It’s well known that some of the most famous peaks in the world can suffer from congestion at critical points, making an ascent even more hazardous.
There’s the Hillary step near the summit of Everest, the Bottleneck on K2, and the Summit Rocks on Aoraki-Mount Cook. But none of those compare to what we encountered on Jebel Hafeet, the highest peak in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the destination for the inaugural expedition of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club.
The official vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club.
The Abu Dhabi Alpine Club is not an entirely serious organisation, not least because of the geographical difficulties of being located in one of the hottest and least alpine environments on earth. In early meetings with Kiwi expat co-founders Chris and Stacey, we’d talked about adopting rules in which club members could only be referred to by name if prefixed by the word “Sherpa”.
But Kathmandu is a four-hour flight from here, making the Himalaya a viable weekend destination. And we figured the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club could be a nexus for those of us who were missing the cold and crinkly bits of the planet while stationed in a particularly hot and sandy corner of it. And because we share our acronym with the ginormously wealthy Abu Dhabi Airports Company, there is always the chance that someone might mistakenly send us a cheque equal to the GDP of Norway.
And if the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club was not an entirely seriously alpine, neither was Jebel Hafeet. The peak is on the outskirts of the oasis town of Al Ain (”The Spring” in Arabic) on the border with Oman, reaches the hardly-nosebleed-inducing altitude of a little over 1240m/4070ft above sea level, is barely cooler than the baking surrounding deserts of the Arabian peninsula, and can be safely climbed while shod in Tevas.
And then there’s also the presence of, um, a, er, road leading to within a short walk from the summit.
It was the road that caused the problem. Well, that and the Eid al Fitr holiday to mark the end of the Muslim daylight-fasting month of Ramadan, when all the denial of earthly pleasures and the religious reflection of the previous 30 days is supplanted by massive feasts and general partying.
Chris, Stacey and I made a day trip to Al Ain with few plans other than getting out of AbDab. We knew there was an extensive grove of date palms still preserved around the oasis, and that there was a well-known zoo where Stacey had thought about seeking work to use her zoology degree rather than succumb to the expat wives’ Stepfordesque obsession with nails and spa treatments. There was also Jebel Hafeet, a great lump of sedimentary rock uplifted by some long distant tectonic event and now standing alone as the final isolated example of the spine of rock that forms the peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz.
The drive itself was an education of life on the UAE’s massive motorways. Thanks to massive irrigation sourced from the equally collosal desalination plants, the route is almost entirely lined with date palms and other similar species to give a vision of relative lushness. Just beyond were rolling red sand dunes and flat rocky desert terrane to show what normal life is like.
An even bigger impression was made by our fellow travellers. We’d beetle along around the 120kmh/70mph speed limit and get passed regularly by other vehicles being driven at up to 200kmh/125mph. On a substantial minority of occasions, the other drivers used the slow lane for these overtaking manoeuvres and as often as not, our substantial Land Rover Discovery would be buffeted by their slipstream. It was not hard to work out why the UAE’s road safety record is near the worst in the world.
We arrived safely at Al Ain and repaired to a mall (yes, I’m becoming a mall rat) for lunch, which was bookended by the surreal experience of watching the Emiratis’ attempts to ice skate on the indoor rink that forms the mall’s ground floor centrepiece. Ever wondered where your $2 a litre for petrol goes? It’s so Arabs can ice skate in the desert.
The temperature outside was hovering around 40degC/104degF but unlike AbDab, the humidity was barely noticeable. It was even nicer in the shady environs of the impressively intact date palm farms around the oasis, which had been spared from the developers’ otherwise seemingly omnipotent bulldozers.
Around 3.30pm, we tried to get to the zoo but were dissuaded by the vast throng of humanity descending on it.
“I know,” someone said, “Why don’t we go to Jebel Hafeet?”
Almost immediately, there was some kind of traffic snarl in which we were stuck for close to an hour. Within minutes of getting out of that, we were caught in another, although this time it was soon after beginning the ascent of the impressively engineered three-lane road heading to the summit. We were eventually to learn that this snarl extended all the way to the enormous car park just below the summit.
We — OK, I — foolishly talked about how to kill the hour or two so we would still be on top at sunset. At first it seemed the snarl was caused by the impressive local drivers’ habit of attempting a U-turn in the middle of the worst snarls, prompting the others drivers around them to move forward so that nobody could move in any direction, turning what had merely been congestion into full gridlock.
Cars boiled over. Cars ran out of fuel. Many people abandoned their cars and walked. We might have joined them but for the prodigious proportions of the Disco — Chris’s work car — which would have had it at the peril of the locals’ questionable driving skills no matter how closely we parked to the guard rails.
We sat and waited, entertained by kids in neighbouring cars pursuing the national pastime of twirling AK47 replicas, which would no doubt cause pandemonium and fears of junior jihadis to many outside observers but here seemed oddly normal.
