My Year in Oman
An American Experience in Arabia
During the War On Terror
By Matthew D. Heines
Not for sale or reproduction
The plane lifted off and flew into London’s early morning drizzling, overcast skies. I had not slept since leaving Seattle. In a row of seats by myself, I watched out of the window as the clouds below me turned from dark and threatening rain, to gray. After a few hours of flying south and east the clouds began to dissipate. The world I saw as I looked out of the airplane window at the ground thirty thousand feet below was no longer green. It was predominantly the light brown color of the desert and the dark brown color of the mountains between.
The plane flew for six hours, arriving at the airport at Dubai around ten p.m. local time. I remember passing over what looked like a city on an island with a bridge of lights connecting it to the mainland and another city. I later learned this was Abu Dhabi. Surrounding the lights was a vast empty darkness.
As I watched the scene unfold below me, I knew I was in one of the most strategically important areas of the world. Almost everything below was there because of the huge reserves of oil and natural gas hundreds and thousands of feet beneath the surface of the desert. There were pipelines, refineries, and lighted tankers waiting off the coast, all were highlighted by the same soft yellow white lights.
We made a short stop in Dubai where we offloaded the few remaining Westerners except me before continuing on to Muscat, Oman. Then I was the only one on the plane with white skin and Western clothes. The other passengers wore what looked like white nightgowns or robes. They wore red and white cloths wrapped around their heads or they wore circular blocked white hats. They were wearing sandals instead of shoes. I felt out of place and truly alone. No one but me seemed to notice.
Being alone did not scare me. Rather, it heightened my sense of awareness. I was in the heart of Islam. This was the land of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the land of the legendary Sinbad the Sailor. All that I was doing now was the stuff of my own childhood fantasies of travel, danger and adventure. This was exotic, different from anything I had ever known. I thought it was odd that when others were fleeing this area, I was charging headfirst into it, all alone.
The approach into Muscat, the capitol of Oman was similar to the approach into Dubai. The glow of streetlights broke up the darkness of the desert. As the plane approached the city of Muscat, it dipped, allowing me to examine the city. I expected to see camels and donkeys traveling in caravans along dirt covered streets. Instead, I saw a large, modern-looking metropolis. There was a six lane highway with cars speeding along it. Neon signs that seemed to go on forever lit up a multitude of stores along its sides. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Well, I thought, so much for the Arabian Nights. A few minutes later, the plane touched down, slowed and finally came to a stop some distance from the terminal.
The adrenalin was flowing as I grabbed my carry-on and made for the exit. I was unsure what to expect. Of all the things that I had expected, the one thing that I didn't expect hit me first. A bus waited below the stairs to take us to the main building. As I stepped off the plane the air was thick, hot and wet. I almost couldn't breathe. Even in shorts and a t-shirt, I immediately began sweating. It‘s after midnight and it’s this hot? What is it like here during the day? This is November, is it winter or summer here? I got on the seat less bus and found trying to keep myself upright by holding the stainless steel bar nearly futile because the sweat on my palms made it nearly impossible to get a firm grip.
Once I entered the terminal, the university had sent someone to pick me up, so my next objective was to pick up my luggage and to find that person. I approached the immigration desk. It’s midnight and it’s dark. If I were a terrorist, this would be my time to strike.
Clearing customs was uneventful. I threw my luggage onto an x-ray machine. The guards, who I expected would tear open my bags and rifle through everything looking for copies of Playboy or bottles of whiskey, hardly seemed to notice me. I then went through a pair of large double doors to the reception area of the terminal. It was just after midnight. At this hour, the airport was for the most part deserted. I looked around for someone who looked like he might be looking for me. I went and asked a person who looked like he was looking for someone if he was looking for me.
"Sur College?" I asked him.
"No English," he replied.
I pointed to myself and said my name.
"No English," he repeated.
I assumed then that he was not waiting for me.
