But, in my defense, it wasn't my fault. After happy hours and dinners, the company decided to take me on an adventure in the hopes I might want to stay here. I met up with Ib, a guy I met through work whom I've become friends with, at 6 PM last night. He's an explorer in an off roading club in dhabi. There were 12 other people on the trip.
Off roading is very dangerous here, so the club has "ranks" of drivers. New drivers have no rank. Someone who's been driving for 6 months on "newbie" trips gets one star. The star system goes up to 4 stars (the stars dictate which trips you can go on). Experts can become explorers, meaning they find new trails. The trails are sort of marked on a gps system, but since the dunes change on a daily basis, the route isn't always clear.
Ib is an explorer. He's been driving for 6 years and he goes at least twice a week. He told me the trip would be done at 10. I figured I would be back to the hotel by 11 pm.
We started out by getting the car ready for offroading. Ib said "don't expect to be treated like a princess". I got out of the car in the 133 degree heat and helped uninflate tires at the edge of a road leading into the desert. Then we were supposed to put up a flag so drivers could see us when we were down in a dune so they wouldn't fly over the dune and hit us. But, Ib didn't have a flag. "How dangerous could this be though?" I thought to myself. Ib's 8 year old daughter's stuffed pink cat was in the car because she sometimes goes with him.
I was about to find out the answer to my question.
We started out on some mellow terrain. It took a bit of getting used to at first. You drive sideways across a dune, like a surfer surfing a wave. The car is constantly sliding down the dune and feels like it is about to turn over. People roll, but usually the sand is so soft that it's hard to roll the car unless you do something really stupid.
Night started falling and we were deep in the desert. We stopped at the top of a wide dune as the moon, which was barely a crescent, came out. We got out of the car and set up some chairs, and the group sat around and had tea and smoked either cigars or cigarettes. "What are we waiting for?" I asked Ib. "Complete darkness," he replied.
Once it was totally dark, Ib handed me the keys to his car. "We're going for a drive," he said. The rest of the group looked as surprised as I did. "But I don't know how to drive in the sand," I said. There was another female in the group, Carol, who's french and looks like a model. She's been driving for four years and is an explorer too. She had been telling me how long it took her to get the confidence to drive on easy stuff. And here I was, in the middle of some serious terrain.
Oh well, f*k it, I thought. I took the keys. My first maneuver involved getting the car out of the way of the other 8 cars parked on the dune. Ib's car was facing downhill on a steep sand slope. There was a car parked sideways in front of me. I had to roll 2 feet to get past the car next to me, and then execute a sharp turn to get around the car in front of me, without sliding into it. I managed to do that but was less than 6 inches from the car in front of me by the time I made my turn. Scary.
Then I made my first foray onto the side of a dune. You have to fight every driving instinct to do this. The car is sliding sideways as you are driving forward and you have to fine tune your pressure on the gas pedal to make sure you are gunning it on the more solid sand and easing off on the softer sand so you don't dig a hole. If the car decides to slide down you have to let it go and then figure out how to get out of the sand ditch. I got about 5 feet onto the dune and the car started to slide. Instead of turning the wheel down I tried to drive up more on the dune and then I hit some soft sand. We were getting stuck. I gunned the engine and all this sand flew off the front tire and into Ib's window. His face was covered with sand because he was sweating. I laughed and got stuck.
Ib tried to get us out, but couldn't. The jeep with the winch came and pulled us out. I thought that would be it for my driving, but Ib wanted me to keep going. He also said "just call me the sandman" because he was so covered in sand (the sand flying through the windows happened constantly the rest of the night because we drove with the windows wide open so we didn't have to have the air con on - what's the point of being in the desert if you aren't experiencing the desert fully?).
My second attempt went really well. I decided to treat the car like a boat and steering became easier, except that Ib said I was taking too tight turns, which can cause the tire, which is deflated, to come off its rim (called a pop out). He also said I should slow down coming over the top of a sand dune since you have to see what's on the down side.
But I was so afraid of getting stuck that it was hard to break coming over the top of a sand dune (that's one of the worst places to be stuck because it's hard to move the car with one set of wheels on one side of the dune, and the other set on the other side). The dunes rise up sharply like a shark fin. The last 2 or 3 feet are normally soft, baby powder textured sand. If you get stuck in that mess you can't drive out of it. So I kept flying over the dunes. Anyway, it was so dark, with no moon, I normally couldn't see where I was going anyway.
Then disaster struck. I went flying over a dune with the gas pedal to the floor because I had been zig zagging up a very soft dune. Ib was encouraging me, psyched I was able to drive up the dune. We came over the top, and for a moment it felt like the car had stopped. Then I realized we weren't stopped, we were falling.
