Al Wasil to Sur. Will we ever learn?

After breakfast, Hakhan told me if we wanted to follow him back to Al Wasil, he was going in 5 minutes. Yes we did, it was quite a long journey with no road markings – thanks for the short notice Hakhan. I hurriedly got ready and told Matt and Ben too. We all shoved things randomly in bags to be ready in time.

H set off at break neck speed, but we managed to keep up and arrived safely at Al Wasil. After getting our tyres pumped up again and exchanging emails, we said goodbye to Matt and Ben and set up google for our journey to Sur, a seaside town to the south east of us.

Calamity – the new road taking us to Sur was closed. What should have taken 2 hours was now going to take nearly 4. Bugger. Of course, neither of us took on board that distance wise it was only 160km. Alarm bells should have started ringing. It’s not as though we hadn’t been here before. If you look back at my Costa Rica blog you’ll know what I mean. Long hours and not many kilometres mean only one thing – journeys from hell. Like the morons we are, instead of saying maybe we should change our plans and go via Muscat, we followed google.

Cue a 4 hour nightmare of tiny mountain tracks with no barriers and sheer drops, ridiculous inclines that the car only just got up and crazy descents that I couldn’t see but could only imagine as I tried to see over the dashboard.

Steve held grimly on to the steering wheel and I went into Costa Rica mode – calm on the outside, wailing on the inside. I cannot tell you how scary it was – DO NOT DO IT. We saw no tourists during the entire journey and the 4 hilux pickups we saw were driven by locals who looked at us as though we were insane.

Eventually the road became less torturous and we could see the town of Sur in the distance.

Praise be the lord!

We were utterly exhausted by the time we got to the hotel.

Sur so far seems uninspiring but then again we weren’t in the mood for exploring on arrival so I shall withhold judgment until tomorrow. However, when we went to stretch our legs along the sea front, a young boy screamed abuse at us from a vehicle. It was very vitriolic and quite disturbing.

Let’s hope it’s a one off.

Photos below are of the better sections of road – far too scary to take pictures of the other bits!