Soon the terminal was empty except for the few souls who were staffing the rental car and money exchange offices that lined the side of the room. I was beginning to feel quite uneasy. I came from halfway around the world and no one had been sent to the airport to pick me up?
In this situation, my imagination began to get the better of me. What if this was some kind of terrorist plot to lure me into the country and then massacre me in the airport to send the U.S. government a message? I looked around the lobby for some "Death to America" or "Yankee Go Home" placards. There were none. But there were signs in Arabic. Maybe they didn't know how to spell "Die Yankee," in English. Maybe that was why they brought me here, either to kill me or to teach them English so they could make better signs for the Western news cameras.
I waited pensively for twenty-minutes and no one burst through the lobby spraying machine gun bullets or throwing grenades. Neither did anyone come into the lobby asking if I needed a ride to the college in Sur. It was just quiet and incredibly hot. Great, I am stranded in the middle of the night at an airport in Arabia. I seriously began to doubt the efficiency of the institution I had come so far to work for. The term Mickey Mouse outfit began to roll around inside my head.
What are my options? I had been flying for over a day. It was dark and I had two hundred American dollars in my pocket. It probably wouldn't be too safe to sleep here just in case any would-be terrorist came in looking for easy pickings.
Once when I was in the fourth grade, I had been left at little league baseball practice inadvertently by one of the parents whose turn it was to pick me up. We didn’t have a telephone so, with nothing else to do, I waited until it was dark and finally I crawled into a piece of playground equipment to try to sleep. I felt a sense of being abandoned then and now the same sense of abandonment was beginning to overtake me. Should I try to find a playground?
Near the door, I saw a tall man with pale white skin and glasses dressed in Western clothing. He looked like he was waiting for someone. I approached him.
"Sur College?" I asked him.
"No," he answered with a British accent. "Are you waiting for someone to give you a lift?"
"Yeah," I said, frustrated.
He looked around the terminal. It was devoid of passengers and picker-uppers.
"Did you try calling them?"
"Yeah. My phone card doesn't work."
"Where are you going?"
"A place called Sur."
"That's quite a ways away. You should get a hotel tonight and try to get there in the morning.” He began looking at me with either curiosity or suspicion. It seemed more than apparent to him that I knew very little about where I was or where I was going.
"How much is a hotel here?"
"About sixty U.S.”
I looked at the rental car places, "How much for one of those?"
"I don't know, I can find out."
We walked to the counter and asked. The rental agent told us that a rental car for two days was about forty dollars U.S. So I could stay for a night in a hotel for sixty dollars and wake up in the morning and still not have anyone to pick me up, or I could rent a car for twenty dollars less and try to make it to Sur that night. "I think I'm going to rent a car," I told the man.
"Do you know how to get to Sur?"
"Nope, I've never been in this country before."
"Do you have a map?"
"Nope. Do you know how to get there?"
"Yes, I can draw you a map. But it's almost four hundred kilometers and if you make a wrong turn, you're going to go way out of your way."
"Well, I'll take my chances.” I wasn't exactly sure how far four hundred kilometers was.
He looked at me somewhat funny and, as he sketched a map, the person at the rental agency gave me paperwork to fill out. When all was finished, I took the map and started outside with my luggage.
"Just make sure you don't miss the Nizwa exit," he cautioned from behind me. "It comes up kind of fast."
"The what exit?" I asked.
"Nizwa, it's on the map."
"Oh, yeah, okay," I said over my shoulder as I lugged my suitcase toward the car.
"When you get to Sur, take a right at the roundabout. I don't know where the college is but someone there should be able to help you," he told me.
I dropped my luggage and turned around. "The roundawhat?" I asked wrinkling my brow.
He was really looking at me suspiciously. "You sure you don't want to stay in a hotel?”
"Yeah, I'll be okay," I reassured him.
"Americans," he mumbled. He shrugged his shoulders, turned and walked back into the terminal. The glass doors shut behind him.
