Ridges, Coves, and Gullies: A Weekend Adventure. 7-8th July, 2000
The hard ascent from the road to the ridge
From Wadi Khabb al Shamis’ dirt road at the base of Jebel Suwaih, we begin our ascent to the skyline ridge a little before 5pm. We make steady, rapid progress, despite the 95 degree heat, 90%+ humidity, stillness of the air, and steepness of the terrain. We are working very hard – hearts pounding, sweating profusely. This Western face we’re on soaks up the blasting rays of the summer sun for the better part of the day, and by the afternoon it radiates steady heat like a clay baking oven.
Fifty minutes or so from the start we reach the narrow gully, which ascends steeply to the ridge at the summit. Wedging a foot into a break in the limestone slab which starts it off, and finding a hold to pull on, I begin climbing. Annie follows close behind. We make steady headway, taking only two short breaks, spaced out evenly along the length of the gully. There is little or no breeze to cool us, until just ten meters or so below the summit at 700 metres where we pass into a steady stream of refreshing sea breeze wafting down over the ridge. First the balmy breeze, and moments later the pleasurable relief of breaking over the summit ridge, ridding ourselves of the heart-pounding toil of heaving heavy loads up a steep mountain. From our stance looking down in the direction we have emerged from we can see patches of cloud, dense and smoke-like, being whisked rapidly over the ridge and down the upper portion of the gully.
The vista we have gained is spectacular – extending to the Eastern horizon lies the calm and hazy Indian Ocean, while from ground on which we stand the mountain drops quickly to a long, inviting stretch of beach, at the rightmost side of which can be seen a dozen or so stone dwellings comprising the fishing village called Zighi Until last year this village could only be reached by boat. It is now linked to the Wadi Khabb al Shamis dirt road by means of a daring track bulldozed zigzag fashion over the mountain. The villagers stay put throughout the year, enduring the summer’s stifling coastal humidity and the scarcity of fish which must depress their income and keep them idle. During the summer, to escape the warmer waters, the fish they depend on migrate further out to sea and to a greater depth, and this makes the fishing difficult. But what the villagers sacrifice by way of material comfort and mental stimulation they must reckon to make up for by preserving their independence. The village nestles up against a mountain peninsula that connects to the spine of the mountain ridge on which we are standing. It tapers out to sea for perhaps half a kilometer beyond the village, square to the beach. On the southern horizon in the hazy distance one can make out the land mass that runs east-west from Dibba bay, which at night is illuminated by a long string of lights along its coast. Looking North we see another peninsula jutting into the sea, shaped like an old hag’s finger, curled towards us and enclosing a deep fjord or khor, the innermost reaches of which are out of view. Turning our backs to the turquoise ocean and facing West, within a kilometer’s distance towers the precipitous dusty gray walls of the mountain range on the other side of the Wadi Khabb al Shamis, the gorge out of which we have climbed.
Along the ridge and down to the 100 meter beach
From our position we cannot see the small sandy bay on the other side that is our destination: it comes into view a kilometer or so further North along the ridge. At about 6pm the light is still good, but we must keep moving if we are to make it down before dark. We set off, hopping over the jumble of large, sharp, angular chunks of rock that cap the ridge, altogether different from the smoother, softer and dusty rock that are found on the scree slopes below. On route we pass an old, primitive stone leopard trap with its trap door facing down south, built by the al Shehi tribe in past generations. Within half an hour or so we have made it to the declination of the ridge which marks the beginning of the obvious descent gully that will take us to the cove which is now in full view – as is the headland on its right separating it from Zighi beach .
The descent gully looks long and tedious and will take a lot out of us. We have under an hour before sunset. I’m feeling overworked and resisting the urge to hurry inefficiently under time-pressure we stop and eat some nuts and dried fruit to boost our energy reserves and mark time in our own terms. When you are harassed by time you can lose your composure and the tension makes you wasteful of your energy. Your judgement and objectivity can also suffer, and this can be more dangerous than any physical deficiency.
Then down the scree we go. These gullies are full of loose rock and since the gradient is quite steep, it is easy to slip. One’s immediate focus is thus always fixed on the next step or two ahead of you, constantly judging the ground one is stepping towards for stability. Occasionally there are more precipitous drops – little cliffs or cascading slabs of rock that may emerge unexpectedly in any direction ahead. If you don’t know the gully, and cannot make out a clear and continuous passage from the top, you are always aware of the possibility of reaching a cliff which is impossible to pass. If the features of the passage right ahead show signs of this possibility you’re gripped by a feeling of apprehension and this feeling is sharper if you have committed a lot of your time and energy to the gully as we had now done. But on this day we find an unbroken line easily enough.
