Fujeira- Day 10 The mountains

After lunch we hit the road for Dibba which is coastal city divided by two Emirates (Fujeira and Sharja) and Oman. To get ther we had to cut through the mountains in the northeast.

We drove through Hammoudi's town and saw a hotel that was built and then shut down as the mountain hill it was built on crumbled underneath it. OOPS!

We saw a natural hot spring fed by water from the mountains. A lot of the people come here and take little baths to get some of the magic water in their system. Very nice.We cruised around a bit and say Hammoudi's grandfather's farm where we met up with his uncle Ahmed who was going to take to a few other notable spots in the mountins. The trip in the mountains was breathtaking and fun since we had to drive along a dusty unpaved road which went almost straight up the mountains.

We stopped to take pictures of a Wadi, which is a dry riverbed that floods during the rainy seasons. Then we pressed on to an amazingly lush and beautiful mango farm hidden up in the mountains. Apparently, this is ahmed's uncle's farm and it is build on the site of an ancient fortress. There aren't any national historical societies in the UAE, so if you live there, it's basically your old ruined fort, so we took some pictures and wondered about the history of the old place.

After the Fort we walked down the path to the Cool-Old-Guy-of-the-Hills' farm. He was abuot to smoke his old wooden pipe, filled with some suspicious green plant, but when we arrived, he jumped up ans gave me a snappy British salute.

Ii saluted back, we had a larff, and walked down into his amazingly lush farm. Up to this point, I had been getting used to seeing 'farms' which were basically fenced off squats of desert where goats and camels hung out. This was something else entirely. It was actually cool in here, and mangoes fell from the trees right into your hand ready for eating.

He directed us around the side of his farm and had one of his Bangladeshi helpers climb a tree and shake some fresh fgruit for us. We were a bit overwhelmed by the enormous bag of fruit he gave us because we had no clue what to do with it all.

He demanded that we have dinner with him, but our plans had us travelling for the next few hours so we couldn't. It was heartbreaking to refuse, but if we said yes to every family that invited us to dinner we'd be eating once an hour and would have to ditch our luggage to meet the weight requirements needed to get home.



Next we stopped at another farm with lots of goats and a pair of gazelles. There as a little girl here who had a littler baby goar in her arms. It was very very cute. This family invited us to their house for dinner as well, and again we had to decline.

For the next hour or more we drove through the mountians, stopped at a quaint mountian town for water, and headed into Dibba where we were going to spend the night. We had to wait for Sulaimon to call us about our hotel, so we hitched over to the Omani side of DIbba and took a look at a dam they had built to stop mountain flooding. It was nice, but a tad bit underwhelming after the other things we'd already seen.

After this we got a call from sulaimon, went to our very comfortable apartment, and I think I was asleep in about 30 minutes. All in all a very beautiful and scenic day.