By that time, it was almost one o'clock in the morning. I was starting to feel punchy. I put my luggage in the rental car's trunk. I wanted to look at the map one last time. I felt my pockets for it but it wasn’t there. Crap, where is that friggin' map?
I couldn't go back and tell the guy I lost it. That would make me look like even more of an idiot than someone would go driving across the desert in the middle of the night in a country where he had never been. Oh well, there are only two turns.
I got in the driver's seat and put the transmission in drive. I was heading off into the desert in the middle of the night. I had no idea where I was and less of an idea where I was going except for the penciled map I had managed to lose. I had no idea what the political climate was here and what kind of feeling the local population had for Americans. I didn't even know if there was really a road that went as far as Sur and if there was, what shape it was in. If there isn't a road, will this car make it through the desert? I began to think that what I was doing would be considered insane by some. Maybe so but the reality was that someone had left me stranded at the airport. I needed to check these people out and if they were really that primitive, I was going to be on the first flight out tomorrow.
I followed the man's directions and got out onto the main road. I was surprised at how nice of a road it was. It was wide and straight. Traffic was light. I needed to make up time to get as far as I could as fast as I could, or I went to sleep. I punched the accelerator to the floor.
The rental car was a newer Toyota Camry. I got up to 160 kilometers an hour quickly. Having no understanding of the metric system this seemed a good speed. Almost as quickly, I saw that I was heading for a large structure or building standing in the middle of the roadway.
What is this? I stepped on the brakes. It appeared the road went around the structure in a full circle. I drove through it halfway and saw a sign that said, "Nizwa" in English. I followed that road. Once again on the straight wide road, I pressed the accelerator to the floor. Soon a sign overhead read, "Nizwa." There was an arrow pointing to the road on the right side of the highway.
I remembered the man saying not to miss the Nizwa exit.
Once again, I stomped on the brakes and veered off the exit barely missing the side of the tunnel I was entering. I made my way through the tunnel and then came to another building in the middle of the road with the roadway again going in a full circle around it. “This must be something the British thought of,” I said as I slammed on the brakes for the third time in as many minutes. I read the signposts as I approached a turn off. "Nizwa," I saw on one of them. That must be it.
I turned down that road and once again punched the accelerator. Once I reached one hundred and sixty kilometers an hour I eased back a little bit. One hundred and sixty kilometers an hour, I reasoned was probably around sixty-five or seventy miles an hour. The street was wide and well lit. There were no cars anywhere. I pulled a cassette out of my carry-on bag and inserted it into the car’s cassette deck. The beginning notes of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir began to reverberate throughout the car. I looked at the roadway speeding past and at the bare brown desert lit by the headlights on the side of the road. I was living the Kashmir song. This was great.
I was very concerned about being spotted by a police officer in the event I was exceeding the speed limit. However, I was more concerned about going to sleep at the wheel and dying in a fiery car crash. If, by some chance I were pulled over by a police officer I would simply explain that I was an American and Americans don't use the metric system. Then I thought about that. I was going to tell an armed Muslim policeman in the middle of the desert that I was an American? I had to think for a second. I did and pushed the accelerator a little closer to the floor. “Let's just hope there aren't any coppers out tonight,” I said to myself.
I had driven for some time when I saw a sign that said "Sur" above the roadway. Once again I applied the brakes. I turned off at that exit and came to another circle in the middle of the road. I drove around it and found that it just went back to the highway. Must not be this one, I reasoned.
I got back on the highway and remembered the man saying there were a gas station and a restaurant at the Sur exit. So, on I went at looking for a gas station and a restaurant near an exit. I crested a hill. I appeared to be steadily climbing now and as I came down the far side, I saw a restaurant and gas station lighting up the side of the road. Above the highway was the sign I was looking for. "Sur.”
I veered off of the highway; the road then went through an almost hairpin turn and then led out onto a two lane roadway that had no lighting like the highway. All I could see now was what was illuminated in my headlights. The road looked straight, so once again I punched the accelerator and got the car back up to one hundred and sixty. With no lighting now, I began to get a better sense of where I was. I was in the middle of the desert with no map and little idea of where I was going. My only consolation was that here and there were old buildings so at least I felt comforted by knowing the area I was passing through was probably inhabited.
