The Hatta Track Is Closed

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We tootled off into the Hajjar mountains, a merry little party of merry-makers and nieces on our way to take a whizz up the Track Formerly Known As The Hatta Track. As eny fule no, that track has now been transformed into a metalled road, the bumps evened out and the surface a ribbon of blacktop threading through the arid and majestic moutains.

The Hatta track takes you to the famous Hatta pools, a series of pools in the wadi bed, long strewn in graffiti but still beautiful. It takes you through the mountain villages of Rayy and Shuwayah, past the lovely Oleander Waterfall (now only accessible if you really know what you're doing, the original gatch track that led right up to it having long been washed away in a winter spate) down onto the plains that will take you to Al Ain and Buraimi.

Only now it won't.

We got to the UAE border point on the track, formerly only a sign on the open road and then a police post where your ID would be requested and glanced at before proceeding, only to be told that this time round, it would be as far as we were going. There had been trouble with the inhabitants of the village beyond the border point and people had been 'angry', the Omani police had been involved and there was a vague mumble about too many Europeans.

So that was it. Turned back. No Hatta track. Not even the NoFun OneCal blacktop one.

First Wadi Bih and now this. Pants.

Border

It's been almost nine years since the border between the UAE and Oman was agreed between the late Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and HM Sultan Qaboos bin Said. Detailed negotiations then carried on, resulting in in a detailed and mapped agreement on the border in May 2005, almost six years to the day from the original agreement.

Over the past couple of years, a green fence has started to snake its way along the frontier between the two countries, slicing through the wadi plains and climbing up into the rocky foothills of the Hajjar mountains. The 'rabbit proof fence' is high and topped with razor wire, set into concrete and relatively serious as fences go. And it was built by the UAE, apparently.

It's no easy task, closing this border. Because of the original tribal affiliations of the people living in these areas, there are enclaves of Oman within the main borders of the UAE, including the Northern tip by the Straits of Hormuz, the Musandam Peninsula; a pocket of land inland from Khor Fakkan on the Indian Ocean near the village of Shis and the wadi plains of Vilayat Madha. So you drive from Dubai through Sharjah, Oman and then a little bit of Ajman to get to Hatta, for instance. What's more, if you drive North of Hatta on the road (used to be track, *sigh*) from just beyond the Hatta Fort Hotel to the desert town of Dhaid, which is part of Sharjah, you'll be driving through Ras Al Khaimah to get there.

It's kind of complex, no?

Now they've shut the border between the UAE's desert oasis town of Al Ain and Omani town Buraimi, which have always lived side by side in the desert, sort of semi-morphed into a single town. What's interesting here is that there are now to be two border crossings between the two towns, a move that was hilariously headlined by Gulf News: "Expatriates get separate border crossing at Al Ain" as if it were some kind of benefit to have to drive 15km out of town to cross the border!

The National had an excellent piece on the effects of the move this week, as residents try to manage a border through a community that in many ways had become a single community made up of two adjacent towns in two adjacent countries. A sort of Siamese City.

The other border crossings, including the road through Vilayat Madha to Hatta, remain open. The question is for how long - and how they can be closed. It's hard to find a reason why the border has been so comprehensively locked down, although smuggling and illegal immigration have both been mentioned as the core reasons behind the massive project.

So now you can't just pop over the border to Buraimi and visit the pools at Kitnah or pop over to the Hanging Gardens and then slip up the track from Al Ain to Hatta, perhaps stopping off for a splash around in some of the wadis on the way. It'll be interesting to see how long it'll be before the Hatta Track itself (now blacktop anyway, so no wadi bashing to be had here) is closed off.

Sad times.

Blacktop

Nipped up to Hatta yesterday for a quick tour with visiting guests. Having seen a bunch of workers starting on it last time we were up there a few months ago, I had expected to find tarmac on the track and my expectations were fulfilled. After the first crossing of Wadi Hatta itself, the road is 100% blacktop all the way through the mountains and down onto the plan. Blacktop stretches out to the left at the T-junction, the way to Al Ain. And blacktop stretches to the right as well – and has done for quite some while now. I’m fond of jinking off this road to the left, through Wadi Sumayni and through an Omani border post: the landscape here has some unusual rock formations not unlike those found in Wadi Bih and the foothills give way to the Madam plain and then into the desert. The transition of landscapes is quite amazing and you can then nip up onto the dam across the wadi and then up to the Madam/Al Ain road. Except that now the Omani border fence stretches all the way up to the Hatta Road and they’ve welded the damn dam gate shut. So we had to roar up the graded track to the Hatta road.

Our visitors, from Australia, delightedly christened the long green border fence, ‘the rabbit proof fence’, which did rather amuse me. What amazed them was that miles and miles of concrete and steel fence topped with twists of razor wire then simply opened up at the main road with no crossing or check point. They saw the whole thing as utterly pointless and I must admit it’s always mystified me.

The long and short of it is that, sadly, yet another of the great tracks through the mountains is now a metalled road.

RIP, then, the Great Hatta Track.

