“The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city.” – Robyn Davidson
The first 20 minutes after camp had been set up were the hardest, because although there was nothing to do except enjoy the vast expanse of beautiful nothingness, I seemed incapable of simply sitting down and switching off – a symptom I have come to recognize of having been too long in the metropolis.
If you caught last month’s story, then you will know we were unable to get out for our dose of wilderness therapy for almost a month due to the cars requiring a monumental amount of rehabilitation. This clearly had a profound effect on both of us because as soon as we were able, we packed up our rejuvenated dune bashers and headed out in search of the revitalization and sense of perspective we have learned only new experiences and new challenges can give us. We were in total to spend five nights under the stars this month.
I was the first to head out — alone save for my two dogs, to camp in the desert. Experiencing a night of solitude, silence and detachment is something I have wanted to do for some time. To defy the potential fear, risk and loneliness I believed I was subjecting myself to was a purpose in itself, but not the only one.
“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.” – Alice Koller
If you live in a city that’s described as having a “high quality of life” then by definition you’re separated from the basic tasks associated with self-preservation, because everything is outsourced. It’s easy to forget how rewarding and grounding acts of self-reliance can be – the taste of a freshly cooked meal for example is all the more satisfying if achieved by your own hand.
“I used to sleep in the desert once every week, now it is every two weeks, most of the time alone. It’s beautiful. What I enjoy is taking my food and cooking for myself.” – Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Spending a night in the desert without human contact was, as the above quote notes, utterly beautiful. I was so comprehensively relaxed that I never wanted the night to end. With nothing around my crackling campfire except for the strangely comforting dunes, my tent and my moon-bathed old Land Rover, my mind was vacated of any city-forged concerns – no work, no bills, no noise.
I miss that feeling.
Instead of worrying, I read a book I hadn’t found either the right time or frame of mind to entertain for weeks. I smoked and cooked my own delicious food on a BBQ dug into the sand and fuelled by wood I had collected from nearby dead trees. I stargazed for what seemed like hours but never became bored – I clocked six shooting stars and felt as elated as a child at each ephemeral sighting. I thought deeply about the people in my life and I bonded with my treasured dogs: Archie and Sophie, in a way I had not in a long time. I felt as though this was the way life is supposed to be, the whole experience was a meditation.
“Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.” – Robert Cecil
The next trip would be one we embarked on with both cars. Leaving Downtown at 14:00 we made it to our destination, Fossil Rock by 15:15. It is as always remarkable to find somewhere so close and so worth visiting, yet most people in Dubai seem not to have even heard of! The area offers opportunities for some authentically technical driving if you are brave enough to sail up the rock, away from the flatter dunes below, which offer a good training ground for virgin off-roaders but, as always, we were looking for a challenge.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.
As usual, we quickly found ourselves in circumstances that sharply tested our nerves. After a series of poor decisions that saw us nearly stuck in what would have been “incredibly difficult to escape” places, we stopped to collect ourselves and plan a route across the rocky dunes to our proposed campsite – something we should have done from the beginning. Every overlanding experience is a learning opportunity if you pay attention and Fossil Rock was a day of many lessons.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi
Camping at Fossil Rock was a mixed experience – we love to camp, so were grateful just to be there, but the experience was marred by large areas of rubbish, which can ruin the experience if you let it and the fact that we couldn’t seem to find a spot far enough from either the noise of the Sharjah–Kalba road or the ubiquitous ATVs.
After a night back in the city, Neil and his girlfriend Hanna set off to camp in the Hajar mountains whilst I stayed behind another day for my friend Andrea, who had never camped in the Arabian wilderness before, to finish work for the week. It was worth the wait, as although I longed to get back into the mountains, introducing someone to the experience for the first time allows you a window through which to see it afresh again. Andrea and I met Neil and Hanna in the dunes at the foot of the glorious mountain range for their second night of freedom.
That night we watched a magnificent sunset from atop the highest nearby dune and, with our campsite camouflaged by regal Acacia trees, ate food preferable to that of any restaurant, exchanged stories and ideas such as only a campfire can encourage, laughed, stargazed, then after a perfect sleep awoke to a charmingly bright yet cool desert morning, that accompanied by a superb cup of English tea and a BBQ breakfast, seemed like our own little hidden sanctuary.
We plan to make the most of the camping-friendly weather over the next few months and are in fact heading out again this week to introduce two more virgin campers to this most natural and magnificent of experiences. I encourage all of you to #GetOutThere and do the same!
“We need the tonic of wildness… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
Words By: Theo Measures
Photos By: Neil Walton