Then I began to think about cops. I looked instinctively into my rear view mirror. Way back I could see something flashing. I looked a little more intently. It was a flashing blue light. It was the cops. “Oh sh--,” I said. Now, I had to make a decision. The flashing light was at least two miles behind me. I could try to outrun them or try to hide by turning off my lights. My worst fear was coming true. I was being chased by a Muslim policeman in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. I was an American. He most likely had a gun.
I knew I was an American. He didn't. I would just tell him I was Australian. Everyone loves the Australians. I practiced a couple of, "G'day mates," and slowed the car down. Much to my chagrin the blue light kept getting bigger in my rear view mirror. I was the only car on the road. I couldn't use the excuse that I didn't know he wanted me.
I pulled the car off the road and brought it to a stop. It took a few minutes for the blue light to catch up but inevitably, it did. "G'day," I practiced. "G'day, g'day, g'day." Then I realized it was night. "G’night?" Do they say, "G'night" in Australia? I wondered. That sounded like I was going to sleep or something. It just didn't sound right at all.
The blue light was now flashing right behind my car and it had stopped. I took out my documents, passport, etc. only to present as a last resort. "G’day, g'day, g'day." I kept repeating. Then I heard the door of the car behind me open and close. I would say that I was a little frightened, but that would be an understatement. As the expression goes, one could have built a pretty solid structure from what was almost passing through my bowels at that moment. "G'day, g'day…"
The flashlight came up to my window and stopped. It shone in on me. I then realized I should roll the window down in order to facilitate conversation. G'day, g' day, g' day...
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," I answered. Did I just say hello?
"American?"
I am proud to be an American. I realized then I could never say I was otherwise even if my life depended on it. Now I was fairly certain that this might be the case. I thought this as I looked at the holstered gun on his hip.
"Yeah," I said. "Look, I may have been going a little fast, but I don't really know the met…"
"Passport?"
He didn't seem at all angry that I was speeding. I gave him my passport. He looked at the picture and then he shone his light in my face.
"Ah, American friend," he said smiling. For some strange reason, he seemed quite pleased to have pulled me over.
American friend? "Yeah, uh sure." This is a strange twist.
"Going where?"
"Sur, I'm going to teach at the college there."
"Good, good," he said. Then he said something in Arabic and I realized there was a person standing outside the passenger side of my car. The policeman then pointed to that man and said, "My brother. Can you give him a ride?"
Here I was in the middle of the desert at around two o' clock in the morning. An armed Omani policeman had just seen me going, I later realized, at least a hundred miles an hour. He was asking me if I could give his brother a ride home. Have I stumbled onto Mayberry R.F.D. Arabian style? Whatever it was, I was not about to say no to an armed policeman in the middle of the night.
"Uh, sure," I said somewhat confused.
The policeman then said something in Arabic to the man standing on the other side of the car. A second later, the door opened and a large man with a white nightgown and a red and white cloth around his head got into the passenger seat. He smiled and shook my hand.
"He will tell you where to go," the uniformed policeman said. "Thank you my friend.”
"Uh you're welcome," I responded.
The policeman gave me back my passport and then returned to his car. Now that the flashlight was gone, I was sitting in the car with a man in a nightgown. I guessed it was probably a good time to leave so I put the car into gear and pulled onto the road slowly. Suspecting the worst, I watched in my rear view mirror as the police car also pulled away and began to follow me. I began to suspect that at any instant, the man next to me would pull out a gun or a knife and then that would be it.
This was one of those moments I would classify as "tense." Here I was alone, unarmed and quite helpless. I had a Muslim policeman behind me and his accomplice in the seat next to me. As crazy as it may sound, my plan was that if they were going to try to kidnap or kill me, I was going to take the man in the passenger seat with me on the quick trip to the hereafter.