The side we had come down on was super steep. There was a soft sand powder hole at the bottom of the dune and we landed smack in the middle of it. We hit so hard I ended up with a bruise from my seat belt (note in the picture there are NO tire marks behind the car).I heard the rest of the club, who had been watching me drive from another dune cheering. One egyptian guy yelled out "Franki went flying!" The car had made a horrible noise when it landed. I thought Ib was going to kill me.
Instead he laughed and said "Your first stuck!" It took 15 minutes of winching to get the truck out of the sand pit. Ib laid under the front tire to show how high up it was off the ground. Then the club told me to sit under the tire so they could take a picture for their web site. These pictures so just how soft the sand is here. The back of the truck buried on impact. The front left tire was buried (I also damaged the bumper) but the right tire was really high off the ground.
Some of the group decided to go home at 10, but I wanted to keep going. The terrain was getting more and more treacherous. At times Ib just let the car slide where ever it wanted to go. Other times we would fly over a dune and hit hard on the other side after flying through the air.
We stopped in a spot between the dunes around 11 pm. Everyone got out and we had dates and tea. Ib and I talked about work, life in general, camels, and then farting. He was telling me about how he had stopped hanging out with some of his friends because they were always having farting contests. He also said they sell this thing in his home country of Jordan that's like a stink bomb, and he used to throw them in his classroom because they would have to cancel class for at least two days because none of the lady teachers could stand the smell. I told him to bring some into the office (he and his family were heading to Jordan today for two weeks holiday) so we could get out of work. He laughed and said he didn't want his sons to know that these things existed because they might throw them in the house (they are 7 and 8 and apparently very badly behaved).
Around 1230 am we started to head home. That's when the trip turned into an epic. First we got a little lost and ended up on a soft dune. Everyone kept getting stuck. The only way out was to drive down this narrow corridor. As we headed towards the corridor Carol, who was in front of us, slammed on her brakes. In front of her was a newly constructed fence. She almost hit it, and then we almost hit her. Our cars were so close they couldn't winch Carol out because we were in the way. The guys in the group managed to push her out of the hole she had dug spinning her tires trying to not hit the fence. We then tried to back up the dune but the car slid forward into the fence.
About 20 guys came riding up on ATVs and started yelling in Arabic. Apparently a camel preserve had just put up the fence and they were yelling at us for being to close to the preserve. They yelled at Ib as he tried in vain to unstick the truck. His clutch was burning so bad that it smelled for the rest of the drive, but he couldn't move his car.
Finally the camel guys agreed to lower the fence so we could drive over it. We gunned up a dune while the camel guys screamed at us to not hit the camels. Then we got out and over the dune.
But a few minutes later the leader of our trip hit the fence in a new place. It took 15 minutes to get him unstuck and instead of being nice like Ib, he just cut the fence. Then another driver got stuck in the same place and had a pop out. While we tried to jack up his truck and fix the problem (which was not easy because the pop out tire was on the downside of the dune slope) the camel guys came over and started screaming that we would be arrested for ruining their fence. I was like great. It's 130 in the morning. I was tired, really dirty, and hot. I hadn't eaten anything since 11 in the morning so I was hungry but afraid to eat because I knew I would puke from all the spinning moves we were doing in the truck. And now we're going to jail, I thought.
But, Ib talked to the guys and in the end they let us go. We got the pop out fixed and Ib assured me we were only 10 km from the road and that we would be heading home shortly.
Then two more people got stuck. And Ib flew over a dune and landed in a sand pit. He had to be winched twice to get out of it and we thought for a few minutes we were going to have to leave the car because the position it was in made it so hard to pull out. The leader was the final stuck, ending up in a sand pit so deep that when the winch pulled him out we all had to move in case the cable broke and went flying.
Finally, at 4 am, we arrived at a gas station to reinflate the tires. Ib's car was first, but it took so long for the guy to fill the tires that it seemed he could do it faster by manually blowing into the valve. Ib was making fun of me because I was covered head to toe in sand and sweat. As Carol and I walked across the parking lot of the filling station to look at the damage she had done to her jeep from a stuck I left a trail of sand.
Ib dropped me off at the hotel at 530 in the morning. The intercon staff looked at me curiously as I made another sand trail through the lobby. I had blood on my feet from scratching them while I was trying to help unstick the truck barefoot. My shirt and pants were covered in dust. My hair was flying in a million different directions from driving in the heat with the windows open.
After showering I finally was able to lay down and shut my eyes. But right before I fell asleep I remembered the words of the trip leader: "so, next ride you will have your own jeep?"
Ha ha, I wish. No, I'd rather wreck someone else's.
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