RAK Hike

On New Year’s day we decided to drive up to the Ras Al Khaimah / Oman border for a hike that one of my coworkers had recently done.  The drive was easy except for the final destination.  The directions were all based on GPS coordinates and we don’t have a GPS out here…  so we made a couple of wrong turns, but we eventually found it.

The day was quite an adventure from the beginning.  Once we got parked and started walking down the trail, we passed a home of sorts where three Emirati men were standing outside.  The oldest one (maybe the other two’s father or grandfather) started yelling at us in arabic as we were walking past them.  So we stopped and Paul and I tried to communicate with them in our very limited arabic vocabulary.  The other two guys indicated that it wasn’t a problem and for us to just keep going.  Very bizarre.

I wish I had gotten a photo of the goat while it was in the tree

one of the semi-inhabited emirati building at the bottom of the hike

just getting started (the building up ahead is where we got yelled at)

After about 15 minutes or so of walking, we came to a decision point.  My impression was that the hike was a loop—this proved to be a very bad assumption which I didn’t figure out until we were actually completely done with the hike.  We went right when we were supposed to stay left.  Instead of a hike, we ended up doing some rock climbing.  The whole time we were doing this, we kept saying how glad we were that it was a loop and we wouldn’t have to come back down the same way.  Ooops, we hit a dead end and finally realized that we did have to go back the same way.

the infamous decision point

and this was the "easy" path down

Once we got on the right path the hike was much easier.  Eventually we made it to the top where we were greeted by literally over 100 goats—they were a little scary at first because they wouldn’t leave us alone.  I think that they’re just so used to people coming up to feed them so they were expecting to get something from us.  At the top there was a small palm tree “plantation” as well as some other fenced in gardens and some buildings.  It’s hard to believe that they took all the supplies for the buildings up the goat path that we took.

rehydrating in the shade

that's the palm plantation up ahead

By that time the sun was starting to go down and we only had a couple of hours before dusk.  So we decided to try to find the other side of the non-existent loop.  We hit a few dead-ends which was starting to get a little bit unnerving as we were racing the sun.  Eventually we found a way to get back on the path that we had taken up and when we saw our orange peels on the ground we were feeling much better about getting out before dark.

the moon was already out while we were still at the top...

making our way back down

A great adventure to start off the New Year.