In the glow of the dashboard light, I kept one eye on the man's hands next to me and an eye on the road, waiting for some quick movement. The moment anything unusual happened, I was resolved to pull the steering wheel to the right and force the car to roll off the adjoining embankment.
I waited for something to happen, but it never did. After about a mile, the police car behind me stopped and turned around and headed back the other direction. The man next to me just watched the road. We continued on into the night in silence. Finally, I turned to the man and said, "Speak English?"
He shook his head no.
Great, I have who knows how many hours to drive and my company is an Arab in a white dress who I can't even talk to. I needed something to keep me awake.
I reinserted the Led Zeppelin cassette into the deck and the notes of Led Zeppelin's, "Kashmir" reverberated through the car. The man turned his head and looked at me.
"Rock and Roll," I said.
We approached a winding portion of the road which was a series of wadis that lead to a higher desert plateau. I still was trying to make up time expecting a jaunt through the desert before I reached my final destination. As we approached each curve, the man would wave his hand in front of me, which was his way of telling me to slow down. Each time he did, I applied the brakes until he stopped waving his hand.
This ritual repeated a number of times until finally the road straightened out. I began to feel exhausted. I turned the music down to communicate with my companion. I asked him if he was a policeman by putting my hands together as if they were in cuffs and I pointed behind me and then to the man. He nodded his head yes. I wondered if he would give me a ticket for speeding. I was getting tired and every time I tried to accelerate over a certain speed, the hand began waving in front of me again.
A little while later he looked at me and said, "Coffee, tea?"
"Coffee," I said.
It was after two in the morning and I was wondering where we were going to get coffee. We drove until we came to a series of old buildings that looked uninhabitable. We had passed a number of these already and I assumed by now these were deserted villages. They were old villages, but not deserted. Ahead on the right was a lit red neon sign. He pointed towards it.
I pulled off the road and drove up to the building, which had "Restaurant" written on the sign. The man next to me opened his window and called out to one of the men working there. The man wore western style pants and a shirt. He approached the passenger window. The two spoke to each other in Arabic and then the man from the restaurant said, "Milk?" in English.
I nodded. He disappeared inside the restaurant for a few minutes. He came out with two plastic cups. The man took them from him and handed one to me. "Ouch!" I said. The cups were not Styrofoam and the plastic was no thicker than a piece of paper. The water they used was near boiling. I put the cup down as fast as I could. "That's hot!" I explained to the man next to me. He just smiled.
My companion paid the man from the restaurant before I could offer to do so. "Thank you," I told him, looking at my hand for visible burn marks.
He nodded and smiled again.
I was in a quandary because I couldn't find a cup holder and I was not going to pick up that cup of scorching hot brew and try to drive. "Can you hold onto this?" I said pointing at the cup. The man picked it up without flinching and off we drove into the night.
After I finished the coffee I was wide-awake. I don't know what they put into it, but it sure did the trick. No longer tired, I decided to pick up a few words in Arabic.
First I pointed to the car and said, "Car." Then I asked, "In Arabic?"
The man said, "Siera."
“Siera?” I thought. That was easy enough to remember.
Then I saw the reason for the man's concern for my excessive speed on the road ahead. There were two camels crossing a few hundred yards away. They were big, in the same category as a moose. I remembered what damage a moose would do to a car in Alaska if hit. Its huge body flipped onto your hood and went right through the.
"In English," I said pointing to the animals on the road ahead, "Camel. In Arabic?”
"Camel," he replied.
"Oh.” That made perfect sense.
The rest of the drive was quite uneventful. After about two and a half hours, we approached another group of buildings, which I assumed to be a town, and the man next to me made his slowing motion once again. He pointed with his finger at a road on the left and I slowed, turned on my signal, and made the turn. We drove down this road for a few hundred yards and then he motioned for me to turn again. I turned and drove down another road for some time. It was very narrow and on each side were old stone buildings with tiny windows that reminded me of something from the Middle Ages. We turned down another road and then another. We went around a curve and here the man motioned for me to stop.
