What is wadi bashing

An Arab merchant, peripatetic and an everyday presence in the bazaar, hawks a cluster of gorgeous tropical snakes. That is what they look like until he holds them up for inspection. Steering wheel covers, they shimmer in the sun. Ibn Khaldun compared the world to a market like this one. Set out for display, the wares were sects and customs, institutions, forgotten lore. This was a sore affliction, the historian said. Leading to the world outside, the creek, an arm of the sea, brings the world to Dubai.

Some Arabs, strong for the old ways, say that this is how the rot gets in. The truth they honor is absolute, not compromised by the world. Platonists in their bones, they despise the world and the flesh. In his Book of Laws , Plato put the good state far inland. Merchants and such never came there, and this provincial place kept its virtue intact. Provincialism, said Ibn Khaldun, was the key to Arab greatness.

He thought that Arabs in the desert, savage, not sociable, were more disposed to courage than sedentary people, also closer to being good. Jealous of the stranger, Arabs cocked an ear for every faint barking and noise.

This xenophobic thing preserved their casabiyah. Rosenthal, translating Ibn Khaldun, renders the Arabic word as group-feeling. But the tale, baffling the teller, has an unexpected ending. Leaving the desert, Arabs bent on conquest took to the sea. This sullied their lineage.

They meddled with strangers, and the closely-knit group was a thing of the past. The thrusting stems of these dhows are like giant toggle switches for opening or closing an electric circuit. Bouncing off the water, the sun explodes in fragments, hard on the eyes.

In the street outside the souk , this same sun, unrefracted, creates a movie set, life imitating art. The movie is a Western, High Noon or Duel in the Sun , and the hero and villain, outlined against the sky, are stalking each other. The people in the street stand up like gnomons, uncompromisingly themselves. Nuance, Arabs think, is for effeminate people, and their art, like their politics, is mostly innocent of chiaroscuro.

My American banker friend, he who never got out of the airport, spent two weeks in Palestine before coming to Dubai. Forewarned is forearmed, and he should have known better. Palestinian Jews, sun-spattered like Arabs, share their yen for broad strokes and primary colors.

Hallucinating in the sun, I go back in mind to Palestine. In Tel Aviv, the capital, an old movie is playing, white settlers vs. The hero of the piece, clean shaven, rides a white horse. You can tell the villain by the pricking of your thumbs. Always on the alert, Israelis keep the villain in their gun sights. Out in the country, still Biblical country where shepherds tend their flocks, military checkpoints, bisecting the roads, are manned by soldiers toting automatic rifles.

Dressed in combat fatigues, the soldiers, men and women, are sexless. In Israel, everybody goes to war. Barbed wire, running with the roads, separates the beleaguered state from the Jordan River.

The wire, a secondary line of defense, also functions as metaphor, dividing sheep from goats. Stockades topped with wire surround the kibbutzim, lonely outposts in the desert. Outside are the hostiles. Arab merchants in the city, paying out treasure, keep these guerrilla fighters in pocket. Self-appointed vigilantes keep tabs on the merchants. Blue and white are the colors of the Israeli flag. A free port on the gulf, Dubai has its own dry dock, a modern harbor nearby at Port Rashid, also a trade center, austerely modern.

Along the curving drive that sweeps up to the entrance, fan palms, pomegranates, and dusty pink oleanders do what they can to mollify the hard scene. Little flame-colored blossoms surround the fruit of the pomegranate. Wood and wire screens protect these growing things, otherwise the desert, always on the prowl, would destroy them. Arabs understand this, a hard lesson learned, - Centuries ago, when they conquered North Africa, they found an enormous thicket covering the wide littoral between Tangier and Tripoli.

Under the shade were hamlets where men and women fostered life in society. They cultivated the land, sunk wells, and had their arts and crafts. Artificial, not natural, these little enclaves on the edge of the desert needed tending. Today the land is treeless and nine-tenths of the people who lived there are gone.

The ruins of Roman oil mills break the surface of the plain. Outside the Hilton, my home away from home, Rose of Sharon in concrete tubs splashes bright color against the facade, new as tomorrow. Water from the local desalinization plant, courtesy of Yelverton, cascades in a rococo fountain.

