Edelweiss Bike Tours have a brilliant new location, something very different, Dubai and Oman. Rather than a 24-hour flight to Europe, Dubai is only around 14.5-hours from Australia...
Oh Man. Oman! Amazing roads and closer to home. Like you, I love heading out for a ride. Like you, I love riding somewhere I’ve never been. But also like you, I don’t look forward to the long flights that take me to the overseas destinations where I’ve never ridden a bike.
“Dubai is the most common stop for anyone flying from Australia to Europe, 14.5 hours from Sydney aboard an A380”.
All right, I haven’t been everywhere in Unzud, it’s true. It’s not so bad flying to the US West Coast, but that 22- or 23-hour trip to Europe takes it out of you as well as costing a heap of money. But now I’ve found an alternative destination, or at least Edelweiss Bike Tours has. It’s Dubai/Oman, and the riding is amazing. Dubai is the most common stop for anyone flying from Australia to Europe, 14.5 hours from Sydney aboard an Emirates A380, so I am used to arriving there at 5.00am. But this time I did not have to board another plane for another five or six hours. I found the driver of the cab I had booked for the ride out to Al Badayer Retreat, a desert resort where the tour was to start, checked in and got some horizontal shuteye. Way to go; much better than sitting up somewhere over Turkey.
After meeting your guides and fellow tourers you are introduced to the bikes, complete paperwork and then head to dinner where you chat with everyone…
Edelweiss tours has a simple format for tours: after meeting your guides and fellow tourers you are introduced to the bikes, complete paperwork and then head to dinner where you chat with everyone else. Angela, the guide, and I were on Yamaha Ténéré 700s. I usually ride a BMW F 750 GS on Edelweiss tours, but since the bikes were locally sourced – normally Edelweiss sends its own bikes – there weren’t any. The Yamaha turned out to be an excellent alternative, better in my opinion than the BMW R nineTs everyone else had because it was lighter and more nimble. On the long straights it lacked a little power, but elsewhere – especially in the gravel – it came into its own.
Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British explorer of remote Arabia, required only “clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep” on his travels. We mostly stayed in five-star hotels and did rather better, but in a lot of places they serve only non-alcoholic “beer”; I’m going to launch a campaign insisting that a beer after a days’ ride is part of Australia’s religion, and therefore obligatory.
Follow the Bear tracks here…
Just in case you’re concerned about the heavy hand of Islam, don’t worry. Omanis mostly belong to a tolerant sect and are pretty cool. All you need to be is a little considerate of their feelings.
“I said above that the riding was amazing, and the afternoon of the first day showed us two reasons.”
The morning of the first day was a transport stage over the United Arab Emirate’s unbelievable “back” roads. Why the inverted commas around “back”? Well, while these roads are in the back country and often only connect a couple of houses with half a dozen others, they tend to be six-lane highways. Okay, some of them are only four lanes. They share the flat plain with power lines, and very little else. I asked a friend in Dubai about the purpose of these roads, and he said: “Yeah, they just build them because they can…” One odd thing is that they rarely have a crown – they’re flat – and there is no roadside drainage. We’ll get back to that.
I said above that the riding was amazing, and the afternoon of the first day showed us two reasons. When we turned off the UAE superslab onto the Jebel Jais road we were in a different world. The road was still multi-lane and its surface was still excellent, but it now snaked up into the mountains as if it was designed by a motorcyclist.
“When we turned off the UAE superslab onto the Jebel Jais road we were in a different world”.
It made me think that traffic planning jobs around there must be reserved for petrol heads, a conviction that was strengthened every time we came to a mountain road. That was one amazing thing; the other was the countryside. Rocky cliffs made up of twisted, tortured layers of stone, some of them almost knotted together, look like giant’s Playdough. And through them ran those magic sealed roads, one corner after another.
At the top of Jebel Jais there isn’t only the world’s longest and highest zip line on which you reach up to 100mph but also the Sledder with little one-person carts that hurtle down the almost vertical mountainside on a rail before hitting some serious loops. Both were closed due to the wind, but the road back down felt like just as much fun as any zip line.
The Fairmont Fujairah Beach Resort is in the Al Hajar mountains and is a 5 Start rated resort. Pic: Fairmont Fujairah.
The name of our hotel that night was Fairmont Fujairah Beach Resort which probably tells you all you need to know about it. Five stars, a liquor licence, world-standard facilities but not much local colour except for a bloke playing an oud at dinner. All very nice, but the Jebel Jais road had whetted our appetites. We were hanging out for Oman’s mountain roads, and we didn’t even know about the other brilliant riding that awaited us…
The Bear took this tour as a guest of Edelweiss Bike Tours, www.edelweissbike.com.
Next month we bring you Oman Part 2, where The Bear continues his adventure and, amazingly, gets rained on! Typical!
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