"Your house?" I asked.
He nodded yes, opened the door and got out.
"Hey wait. How do I get back?"
He pointed back in the direction of the curve we had just come around.
"Oh, thanks."
I figured I could remember how to get out of here, all I had to do was go in the direction of the main road. The trip back to the road turned into a maze. After ten minutes of this, I gave up. I couldn't find the road that led to the main road and I was getting very tired.
At a shop on one of these streets was a group of old men in Arab clothing talking and drinking coffee. It was almost four in the morning and as I got out of the car to ask them directions, I had no longer a sense of fear, but I became quite conscious of how out-of-place I really was. I was a white American in shorts, sandals and a t-shirt in the middle of an Arab town in the middle of the night and I was going to ask someone for directions as if I was looking for Pismo Beach.
I approached the men and said, "Sur?" They didn't even seem to give me a second glance. They pointed to the intersection at the end of the street. I said "Thank you." I went back to my car, got in and drove to the intersection. They were right; I remembered this was the first turn I had made. I turned left here and soon I was back at the main road. I drove back onto this road and continued in the direction I had been traveling before the detour.
I drove along for a little while longer. I began to see signs that said, "Sur" in English with kilometers noting the distance. The numbers began to get smaller. Finally, after another stretch of zigzags in the road, two things happened. The first rays of sunlight began to appear over the horizon and I reached Sur.
I remembered what the man at the airport had said, "When you get to the roundabout in Sur, take a right." I came upon another building in the middle of the road with a circular road going around it. This must be the roundabout in Sur, I thought. Of course, there were no signs telling me that this was Sur, but it was the only roundabout I had seen for almost four hours.
Having arrived in Sur at the daybreak, I was able to see a little bit of the town where I had agreed to spend the next two years teaching English. One of the first things I had seen before the roundabout was a very large sports stadium on my right. On it were the words, "Youth Sports Complex" in English. It rivaled any small college's stadium in the US and it was modern looking in its design.
The rest of the town looked old. The buildings were all white. Around me were brown dirt-covered hills, with little or no vegetation. I continued down the main road and went up a small hill, and came upon a hotel and a Toyota dealership, which appeared to be the only modern buildings in town besides the sports complex. The road I was driving on had two lanes going in each direction and was separated in the middle by a series of dividers. It was rapidly getting light as I sped along. I rolled down the windows to get a better feel for the place.
The first thing I noticed when the outside air rushed into the car was the smell of the sea. The second thing I noticed was the heat and the sun hadn't even come up yet. I continued into the town.
If I had a plan, it was to find the college and hope someone was there to meet me. It wasn't much of a plan, but having been left stranded at the airport, there wasn't much else to do. This town seemed to go for a long distance. There was definitely a sense that one was in the desert, but the closeness of the sea seemed to offset this.
I still planned to get back on a plane home if the people at this college seemed as inept as when they left me at the airport. I figured with nothing else to do, I would check out the town and that would help me make a final decision. I approached my fifth roundabout and there I saw a sign with "Sur University College" and an arrow pointing down the street to the right. This is a stroke of luck, I thought.
I drove down the street. On my left was a bay of sorts. It was about a half a mile wide but it was devoid of any water. The bottom was obviously muddy which was evident from the darkness of the sand compared with the light brown sand around its edges. On the other side were more white buildings. On the edge of the depression, beside the road was a dumpster and around that was a small herd of goats picking through it and eating the garbage.
A hundred yards down this road, I found another sign on my right with "Sur University College" written on it and turned down a narrow alley with very old looking houses on each side. These houses were square, made of cement or mud, and had very small windows with iron bars on them. Ahead of me was the college at the end of the alley. I had flown halfway around the world to teach at a college at the end of an alley? With nothing else to do but wait, I decided I would try to sleep for a few hours and hope for someone to show up eventually to let me in.