As we get closer to the beach, which is always in view, the air becomes heavy with humidity, and dense with pungent smells of the salty sea and acrid urine. The breakers become louder, amplified by the mountains that enclose us to the left and right. The vegetation increases. There are a few scraggy goats scattered about. By the time we make our way to level ground through the rocky debris, trees and bushes, the goats have dispersed and it is dark. Our timing has not been a problem. We emerge onto the sandy beach which is cradled between two towering headlands North and South silhouetted against the night sky. It is perhaps 10 metres broad and 100 metres long. It is wet, indicating that the tide will submerge it sooner or later. Stripping off our sweaty clothes we wade through the waist high breaking waves, into the cool, refreshing water beyond. The moon, a bright crescent, shines down its cool light on us from above the dark ridge from which we have come, and the stars multiply.
The afternoon’s work now dispatched, muscles and mind gladly discharge their duties in the bay’s moon lit sea. Letting the limbs slack, facing the panoply of stars, suspended by the temperate water, swaying to the tune of the waves, body and mind relaxed. There above us I can see the Plough turned on its head. The water, which is clear and translucent, becomes alive with phosphorescence, with our sweeping limbs leaving trails of hundreds of delicate underwater sparkles. Twice we refresh ourselves in the sea like this, and twice we towel ourselves down and lay back on the sand, glistening with salty water in the warm, humid air, letting the remoteness and raw intimacy of the beach, the mountains, the ocean and the stars, slowly sink into our souls.
The night swim with wet Coleman’s ‘dry bags’
The tide is rising steadily, the long arms of the breaking waves reaching to within three or four metres from our patch of sand, and this prompts us into action. It is close to 10pm, and it’s time we made our swim around the southern headland to Zighi beach. We expect Alan and Tim will be arriving there soon in their kayaks from Dibba beach several miles further down the coast, as we’d arranged. We each have a Coleman’s ‘dry bag’ (so they call it) which we stuff with our Therm-a-Rest air mats, a sheet, spare clothes and some food for breakfast – just enough to camp the night. We stash our rucksacks and shoes, which we’ll retrieve early the next morning, up against the small stony cliff that looks over the beach. Thus prepared, down to the sunless sea we go – a couple of solitary, stout-hearted English souls, in as remote a place as can be imagined, wading out into the Indian Ocean at night. “The bags work like floats!” Annie exclaims, and off we swim, dry bag floats tucked under our arms, happy as puppies.
As we make our way slowly towards the end of the headland, we’re delighted by the magic phosphorescence which glows brightly with a cool pale greenish light about our kicking legs and glitters in swirls of light particles about our hands and arms. We’ve played in it before off Dibba beach, but has rarely been this vivid and copious. In ten minutes we come broadside to a cliff wall leaving the bay behind us and follow this South for another 25 minutes or so. It is easy going, pleasant work and the experience isn’t intimidating. Occasionally I roll onto my back, hugging the dry bag to my chest and, kicking with my legs in a leisurely rhythm, gaze up at the firmament, my hair wafted by the gentle sea. I look over to Annie who seems to be in her own contented world. We don’t talk much. A large bird soars over us two or three times, silhouetted against the sky, perhaps drawn to us by curiosity over the two creatures slowly making their passage below. The fluorescent lights of Zighi village in the distance now mark the end of the beach we are heading towards but which still cannot make out. Our senses are heightened and our voices hushed. “If a local is on the beach” I whisper to Annie, “you must rise out of the water and greet him with ‘Salaam Alaykum’ while I stay back in the water. You must open the dry bag, get my shorts, and then swim back out to me…”.
Our rendezvous at Zighi beach
We can now see the beach ahead, emerging out of the darkness like the murky banks of the river Styx, and it’s a reassuring sight for lone swimmers. Our feet meet terra firma in another few minutes, and finding a suitable camping spot set back on the soft dry sand, I put on my shorts. I’d had a funny feeling about my dry bag and on opening it up, as I suspected, its contents are drenched. ‘Typical Colemans rubbish,’ I mutter. Annie thinks she’s sealed her’s better because she’s a woman, but I pour out a pint of water from it. Fortunately our sheet is relatively dry, and our air mats aren’t too bad either once they’ve been unrolled. There’s no one about to disturb us of course – it’s 11pm on a remote beach in the Musundam in the clammy heat of the middle of summer.