The sun doesn’t set here as such. It disappears into the haze about a handspan above the horizon line and then dusk follows. We were still sitting in the Disco when we saw the sliver of the new moon, on the sighting of which Ramadan’s end is determined. Such is the fickle nature of the sighting, the exact date of the end of Ramadan, and the public holidays for Eid that follow, is not known until a few hours before.
We watched more pointless attempts at U-turns, watched the exodus as our fellow drivers got out to pray at sunset (such was the snarl, it made no appreciable difference to progress up the hill) and then about an hour and a half after dark, finally reached the carpark.
If we thought we were in a bad place, it was put into perspective by the total gridlock for those attempting to descend, and especially at the exit to the car park, where 10 lanes of traffic attempted to converge into one with all the mayhem you’d expect from a nation where the concepts of queuing and precedence are seen as curious anathemas.
The summit spire of Jebel Hafeet and a UAE blingmobile
The actual summit of Jebel Hafeet was maybe 200m/600ft higher than the car park and is an impressive spire of rock. At least it’s an impressive spire now, because what had once probably been a moderately graded ridge was obliterated by excavation to create the car park on which we now stood. Now a cliff stood between us and the summit but we could see a rough but wide path heading up around to the back of the peak.
It was odd too to begin an ascent with virtually nothing other than what we were wearing, which for me was a T-shirt, shorts and Tevas. Stacey and Chris had a backpack with some water and food but the contents barely registered. For those used to the vicissitudes of weather in the New Zealand hills, it seemed wrong not to have jackets and other apparent necessities.
The path up the hill was blocked by a locked gate but we joined the regular procession of people jumping over it. Not all, we quickly learned, were doing so for the undoubted mountaineering status that comes from a glorious ascent of Jebel Hafeet. The presence of men squatting in their shalway chemises or punjabis, the distinctly sewerage-like whiff and then the unmistakeable presence of turds lining the path betrayed the true aims of their missions on the mountain.
Fortunately, the ablution zone was relatively short and then we ascended the path which seemed of similar steepness to Lyttelton’s bridle path. There was obviously no moon to speak of and we hadn’t been planning a night ascent so we had to rely on the streetlighting from the car park and then by the dodgy LED torch function on my cellphone. The path petered out at yet another car park hewn from the peak’s slopes and we continued on up via some easy scrambling on loose but moderately graded rock to the final summit, which we reached a little before 9pm.
Chris and Stacey on the summit
It was nice to actually require the use of hands for this, even if it was only for the final 20m. And there was the added amusement of trying to do so while sharing a single dodgy cellphone torch.
It was almost exactly four months since my last summit, on Denali in -25degC/-17degF but here the temperature was perfect, in the high 20s in celcius (the 80s in Fahrenheit).
The difference four months, one day — and 5000m in altitude — makes.
There was an odd feeling of accomplishment to this ascent, mostly stemming from the bizarre features of the day, which had been one of my most enjoyable so far in the UAE. As with so often when travelling in unfamiliar cultures, it helps to think of yourself as a character in an absurdist drama because then everything that happens becomes entertaining rather than simply frustrating.
We looked back on the line of traffic snaking along the ridgetop road, which remained in total gridlock. It was clear we were not going anywhere soon.
We retraced our route back to the path with less difficulty than I was expecting and returned to the car park, where we made a cursory attempt to join the 10 lanes constricting down to one gridlocked lane down the mountain. Good sense prevailed and we soon abandoned the line to wait.
Thus followed one of my favourite memories of the UAE. Besides the dozens stuck in their cars, there were maybe 500 people here — families cooking kebabs on tiny barbecues, burqaed women wandering around in groups, and the boy racers in their flash cars doing laps of the car park with roof-surfing passengers, showing that alcohol was not essential for young men to display an innate wish to win Darwin awards.
And there were men. Many, many, many men, primarily Pesharis from Pakistan/Afghanistan border who work as labourers in Al Ain.
In everywhere else I’ve lived, alcohol would be a prominent feature of any such gathering but not here. Maybe that helped explain the convivial atmosphere that prevailed. Groups began to form around men dancing energetically in what I assume to be traditional style and to the tune of battered Corolla taxis’ stereo systems, always turned to 11 on the 1-10 volume control.
As one group stopped dancing, another group from the crowd would come forward and take over. There was even a throwback to the eighties, with breakdancing youths in stonewashed jeans, but fortunately they were the exception.
Groups would coalesce and then disperse and I wandered from one to the other, always seemingly welcomed even when I brought out my camera, under the theory that nothing is real unless it’s captured in binary. Some even tried to get me to dance and I did them an enormous favour by declining.
Other groups would form around trios made up of a bongo drummer, a singer, and someone playing a kind of ground-based accordion. The songs were seemingly all familiar because everyone sang and did the hand gestures in unison.
By 11pm or so, the traffic had eased off enough to justify leaving and we were still mired in yet another snarl near the bottom of the hill where similar Eid revellers at a lakeside park merged into the Jebel Hafeet traffic.
After yet more slipstream-buffeting driving along the motorway, we returned to AbDab a little before 2am.