Acer in Pointless Promo Shock Horror

I was mildly amused at the kind gift of a small, flat stone from Acer Computer attached to my Gulf News this morning. I was mildly irritated that the package was glued to the front page headline and tore the page when I tried to remove it as carefully as I could, but we'll put that down to early morning biorhythms.

There were many newsworthy things in today's papers, including the fantastic and most welcome news that Wadi Warraya (or Wurraya or Waraya or any other way you want to spell it) is to be, belatedly, declared a protected zone. This great news was not in Emirates Today which, you may remember, did launch a concerted one day campaign 'Save the Wadi Fish' that was based around an interview with a conservationist working in Waraya. A big bag of bite size Snickers Crunchers says that ET does a piece taking the credit tomorrow. For now, GN can sit back and enjoy that warm, fuzzy feeling that rewards those who get a decent scoop.

But it was Acer's stone that stayed with me. Disregarding the sage advice of French poet Alain Bosquet, I did not regard my stone so long, so long that it accepted to speak in my place. No, I looked for the invariable ad that explained the invitation attached to the stone: "Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy... find out more inside."

Any ad that accompanies such a slice of unremittingly daft and pointless pseudo-empowerment blather is, I thought, going to provide some mild entertainment value at least.

I finally found the ad, buried deeply in swathes of four-page spreads from real estate companies. If you take a minute to go through GN reading the headlines of the ads, you start to understand what Ken Kesey meant by recreating the acid experience without taking the drug:

Experience fine living...because attention to detail is not just a commitment, it's a way of life...; Once a year, the Cereus blooms in darkness; tycoon by day, connoisseur by night; Sea Side Living Starts Today; Your gateway to island living; Live and work in absolute grandeur; Your aspiration for a better tomorrow; Homes created around your lifestyle; Earth, sun, wind and water - the constituents of life, and the quintessence of being; not just another address in the making but a marvel with features extraordinaire...

It's a bewildering array of jumbled up words, sloganeering with no applied intelligence: declamatory, mindless blipverts of aspirational words slung at your psyche in a barrage of positivity and over-promising.

How, you may be starting to think, are our stone-wielding friends ever going to cut through? Answer: they're not. It took me three runs through the paper to find it. And I was looking for the daft thing. The ad was buried on the left hand page 20 and was made of the same old language as all the rest of it. 'Emotion, individuality and temptation at a glance' it starts. Hang on, this is a PC, isn't it? Just checking, thought it might be an apartment in Full Moon Bay. And then, for some strange reason, the next headline is 'Dolby surround sound speakers'! It's like being jerked from a page of Paulo Coelho to a supermarket flyer.

The other words in the ad are irrelevant, you can put them together in any order you like and they'll mean just as much. Print them, cut them out and try it.

Unrivalled | Empowered | Wonder | Style | Concept | Technological | Natural | Performance | Prestige

However, I now have a stone that I didn't have before and for this, like so many other small mercies, I am truly grateful.

Salik Debate Rages as 4WD Shortcut Blocked

Shock horror! Gulf News today reports widespread negative public voice regarding Dubai's proposed Salik road toll system. Salik (see earlier post) aims to charge users of two of Dubai's busiest roads a little over a dollar each time they pass the RFID scanner. Residents, expatriate and local alike, are more than a little concerned about how the scheme will affect traffic flows as people try and avoid the toll, according to GN's unusually critical report.

Reader polls carried out by GN reflect an overwhelming 'no' vote to the whole scheme. While you'd expect this from people who are about to have to pay money they don't want to pay, over 70% don't think the toll will reduce congestion on the tolled roads although over 70% also said they wouldn't use the tolled roads. And 49% said they won't buy the Salik tags.

Woopsie!

The scheme goes live on the 1st July, so that'll be all very interesting.

Meanwhile my journey to work today was enlivened by the fact that some blockhead has decided to dump a load of huge concrete blocks across the desert tracks that an increasing number of 4WD owners have been using as a short cut to work between Sharjah and Dubai. Why anyone would think that there was any harm or damage being caused by a few intrepid souls slipping over the short stretch of deeply rural sand dunes that separate the Sharjah back road from the Dubai back road is a mystery. Another mystery is why anyone thought that you could block the desert by dumping concrete blocks across a few tracks.

But the consequences this morning were remarkable, to say the least. There must have been at least fifty 4WD vehicles in various states of bogged down out there, ranging from just starting to bog through stuck in a ditch that they hadn't noticed to utterly bogged down and hopelessly stuck. There were people running around, digging and towing other cars out, bouncing trucks flying over sandy humps, their grinding wheels throwing up clouds of sand over everyone on foot and all manner of offroaders trying to circumnavigate the blocked tracks. A massive, fantastic fairground of Hollywood road movie style vehicular insanity. Think Smoky and the Bandit mixed with the Cannonball Run and Lawrence of Arabia and you're starting to get the picture.

I picked my way through it all, as well as past the silly, redundant blocks, hardly able to focus on my path through as I watched the madness all around me, open mouthed and in a state of blissful wonderment.

What you need, chaps, is a Salik station in the desert. That'll sort 'em out...