So here we sit at the end of this beach, eyes peeled for the two dark shapes of we expect to step out of the sea at any moment. Looking in the direction of the village, I notice a blip of light – a sudden flash – a little distance out, which I comment on to Annie. Then nothing for a while. Annie leans in one direction. “There…I can see two people…” she says hesitantly, looking down the beach some distance. I can also make out the figures now, and we walk in their direction. It’s bound to be them, but as we near these shadowy figures I reflect to myself there is always room for doubt. But now we are within a few feet of them, there is Tim’s familiar gait. “How!” says Tim, raising one arm like an American Indian.
We all congregate at the campsite and get settled for the night. It’s around 11pm. Tim conjures up a tall can of cold beer which catches my eye. We idle about for the next hour or so, all of us rather tired it seems – partly on account of the warm, still, clammy air. It’s not comfortable camping. An hour passes. We’re biding time, lying face up to the stars, reflecting on life in Dubai, when we witness something marvelous. “Look at that!” Dad cries out excitedly. Up above beyond the mountain that looks over the beach, a ball of brilliant, whitish, incandescent light, streaks through the sky, dropping out of sight behind the ridge. It resembles a silent firework, but the quality of its light appears more rarefied and subtle than anything earthly I’ve seen. It seems so close that it might have come crashing down beyond the mountain. It was an extraordinary sight that filled us with a sense of wonder – a meteor come tumbling into our sky from the measureless reaches of outer space!
The herons at dawn
By midnight Annie and I are asleep on our sheet-covered air mats, our exhaustion from the day’s exertions overpowering us and the sticky, coverless discomfort we are in. Dad would be less fortunate with his sleep that night. We’re awake again at 4.50am in the half-light, and sitting up in a daze I’m barely able to assemble my senses together and take stock of my situation. “We’d better get going”, Annie says, looking curiously fresh and enthusiastic. Sheer willpower gets me on my feet. Declining Tim’s offer of coffee I gobble down a couple of chunks of his moist date and walnut cake for breakfast while packing my dry bag in preparation for our swim back. This time we take more care over making the bags watertight. At quarter past five, in the milky dawn light, we wade out into the calm sea with our bright red tubular bags, headed for our little beach further up the coast – truly an amusing sight for Dad and Tim who takes out his camera for the occasion. Twenty minutes later I look back and can skill make out Dad in the distance, loading up his kayak on Zighi beach. We’re running parallel to the cliffs, which we can now see are absolutely plastered with long-necked herons which frequently break away from their perches on the cliff side and soar overhead. I wonder to myself whether the life of such a bird is as dull and pointless as it seems -or do we go along with William Blake’s unlikely notion: “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”
A dilemma
We make the 100 meter beach after 35 minutes’ swimming, and by now a full sun floats above the horizon. En route Annie spotted what she thought was a turtle poking it’s head out of the water; both of us sighted a ray – we swam directly over it’s dark square form, several metres beneath us. Wading out of the water, I feel rather dizzy and stiff from lack of sleep. A distant fishing boat which has come into view looks like it might be coming in our direction, but it turns around again. We retrieve the rucksacks, repack the gear from the drybags (which more or less keep the water out this time), put on our shoes, and we’re off.
We find ourselves faced with a dilemma: in order to get up to the ridge from whence we came, up which gully do we head? There are at least three options. Since we arrived at the beach in the dark the evening before, we were not able to look back and take our bearings, and now we have lost our bearings. We commit to one, and twenty minutes up our chosen gully and doubts are brewing. We don’t recognize anything, and we are losing sight of the beach which we could see on the way down. We agree that we made a mistake, but we’re too committed in terms of effort to retreat. We suspect our predicament might be the fulfillment of a bad omen witnessed the day before: on the drive out here from Dubai, a bird smashed into the car’s aerial and was doubtless killed. On account of a poorly stimulated pineal gland or something my biorhythms are haywire and I feel like vomiting, although I keep this to myself. I stop for a while to let the sensation pass. “Hold on a sec Annie…I really could have done with some more sleep”.
We continue on up, heaving step after heaving step, gulping down water. The heat’s rising and we’re really struggling. We near the crest of the gully far sooner than we should have if we were on target, and its clear now we’re way off course. I’m concerned that we’ll be cut off by a band of sheer cliffs and have to retrace our steps down to the cove again, squandering all that precious water and limited strength, having gotten nowhere. With our water reserves low, we would have been in a sorry situation back at the landlocked beach with the rising heat of the day.
