Turning the Page – The New Year

Lying on the southern shore of the Gulf of Oman, Muscat has been an important trading hub for more than 2000 years. Today it is the capital city of Oman which is located on the eastern edge of the Arabian peninsula. The northern coast of Oman, where Muscat is located, is rocky and the city is built from east to west with the modern international airport at the western end, connected by the Sultan Qaboos road that runs the length of the city, to the port of Mutrah in the east. Mutrah is the oldest of Muscat’s neighbourhoods and is home to the famed fish market and the old souk. A few kilometres west along the shore are the ex-pat beaches of Qurm and tucked inland towards the hills lies the neighbourhood of Ruwi, also known as Little India. This triangle of neighbourhoods on the eastern edge of the city can be considered Old Muscat.

When I arrived, I was immediately taken aback by just how unaccommodating the city was for those hoping to explore on foot. In fact, to see someone in the street walking from one place to another was a rare sight. The city is built around small rocky hills that spring up from the ground and look almost as though they are piles of rubble left over from recent construction and they make each neighbourhood feel isolated from the rest of the city. Unlike its neighbour, the UAE, Oman has no ambition to build tall and no construction reaches higher than the minarets of the mosques so that all of the scattered segments of the city sit in the shadows of these rocky piles. These short buildings, no higher than four or five stories, are further clumped together into uniform units of square buildings, painted white, with shopfronts on the bottom and living space on the top creating a neighbourhood within a neighbourhood.

Everything is functional and efficient and, upon seeing it, my mind wandered back to Lebanon and my conversations with Ágoston who spoke often about the underlying methodology of the Arab home. It was his contention that Arab living spaces were designed around protecting the family from the unforgiving climate of the desert and the shape and layout of Arab homes reflected that philosophy. In Oman, the way each neighbourhood within a neighbourhood was clumped together with every need settled without having to leave the home seemed to further capture that ideology. Anything that required travelling beyond the nearest block of buildings involved hopping in an automobile and Muscat often feels as if it has been built with cars in mind. Were it not for my inability to read Arabic and quickly make sense of the various transliterations of place names, I imagine that getting anywhere in the city by car can be done with relative speed and ease. And when travelling about the city by public transit, nothing felt more than a short ride away. For example, the bus from the airport to Ruwi, from one end of the city to the other, took only 30 minutes to complete the journey.

“Middle” is built into the phrasing of this part of the world. The Middle East has been at the intersection between Europe and the Far East for more than 2000 years and more wars have been fought in this region because of its strategic importance than any other part of the world. I settled in at a comfortable hotel in Ruwi and had only begun to get a sense of my surroundings when the eve of the New Year was upon me. I had been travelling as a nomad for seven months and had now managed to make it halfway around the world. Unlike Dubai, the pace of life in Muscat is slow. There is nothing showy about Oman and, instead, it is a place that can be better characterized by temperance and modesty where the laws of Islam are more strictly observed than its liberal neighbour to the northwest. I could not help but get lost in my own thoughts and Muscat seemed as good a place as any to reflect on all that I had lived through over the last 365 days.

I took the bus into Mutrah to have a look around at the fish market and stop in at the souk which today does little to compete with the modern shopping malls that have sprung up. I strolled all the way out east through the Muscat gate to the eastern fringes of town where the old Al-Mirani and Al Jalali forts, as well as the Al Alam Palace, are located. If there are tours on offer they go through here but the whole day I was simply lost in my head and unwilling to pay any entrance fees. I covered almost twenty kilometres on foot in a city not designed for walking in the heat of the day so I stopped a lot in various shady nooks, where I could find them, to spend some time just to think.

I had come a long way. There were the four months spent in Europe travelling up through the British Isles including driving through Scotland and its Highlands while mastering the manual transmission car with my left hand. There was a lot of time spent in pubs or on the High Street if I was in the city, or out hiking in the forests when I could escape the hustle and bustle. There was a reunion with an old friend, Irish football, and a Michelin star restaurant in Dublin. I got to visit my family in Hungary and then there was the long overland trip from Budapest, through Slovakia and Austria, to Slovenia to meet some friends, and then racing through northern Italy and up to Paris via Lyon, before flying back to Vancouver to attend a wedding. There was the trip, upon returning to Europe, from Paris to the cities on the west side of the Rhine before heading up to Belgium to meet with Lothar and Kati and then heading onto Hungary for one more week before seeking out the sun in Cyprus. Then I arrived in Lebanon and lived through 10 days of a revolution. In Tanzania, I went on safari and experienced Africa’s untamed wilderness in some of this planet’s most spectacular national parks. I took the road less travelled by taking the train through Tanzania to Zambia and making my way to Victoria Falls before driving across Zimbabwe where my eyes were opened. To have stored up all of those memories over a lifetime would have been a feat, but instead, they represented just a taste of the last seven months. Now I had come back to the Middle East to take a moment to reflect on it all and also imagine the path beyond.

