Want to live out your Lawrence of Arabia fantasies but can only spare a couple of days off work? Tom Robbins travels to Oman for a weekend in the Empty Quarter - 250,000 square miles of nothing but dunes
I arrived home about 10pm with sand in my shoes. Not just any sand - the trickle of fine grains that I emptied onto the damp, south London pavement was more silver than orange or yellow. It had come from one of the world's most fabled wildernesses, the Empty Quarter - a sand sea covering 250,000 square miles of southern Arabia, a place which less than 80 years ago hadn't been crossed or mapped by a European. A place T E Lawrence referred to as 'the great unsolved question of geography'. A place Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary explorer of Arabia, called 'a bitter, desiccated land that knows nothing of gentleness or ease ... a cruel land that can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match'. I'd been for the weekend.
Insane as it now seemed, that very morning I'd been in the Empty Quarter, close to where the borders of Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia meet, sitting alone astride a towering dune and watching the sun rise. Thesiger would be turning in his grave. He spent five years getting to know the Empty Quarter, living with its tribes and travelling as one of them. He despised the thought of fast travel, hated machines, and bitterly resented news of the first crossing of the Sahara by car (it took 21 days). What would he have made of a trip to the Empty Quarter that only required two days off work?
For the past few years, the 'exotic short break' has been one of the travel industry's key growth areas. It started with weekends in Marrakesh, and before long Monday morning chat (around the water coolers in law firms and bank HQs, at least) was full of blase references to the weekend's wine tasting in Cape Town, clubbing in Tel Aviv, or safari in Kenya. It's not hard to see the appeal - such fleeting trips are the closest we get to the thrill of teleportation, deliciously disorientating breaks from the routine. But until now, nothing has offered quite the same degree of dislocation, of utter melon-twisting discombobulation, as this tiny dose of the colossal, timeless, unknowable, Empty Quarter.
Just to add further spice to the culture clash, this long weekend visit to what remains a very wild part of the world (where a war with communist rebels was still raging in the 1970s), is conducted in a degree of luxury that verges on the surreal. I'd come down from my dune that morning, for example, to enjoy a shower, then a bowl of Crunchy Nut cornflakes, melon, fresh coffee and orange juice and a choice of breads, all served at a proper wooden table, with cloth, set up in the middle of nothing but endless sands.
The trips have been dreamt up by Mike Wilson and Sean Nelson, two British expats and former army colleagues. They launch in earnest this week, but three weeks ago I was given a preview.
We land in Muscat, capital of Oman, on Saturday morning after an overnight flight from Heathrow, then fly on to Salalah, a port city in the far south. Mike is waiting at the airport. Tall and rake-thin, with greying hair, sparkling blue eyes, a pointy beard and twirling moustache, he's dressed in sand-coloured shirt and trousers, and a black shamagh, the local Arab headdress. He speaks in a deep, burbling voice that puts you in mind of Alec Guinness or an RSC Othello, if with a slightly bluer turn of phrase.
We jump into one of two waiting Nissan Armadas, giant 4x4s painted a sexy military matt beige, and head to our first camp. Unlike luxury safari camps in Africa, this one is mobile, designed to be pitched and struck every few days. We're on a shortened itinerary because of Ramadan, but most guests will spend two nights on the beach, then move into the Empty Quarter for a further two.
We may be poncy short-breakers, but the more we talk in the car, the more Mike sounds like a match for Thesiger or Lawrence. He came to Oman aged 23 to join the army and help to fight the communist insurgency ('my mother was horrified - she kept screaming "mercenary! You're going to be a mercenary!" My dad said, "you couldn't point out Oman in the school atlas with a pitchfork!"'). He spent a full year sitting on a sand dune guarding the Yemen border, passing the time listening to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, learning to be a great raconteur and inventing elaborate euphemisms for bodily functions ('I'm just off to shed a tear for Milosevic').
An hour-and-a-half later we arrive at a crescent-shaped bay, where the Arabian Sea crashes against the white sand, framed at either end by black volcanic outcrops. Stately brown canvas tents are spread out along the curve of the bay, their porches facing the waves, and in the centre is a majlis, a covered but open-sided sitting area, full of cushions. It's 32C but there's a delicious sea breeze.
After lunch we lounge about, then go out by boat to snorkel. Four dolphins swim up alongside - although they scarper when we flop into the water.
When we return to our tents, which have proper beds, carpets, stacks of fluffy towels and robes, they are lit with hurricane lamps. The sun is setting on the Jebel Qara, the mountain range that runs parallel to the coast and saw fierce fighting between insurgents and the Sultan's army, supported by the British SAS. Communist rebels used to throw dissidents to their deaths from the cliffs, but tonight the range is beautifully silhouetted against the purple sky and, ooh, don't mind if I do, here's a nice cool vodka cocktail.
A long table, cloth held in place by ornate miniature weights, has been set up on the beach and is surrounded by flaming torches and bedecked in candles. Frankincense smoke billows across from a little charcoal burner. It's all quite overwhelmingly beautiful for our first night, although as Mike points out: 'A beach is a beach; the Empty Quarter is the jewel in our crown.'
