This is my second installment from the USS Carl Vinson's WestPac '98/'99. I'm calling this one "The Moses ride" 'cause I felt like I wandered the desert for at LEAST 40 years. . . ;-)
Only myself and one other guy brought our own bikes for this one as bikes were provided by the tour company. Since the area around the port area is very flat (with no mountains in sight), we were rather unsure about what to expect. At 7:30am we loaded in the tour bus and 7 of us were off. We traveled for 1.5 hours south through the desert to the mountains. On the way out there, we passed several herds of camels wandering about the desert in the wild; it's common for here, but strange for me.
We pulled off the hwy onto a wide dirt road that traveled west into the mountains; that's where we departed the bus and got our instructions for the day. The guy from the tour Co. said that there was an oasis about 7K up the road and that we would meet there by 12:00 for lunch. He gave me the feeling that we were expected to stay on the road and head straight to the oasis. Well obviously he had never been tested by the resolve of 7 sailors who had been cooped up on a ship for 4 months before!! There was NO WAY I was going to bring my bike half way around the world only to ride a groomed dirt road!!
The terrain was jagged rocks & sand (duh?) with steep rugged mountains all around with VERY little vegetation except for these little bushes that are about 90% thorns. Of course I only found that they had thorns AFTER I brushed a leg up against one. Temps were in the 90's (F) but the heat was VERY dry and comfortable. Except for the area under my hydration pack, I wasn't sweaty at all, kinda weird. We followed the road for about 1/4 mile before we turned S/W onto a 4WD trail which wound between two mountains and on to an oasis/plantation of sorts. We rode by and viewed the goats and plants and stopped to have drink in the shade of a group of trees that were growing in a fenced off area. The total silence was wonderful!! We continued down into a dry river bed that was full of loose gravel and not very fun to ride in, so we made our way over to the other side; that's where we found a small trail wandering out into the mountains (this is where the Moses name comes from).
The trail was nothing more than an animal trail about 8" wide that twisted and wound it's way through the rough terrain around a maze of dried up washes and riverbeds, all the while, seeming to take us somewhere, but actually it was taking us nowhere but deep into the mountains far away from where we needed to be. The area where we were was like a mountainous moon-scape that was the harshest environment I had ever been. Being from the PNW, I'm used to riding in thickly forested, shady areas of green where mud is common, if not normal. Out here we only really saw a couple small trees, almost no plants and zero mud, 'course that made it easier to clean the bike afterwards. Great care was taken by everyone to keep the rubber-side down out here since anything you could touch would draw blood and we were a long way from any hospital. We ran across a wild Donkey out there that was hanging around a small pool of water. "Pool" isn't exactly a good word for it; there was maybe 5 gallons held by a hole in the rocks. We could only assume that it was run-off from previous rains (probably left over from Noah's time ;-) ) It kept about 100 yards ahead of us before it finally retreated into the steep mountains.
We continued to follow the trail for about 1 mile more until it came to a sort of dead-end where we found another larger pool about 5'X5' and about 3' deep on the deep end. One of the guy's noticed a little frog on the edge taking a break from his hard life. As he went down to get a closer look I noticed a small snake stretched out on the rocks sunning itself. I warned him to be careful, which caused him to want to touch it (go figure??) with a long stick that was close by. The snake started to strike the stick several times and luckily he was able to flick it into the pool and make a clean get away. We later found out after we described it to the tour Co. guy, that it was, in fact, a deadly Sand Viper!! Ignorance is bliss. . . The frog was quite harmless though, I assure you ;-)
By this time, it was well after 11:00am and time to find this oasis. Everyone was getting low on water at this point and so it was time to go back. Most of the other younger, more immortal guys wanted to just cross north through the mountains, for an unknown distance, toward the main road. But being more in tune with my own mortality, I convinced them that we neither had the water nor the energy for an expedition of that sorts in an area we were totally unfamiliar with and with NO maps to boot. So with that being said we headed back the direction in which we came. Luckily we could see the big mountain that the hwy went by and wandered toward it until we saw the oasis/plantation that we had ridden by earlier. What a relief to see something familiar!!
It was right about here that I had the only mechanical failure of the day, when one of my crappy Nike shoes' sole split and I ended up pulling the bottom out of my right shoe. So with toes in the wind, I got back onto the 4X4 track and followed it back out to the road. We made it to the road just as the tour Co. guy was out looking for us in the cycle truck. He was outwardly elated to see us and in all one piece too. Come to find out, he had expected the first folks to start getting to the oasis about 45 minutes to 1 hour after we had been dropped off, it was now over 3 hours later (like we were REALLY going to follow that dirt road, yeah right) and when no one showed up after an hour and a half, they started looking for us by driving up and down the road pulling off and following the 4X4 trails as far as their 2WD truck could go!!
He asked if we wanted a ride to the oasis or if we wanted to ride it on our bikes. We all chose to bike it since it was ONLY 7K more. . . (he followed us in the truck NEVER loosing site of us again; I think we gave him a heart attack ;-) ) That was the LONGEST 7K I've ever rode. We arrived at the "oasis" about 1:00pm (which was the time we were scheduled to be back at the ship). This was an oasis right out of a Warner Bros. cartoon. It had about 5 trees and that was it!! But the shade was cool, they had LOTS of cold bottled water to drink and lunch was waiting for us. We were starving after that 18.6 mile Moses' like wander through the desert. Lunch was a mix of sandwiches, chicken, some fried Indian curry things, Arabic bread with a yellow sauce (forget the name, but it was great!!), cake and a bunch of fresh fruits. Everything was fantastic and right on time, I might add.
After lunch, we loaded up into the bus and made our way back to the ship. Not one word was spoken on the ride home as we were all really tired and most slept. We arrived back to the ship around 3:30pm; What a day!! I had a really good time even though we got lost, I guess that's all part of the adventure. I did learn a couple of valuable lessons about the desert over here.
(1) bring LOTS of water (read: as much as you can carry). I didn't run out but one other person did and others weren't drinking near enough from the looks of them.
(2) Use sunscreen with a high spf number. I forgot to use some and I'm now resembling a lobster (ouch). The sun is very direct here even in the "winter" time like now.
Well that's it from here, thanks for reading this far ;-) My next stop is in Perth, W. Australia in a few weeks, so until then, keep the rubber side down.
Nathan Morse
Bremerton, WA
USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70)
Last updated 5 May 1999