A lot had changed. My whole way of life was centred on finding out where to go. I had my daily responsibilities and keeping my clients happy was always a concern, but over the European summer I shaved off some parts of my business that may have been profitable but not worth the hassle. Work and life had been put back into balance and my routines and habits had evolved to better suit my new lifestyle. I was active every day reserving several hours devoted to exploring my surroundings on foot or getting from one place to the next. I ate less frequently and only when I felt like I needed to and, although I have never suffered from being unhealthy or overweight, I felt as though I had shed anything that might have been considered excess and felt lighter on my feet.

Every destination I reached, and every daily activity I performed, was easy to record and share, but the most profound change that I experienced over those seven months was more nebulous and difficult to relate to unless you have felt the same at any point in your own life. It was how I suddenly felt imbued with a very clear sense of purpose. Call it a spiritual revelation or a having found my calling, this journey had proved to be my own road to Damascus – though, admittedly, I would not go anywhere near Damascus given the turmoil currently ripping through Syria. I was no novice when it came to travel but the idea of nowhere being the place to go back to was a novel idea to which I had to come to grips with several cities back. Whenever I would communicate with family and friends they would inevitably ask when I was planning on coming back and I found it difficult to make them understand the effect that the last seven months had had on my sense of place and that I could not envision ever going back. That is not to say that I would never go back to Canada, only that I could not envision a situation that would make me want to stay in any one part of it for longer than a visit. I had also learned to extricate the word never from my vocabulary. I could see the end of Summer some way off in the distance near to where it had begun, but there were many steps to walk along the way and I had already developed a clear vision of what the road would look like when the seasons turned to Winter.

Temperatures were in the thirties but I covered almost 15 kilometres on foot before deciding that enough was enough and returning to my hotel. It was hard to say if it was because of the coming New Year, or if this was just representative of the sedate nature of Oman, but there was very little going on. I am not sure what I expected, nor did I have any inclination to get wild and party until the morning, but if there were New Year festivities taking place they certainly were not being advertised.

I asked the receptionist at my hotel in Ruwi what people did in Oman for New Year’s Eve and whether or not the hotel itself would be observing the occasion. She mentioned that when her shift ended that evening that she would simply go home to bed and added that nothing noteworthy was happening at the hotel, but that some of the other fancier hotels in other parts of town would likely be having rooftop celebrations and pool parties. When I asked about alcohol she said that if I was determined I could get my hands on some but it would involve making a few calls.

The hotel had a pool, so when the sun began to set I went for a dip before chowing down a couple of shawarmas that I had bought earlier at a nearby restaurant. I had bought some oranges for dessert and found myself seated at the desk in the hotel room slowly eating each wedge and staring at the computer screen. Back in Canada, people would be preparing their own New Year’s celebrations, but I loaded up a project that I would be working on for the next month or so for a client and got to work. I knew that I would be able to profit from the time that this extended effort would free up for me down the line – somewhere. I could not rightly tell when exactly these moments I spent working would be converted into moments where I could be working but wasn’t, but I was certain that I would reap those precious memories when they arrived.

Nomadic life is built on the foundation of this trade. It is sacrificing memories made with those you love most to make memories with strangers who could potentially become lifelong friends or that you might never see again. It means spending the money you have today to do the things that most people reserve for the end of their work-life and knowing that living this way means that your own work-life might never really end. It means robbing yourself of every comfort in the hope of securing one tantalizing unforgettable memory or extraordinary inconvenience. It means booting up the computer and working when your body screams for sleep because you want to keep your daylight hours open for exploration. The reality is, there is no real winning strategy whether you stay in or venture out because you never really know when your number is going to come. I have got enough chips to keep playing so I am going to let some of them ride.