Visa Run to Oman
Dubai grants free 30-day tourist visas to all of its visitors, which technically the girls and I still are. Only Ken is an official resident because Dubai gives those handy little visa stickers exclusively to work jerks and people with a permanent address (we don’t move into our apartment until April 18th.) To prevent ourselves from getting ejected from the country, we had to do a “visa run” this weekend. In other words, we drove about 2 1/2 hours to the UAE border, got our passports exit-stamped, drove over the Oman border, got our passports entry- and exit-stamped, and then drove back into the UAE and got a new 30-day tourist entry stamp.
I wish I could impart some more adventurous tales or interesting knowledge but that’s really all there was to it. Being used to the borderless EU, it felt a little like the movies having to go through high security check points. Ken asked me on the way home why I acted so nervous and stressed during the process. After pondering through my anxiety, I realized it simply comes from the fact that these extremely brash border agents possess so much power to throw a major kink in my life (imagine ”excuse me miss, please step aside to this room for questioning” after not liking something they see in my passport!) Thank goodness none of that shady business happened to us this trip.
The drive was interesting in that we drove through four completely different desert terrains: light sandy flat desert just outside the city followed by red sand dunes, then flat ground with short bonsai-looking trees sparsely dispersed over the land, and finally dark dirt-clumpy looking mini-mountains. And I kid you not, camels roam wild in the country side in the same way cows do in Texas! It feels so surreal that I die laughing every time I see one. After about the 100th camel, Ken was no longer amused at my overreactions but I still can’t help it. I didn’t capture any pictures of the drive, but there’s plenty of time for those to come.
We stopped in the the UAE border town of Hatta at the Hatta Fort Hotel to have lunch. It was beautifully constructed and well-maintained although didn’t seem to warrant an overnight stay, so we just enjoyed a midday glass of wine, let the girls shake off those car-ride blues, and went along our merry way. The pics below are from the Hatta Fort Hotel, they had a gorgeous backdrop of flowers which could’ve won me major photography awards, but the girls were too giddy to pose and found it more entertaining for me to chase them around in front of the restaurant patio full of hotel guests. Adalyn finally gave me a good smile in the camel room. Just before leaving, the girls scored a cup of fish food from the bellhop which was worth its weight in gold. No doubt the girls enjoyed sweet fishy dreams the whole car ride home.
