Gulf States

We’re looking over the Dubai marina from the living room of our hotel suite as the sun sets, on what might be the first completely empty day of our sabbatical so far. We fly to Beijing in about ten hours, and this second leg of the sabbatical already feels very different from the first. The shape of our days has been looser, and while we’re still taking in a lot of new places and new experiences, it’s pretty clear that what we’re looking to get out of our remaining time off has begun to change. We’ve spent much more time talking about the future, and doing what we can to set us up for a return to real life in a few months. Our remaining destinations are less about remote places and adventures, and more about idiosyncratic goals: learning to freedive, skincare, driving lessons, time with friends.

It’s a bit hard to believe that we’ve only spent a week in the Arabian peninsula. It feels much longer. Between Oman, Al Maha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, we’ve listened to most of Expecting Better together and spent a lot of time talking through long-term life plans and frameworks, all while coming to understand, if only a little, a part of the world that neither of us had the faintest understanding of before. It’s been a different kind of density in time, but one that feels good and exciting. After all, this sabbatical is about doing all of the things—seeing the world and otherwise—that will be hard to find time for when we’re back to real life.

Wadi Shab

It was Alice’s idea to go to Oman in the beginning. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but whatever it was, I couldn’t have imagined the sheer variety of landscapes we encountered in our two short days in the country: lush wadis filled with emerald rivers and pools, sheer rock cliffs on either side of highways, white buildings nestled among the mountains, desert and ocean in the same field of view. We saw flashes of Zion, the Grand Canyon, Anza-Borrego, Grand Escalante, and more on our too-short visit. Alice hopes we’ll be back some day.

Iftar

Ramadan in Oman means no eating or drinking in public between sunrise and sundown, but it also means iftar, the breaking of the fast, all across the country as soon as night falls. We saw casual, home-style dishes being brought out onto local streets as the call to Maghrib prayer began, and vast buffets were on offer at the international hotels across Muscat, including ours, for both Omanis and visitors looking for a special occasion. Trying our best not to eat or drink during our long day of hiking was worth it for the char-grilled steak and fall-off-the-bone lamb kabsa.

Morning in the desert

We spent two nights at Al Maha, a lodge in the middle of a conservation reserve in the Arabian desert south of Dubai, named for the Arabian oryx that was once hunted to extinction in the wild but which now populates the reserve. We woke up before sunrise one morning to watch a falconry demonstration, and the sounds and sights of nature were on full display. We hadn’t heard such a rich chorus of birdsong since the first few weeks of our sabbatical on the Serengeti.

Three moments

Horseback riding was nowhere close to being on my list of possible hobbies we might pick up during sabbatical, but I guess surprises like this are part of the fun. There were three moments during our ride through the desert that felt a bit magical: running into a herd of fifteen-ish Arabian oryx, framed perfectly among the dunes; climbing up and walking along the ridge of a high dune just as the sun was setting; and and the moments as we cantered—for the first time—back to the stable when it felt like I was flying.

A few minutes before Maghrib

We visited the grand mosques of Oman and the UAE, the first time either of us had seen Islamic architecture up close. The Sultan Qaboos mosque in Oman was nearly empty when we arrived, and the marble floors across the entire complex were so polished that we were reminded of the perfect reflections in Salar de Uyuni. The Sheik Zayed mosque in Abu Dhabi had a scale that felt comparable to Angkor Wat, and looked particularly beautiful in the soft late-afternoon light.

A different kind of dive

In Dubai, Alice was most excited to visit Deep Dive, home to the world’s largest pool. We did a full scuba dive with equipment usually reserved for technical dives (“management wanted the highest-end gear”, said our guide in classic Dubai fashion). In the hour we were underwater, we explored an underwater apartment, played foosball and chess, slam dunked a basketball, and rode a couple of motorbikes.