Getting rid of indigenous things, the Emirates have got rid of poverty too. Before the gushers came in, Arab poor lived on crumbs from the tables of the rich. For the Feast of Sacrifice, Eid Al Adha, well-to-do Arabs, honoring their prophet Ibrahim, sacrificed a sheep and gave the meat to the poor.

Now the dole, a state subsidy, feeds both rich and poor. In Dubai, unlike the Caribbean, nobody goes hungry. Nobody frets about paying the doctor.

If you get sick, the up-to-date hospital, free to all, is good for what ails you. Dark-skinned nurses in this Rashid Hospital are all starch and no nonsense, and their voices, peremptory, sound like Mary Poppins.

When they come on the phone, their accents are Harley Street, plummy or clipped. Even on the hottest days, the chief resident wears a business suit, his pouter-pigeon belly covered by a decent waistcoat. A gold fob with a seal, attached to a pocket watch, hangs over his belly.

The colonial governor has long departed from Dubai, but their Arab ruler is still dreaming a form on the world. He is H.

His voice, high-pitched and feminine, almost a giggle, tells of the Delta country south of Memphis, Tennessee. A homogenous country, this is where Yelverton lives in his mind. When he was a boy growing up in the Delta, people still honored the old ways and truths. They knew who they were and where they were going. Living was easy. The fat soil, well watered, produced bumper crops.

Rice and cotton were the staples, but if you put a dry stick in the ground it put out suckers. Living in the East for a long time, this expatriate wants to go home. To my surprise, he has a patriotic poem, committed to memory, that says this.

My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be. The home his heart is turning to no longer exists, and all I have to do is read the papers. Arabs in Riyadh, the capital city of the Saudis, have Yelverton and friends to thank for their new international airport.

Named for King Khaled, this sprawl of glass and concrete is anchored to the plateau on the edge of the city. Where Riyadh in the old days was a sleepy oasis on the pilgrim road to Mecca, the march of progress, says Yelverton, has changed this.

Modern office buildings are replacing the mud-brick houses, and they have an oil refinery, a cement-making plant, also a university, the first in Arabia. The fortress wall that surrounded the city is gone, and Riyadh, no longer itself, is a hodgepodge where East jostles West. Foreign workers, crowding in, give trouble to the Najdi population. A traveled man who knows Arabia like his own backyard, Yelverton had to see it before he knew it.

I knew it before I saw it, thanks to C. Doughty and his Travels in Arabia Deserta. TV was for the future, and movies, expensive, were rationed to one a week.

Grateful, I read these volumes cover to cover. In those Depression years, we made our own entertainment. But this writer is most himself when taken in large doses. An uncommon Victorian, he harks back to stately writers of an earlier time. The sleep of the desert refreshes his prose, or you could put this the other way round. Like Aaron with his rod, redeeming the dead land, he drew life from wasted sandrock, spires, needles, and battled mountains.

It took me years to get over this gorgeous prose that reads like poetry. Abyssinian blacks, settled in the desert, saw an enemy behind every bush. But the Bedouin bade the stranger sit and eat. This courtesy to the stranger set him apart. A cable from Washington, handed in at the Hilton, gives me new marching orders. They have scratched Beirut, where Druse, Maronites, and Shiites are killing each other, and my next speech, three days from now, is set for Chulalongkorn.

This modern university, situated in Bangkok, is halfway across the world but only an overnight hop on KLM. I have time on my hands, and Yelverton proposes that we make the most of this.

At first light, when the Land Rover collects us at the hotel, the sky, still empty of sun, is only a smudge, and the desert along the highway rolls like pale water. Contours, blurring, melt into each other. Sufi mystics in Arabia, making little of distinctions, lived in this half-light.

He was Bayazid, who lived a thousand years ago. But the sun is only biding its time. Particles of mica, embedded in the highway, gather the fierce light and hurl it back at our windshield.

The Queen of Sheba had her palace there, Yelverton says. The driver wears the dishdasha complete with burnoose, but rubbing elbows with Westerners has sloughed the old ways. A new kind of man, only just veneered with modernity and a smattering of English, this Abeyd-al-Malik is eager to please.