The awful ascent to the ridge
We can see in the far distance on another mountain range the ridge that we should have now been on – our intended destination – and it is an oppressive revelation. Below us to the right another broad gully runs up through the range beyond, and it clearly follows a continuous line to the true ridge. If we can drop into it, we won’t have wasted too much of our reserves and we’ll be on a definite route. We manage to pick a steep route down into it and prepare for the big ascent ahead. I estimate in total it will take over an hour of climbing. We feel that our situation is fairly urgent, and we need to be as methodical and systematic as possible on the way up. We quickly evolve a number of rules. First, no negative comments; we must keep focused only on the positives. Doubts and criticisms drain energy. Second, we must take long and quite frequent rests in the shade – ten minutes worth at a time – and not yield to the psychological pressure to move on without adequate recovery on account of the rising temperature. Third, after each rest period, we should decide together where ahead of us our next rest station will be, short term goals towards which our immediate efforts may be directed. We agree to check on our water supplies once we have reached the top in case they need rationing on the descent. We stick to these rules throughout the climb, and they prove effective. When the work is regulated in this way, it becomes more manageable, both physically and psychologically. As we make our way up we are both conscious of the potentially lethal nature of this place. Without water and through exhaustion and heat stroke you would soon die. But we feel safe and relaxed now. Up a little to the left a little black and white bird flutters into view, resting on a rock for a while. It seems like a friendly omen for sure.
The semi-delirious descent to the car
An hour or so later, between half eight and quarter to nine we reach the ridge with features we recognize, and it is a wonderful relief. I’m buzzing with a feeling of pride and satisfaction for the two of us. “Well done Annie!” I exclaim, a big smile beaming. But we’re not done yet. We follow our trail along the ridge a little way, to the point where we can descend, and after checking our water – which is OK for volume – we start to drop. Mostly loose rocks and scree, awkward terrain which demands from you perpetual attentiveness and a decision for almost each step you take, but we are on home ground now, and can expect to reach the road within an hour. And as expected we are in the shade until the morning sun breaks over the ridge from the East. Further and further down we drop, zig zagging circuitously as we gauge the next 20 or thirty metres ahead of us which renews itself again and again and again like a bad dream. My legs are quivering, and I’m making sloppy judgments. I slip a few times, bruising myself on my elbow and shin, but I don’t really care now as the wadi bed comes into closer relief. I try to recall the feeling of coming down this scree in the past, when I have been feeling strong, but now I am in a sort of stupor, with my muscles slack, their response sluggish and imprecise. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes, hopping and sliding and slipping further and further down this godforsaken mountain, until the road rolls under my feet in a dreamy delirious haze.
Annie drops down onto the road moments later. We look at each other, knowing very well we’ve pushed it to our limit. We slump into the car, and blast the AC.
About the Author
Mark Ashton Smith What’s national standard for paragliding in Cornwall - among the best you can find in the country? (1) the coastline 🧗🏼♀️ - the most beautiful in the country. We can enjoy it, explore it, and get good at coastal soaring 🏆 (2) the views 👀from up high - all coastlines of the peninsula that everyone comes to visit all in one panorama - absolutely stunning 🏆 (3) technical tor & small hill, inverted, broken-up, and low base flying 💥- really sharpens XC skills - none of this lobbing into house thermals and climbing to 6-7 grand off the bat. If you lose concentration you’re on the ground. If you can learn to fly XC well in gnarly Cornwall you can fly well anywhere in the UK. 🏆(4) the convergence 🌥🌥🌥 - it’s the best in the UK and if we can fly it, it opens up 150km plus flights and even learning to soar sea breezes gets us in league with that lot around Brighton. 🏆 (5) We got instant access to lots of ace coastal sites/beaches to train at within a short drive which gives us more air time, ground handling skills, and wagga skills (call out to Dunc)🏆,and (6) our sites aren’t busy!! You’ll be lucky to find more than 2 people flying at Carn Brea on a perfect day. In Bodmin moor you’ll be with your mate and that’s it. No crowds. 🏆👌Happy to be in one of the best flying areas in the country - just important not to get pulled into the league numbers games which suits other areas but not ours. Gavin McClurg made the same point. Distance is great but there’s loads of other ways to have top flights. Focus on what’s the very best in your home turf! 🏴☠️