We set off at 6am, heading west from Salalah along the coastline. Flamingos stand in the shallows of Mughsail Beach, a three-mile stretch of white sand with high cliffs, draped in morning mist, at either end. Mike tells us an old Arab saying: 'Rise early, for the hour after dawn is borrowed from paradise.'
The road swoops and soars through the mountains, barren and empty but for the occasional gnarled and stunted frankincense tree. Their resin, which slowly oozes out and forms into little translucent gobbets, was once more valuable than gold and made this the world's richest area in 1000BC. The trees look wild, but the sap from each is still harvested. The stuff sold in the souk in Salalah is the best quality available (though quite what I'm going to do with the five packets I brought home is another matter.)
The tarmac soon gives out and we descend into a succession of wadis, whose pebbly floors have been worn by ancient rivers and now carry the bumpy roads.
We're a few miles from the Yemeni border, heading north, when we come to a barrier across the road. A soldier emerges from a hut, and approaches the car, machine gun in hand. He's suspicious: few vehicles pass this way, probably none containing five white, grinning, Europeans. He asks us what we're doing, where we're going, what arms we are carrying. Mike starts talking in fluent Arabic, then produces his identity card.
It works like Dr Who's magic paper. Suddenly the soldier's demeanour changes, he snaps upright and salutes. It turns out Mike is still in the army, a lieutenant colonel no less (running the tour company occupies his lengthy periods of leave). The same thing happens three more times that day. Perhaps we would eventually have got through without Lt Col Wilson - this area isn't officially off-limits - but I'm not sure.
The desert flattens out, all shade vanishes and the temperature climbs to 39C. We could rig up an awning between the two 4x4s and have lunch under that, but instead Mike calls ahead on the satellite phone to the barracks at Al Mazyunah, a dusty frontier town a couple of miles from the Yemen border crossing.
Suddenly we find ourselves out of the baking, dusty desert, and walking across the deep-pile burgundy carpet of the air-conditioned officers' mess, deserted on account of Ramadan. Four AK47s are decoratively attached to the walls, beside floor-to ceiling portraits of the Sultan and some smartly upholstered yellow armchairs. I did say this was quite a surreal holiday.
Lunch is seafood quiche, after which we retire to the games room to play snooker on the full size table. Between turns we look out of the window at the pancake-flat plains that presage the start of the Empty Quarter's dunes.
The road gets more and more bumpy for a few hours, then we turn off it altogether, driving across the desert trusting GPS co-ordinates to find the camp that Sean has set up. We are speeding across the sand, the dunes beginning to rear up beside us, when suddenly a pick-up truck appears alongside, its driver motioning for us to stop. Two armed men get down - more soldiers, scrambled after we passed a lookout post miles back. They have been following the plume of dust from our wheels.
Twenty minutes later, we arrive at perhaps the world's most isolated luxury camp. People rush out and present us with cold towels and drinks. It feels like coming upon a colonial-era expedition - we have a retinue of no fewer than 14. No wonder this is such a phenomenally expensive trip - at least £500 per person per day, not including flights.
After sundowners, we sit down for an alfresco dinner. As I pull my chair out I notice a scorpion, completely white, sitting where I was about to put my feet. I squeal. Mike, who sleeps outside without a tent, comes over laughing and stands on it with his flip-flop, but the poncy British press eat with our feet up on the table legs. Later, as we sit round the fire, a camel spider, six inches across, runs between us at great speed. Sean reassures us they are harmless, but when a second and a third scoot past I bolt up and stand on my chair. I don't think Thesiger would have thought much of me.
After dinner we wander away from camp to look up at the mess of stars. Mike is in wistful mood: 'I love it, I never get tired of this. Well, as long as I've got some booze with me.'
I get up at first light to climb the dune and take some photos. But my camera's got sand in it and the lens won't open, so I'm forced to sit without distraction and wait for the sun. Faced with a moment of such cliched perfection, I'm slightly at a loss - coming here on such a whistlestop pilgrimage puts you under a terrible pressure to feel something meaningful on command. This is it, the jewel in the crown, the view we've taken two flights and a 10-hour drive on desert tracks to reach, the sight that tourists are being asked to pay £3,000 to glimpse. I stare into the distance, feeling distinctly emotionally constipated. To be brutally honest, it's just a load of dunes - and dunes that are strikingly similar to ones you can see in lots of easier-to reach spots.
But a faint laugh from the waking camp far below distracts me, and I realise that of course there is something truly special here. Our little camp is the only sign of human life for miles, and in a few hours that will be gone, my footprints will be erased by the wind and I'll be back in London. That contrast prompts a sort of emperor's new clothes realisation, albeit in reverse: the whole point is that there's nothing there. It's as if all those soldiers were protecting an ever more scarce and precious resource - complete, silent, empty space.
Essentials
Tom Robbins travelled with Original Travel (020 7978 7333; originaltravel.co.uk). Its 'Big Short Break' to Salalah and the Empty Quarter costs from £2,960, including two nights at the private beach camp and two nights at a private desert camp on a full-board basis, flights with Gulf Air to Muscat and Oman Air to Salalah, transfers, guiding and activities.