Is good. I like Americans. No like Russians. Behind the enclosed cab, the flat bed, open to the air, is fenced with wooden slats. When Abeyd-al-Malik goes on safari into the hidden villages of the Hajer Mountains, he carries pots and pans lashed to the chassis, also cheap cotton goods, the rough cloaks they call jubbah , canvas tents and tent poles, and panniers of charcoal. Arab men, fastidious, use the oil of citron, a lemony perfume. Mohammed, not all sturm and drang, says in one of his Suras how he had loved three things in the world, perfumes, women, and refreshment in prayer.

On either side of the road, the desert is littered with the offscouring of modern life, polystyrene packing blocks, rusted hubcaps, exploded tires, plastic junk that lives forever. Fifty yards further in, though, the desert is empty. Materializing out of the sands, a market complex, spanking new, rises like a mirage. Some buildings, Turkish, look like nomad tents in stone, others like Brighton Pavilion.

Lapping this market, the desert, impatient, waits to take it back again. Outside Dubai, the road turns east, then south, following the old Buraimi Trail. They carried their provisions with them, skins of water and messes of barley and rice. Nothing lives in the desert, only yellow lizards and hyenas that feed on decay.

Pinnacled rocks and broken kellas , old redoubts, define the horizon. The kellas guarded cisterns, dry ages ago. Camel droppings in the sand are a welcome sign of life. The oasis at Al Buraimi, a locus amoenus on the edge of the sands, blossoms behind its mud walls.

This pleasant place, carved out by men, is the product of thought and painstaking. Taller than the walls, the castor-oil trees have large star-shaped leaves and fuzzy red flowers, and their skinny boles, reddish-brown, are girdled like shoots of bamboo.

From the branches of the frywood trees, yellow pods hang like tongues depressed for inspection. Date gardens, lush green, glorify the oasis. A gala in the desert, the gardens are flecked with colored lights.

The orange lights are mangoes, also bougainvillea. Like charity, it covers the walls of the houses, bleached out or scabrous. Chinese shoe flowers, rosy-red, grow in plots before the houses. The ovate green leaves, edged with teeth, are sharp enough to draw blood.

Yellow flowers like puffballs hide the dark brown bark of the gum trees, our common acacia. Camels, not choosy, eat the leaves of this tree, prickly with spines, and their drovers use the wood for cooking fires. But the desert, a state of mind, has left its mark on Al Buraimi.

It comes up to the walls like Moors coming up from Spain, hellbent for Tours. Then, without warning, it stops. This is where Charles Martel, a great hero, has raised his baton. In , Moors got their comeuppance at Tours, Creasy said. So far and no farther. Startled, I can see where a line has been drawn, first the white sand, drained of color by the sun, then the alfalfa, a lushness of dark flowers. Forage for goats and camels, it unrolls beneath the date palms as if Arabs had rolled out a carpet.

You can go for wadi bashing when you are on a desert safari in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Wadi Bashing is a tough adventure sport and one must consult a wadi-bashing expert before taking the plunge. Instructions are mandatory to avoid any unpleasant accident. Also, there is a possibility of being marooned on an island if one's not good at the sport. Avoid the summer months, when the temperatures soar and Wadi Bashing is difficult to do and enjoy.

The essentials that one must have are sunglasses and a cap, which protect them from direct sunlight. In winters, one must carry sweaters. Camping gears, too are a good idea if one is looking forward to a night stay.

Some of the trails actually lead past water pools or water falls where you can stop to have a cool dip, whilst surrounded by the incredible sight of the mountains and huge sand dunes in the distance. You may be lucky enough to pass by Bedou villages where you will get a greeting from the local tribe as you travel along. One of the popular routes taken is through the Hajar Mountains, where the scenery is spectacular and the tracks extreme and challenging.

The best time of year for Wadi bashing, is between the months of April and October due to the drought drying these beds up and being safe enough to navigate through. Dune bashing by dune buggy. The closest you will get to taking part in the Paris to Dakar rally, is tackling the immense and numerous sand dunes is a special adapted dune buggy.

This is a half day activity where you will be driven to the desert where the buggies are located and waiting to take you on a breathtaking mind blowing drive of a lifetime that is a dream for all petrol heads.