Al-Ain: Sleeping in a mosque, getting stuck on the border... the usual.

So I’m still cruising with my stupid 2004 Lonely Planet ‘arabian peninsula’ which is the only version that includes the rest of the UAE (there is a dedicated Dubai guide but apparently they didn’t consider the rest of the country to be worthy of a book.

Al-Ain is supposed to be a cute half-oasis, the other half being across the border in Omani territory, under the name ‘Buraimi’. Supposedly, there’s free passage between the two halves and the Omani side is where cheap hotels are.

It took forever to fill for the minibus going from Abu Dhabi to Al-Ain - so we ended up getting there around 1 am: no more taxis to Buraimi, baby. Crap. There go away my dreams for a $40 bedroom (that’s the cheapest, apparently). I call the main hotel in Al-Ain - $180 - but they’re full.

At which point a good homie from Fayoum, named Ismail, who works a security guard for the local market across from the bus station, offers me to stay in his little ‘office’ until the wee hours of the morning - his shift ends at 5 am.

So I hit 3 hours sitting on a chair, then get really really tired - but thank him profusely anyway (he refused to take the money though), go for a walk with my backpack, realise that the first museum opens at 8:30... so I decide to go to the ancestral house of travellers: the mosque.

True, my sneakers and shorts don’t make me look like the usual Asian bloke sleeping at the back of the mosque but hey, I have the right be here. So I plug my camera battery to recharge it (ha, ha) and get some sleep on the floor, until someone wakes me up at 8 and tells me to evacuate.

I couldn’t help but think of Ahmed Zaki in Ma3ali al-Wazir and imagine that the mosque dude will chase me off with a shotgun.

Anyways. I get to the Al-Ain National Museum - which the first 8 taxi drivers had NEVER heard of. The ninth gets me there when I tell him it’s next to the cattle market. I felt bad for culture for a split second.

The museum is nice and the ticket woman has really beautiful eyes. I check-in my backpack (and end up leaving it there for most of the day, even though I spent like 1 hour in the museum...) then head to the cattle market (you have to be a New Yorker or something to find this exotic because it was, well, a cattle market. What’s with the stupid LP?)

Went to walk in the Oasis - it’s impressive how much green there is here in the middle of the desert (that isn’t planted in imported fertile soil like the rest of the country!).

Then I went to see Buraimi - took a Oman taxi that I split with a Tunisian guy going a visa run in Oman.

Now the border crossing: because it’s not an open road like it is in Mussandam (which an Omani enclave in the north of the UAE); there’s actually a border crossing. I get past the first post where they check my passport and decide that a visit visa won’t let me through to Oman, which I’m sure is wrong but I prefer not to argue to much. So I go around the border post and try to get to the entry post for the UAE (to return where I came from) where the dude says that he can’t let me in because my visa expired.

Hmm. Flashes of the Syria-Lebanon 4 hours border crossing. On that one it was night and it was January. Here it’s 45 degree in the shade.

Anyways. I walk around a little bit in no-man’s land, then decide that it’s boring to ogle at barbed wire for too long so I go back to the UAE customs post where I pull my ‘I’m a consultant for the government and you’ll get fired by Sheikh Mohammad if you don’t let me in’ routine --- so he sneaks me in, literally, from behind the entry post.

Ha. Illegally in the UAE. That will be fun to explain when I take the plane on Sunday.

Anyways. I hitchhike a ride with a Palestinian-Jordanian man back to Dubai.

First night back in a lousy and not that cheap hotel in Little India (a.k.a. Deira). Now though I’m staying with my friend Talal and his brother Oussama who who very graciously offers me their extra bedroom. They’re both great, great lads. (and no, they’re not reading the blog.) and it’s a very very fancy apartment building.

Aww! (Michael Jackson tone). I’m moving in. Actually I’m almost tempted to delay my flight to KSA.