National borders always induce anxiety in me. Once you enter these strange no-man’s lands, especially on the back of a bicycle, you are exposed and at the whim of bureaucracy. You are encountering an enigmatic power you have very little ability to influence, and border guards often seem to know this: their power is absolute – to detain, to turn you back, to scupper plans, to inconvenience. There is always a gnawing feeling of wrongdoing: a feeling that I was carrying something illicit, that my paperwork was incomplete or my passport somehow void. There is barbed wire, automatic weaponry, unclimbable chain-link fence.
I had hoped that my transition through this border would be smooth: my status as a resident of the United Arab Emirates meant that I should be able to cross into Oman without a visa, a privilege I had previously used before when travelling by car. It seemed, as it turned out, that this privilege did not extend to entry on a bicycle, and my entry was stone-facedly denied. My residency was not sufficient, and I was to enter the building with the slip of paper that I had been handed for processing (land borders in general, and this border in particular, seem often to be confusingly governed by the movement of small slips of paper from place to place, official to official).
The customs building was anonymous and sparse. The only decoration was two grandly framed portraits above the desks at one end. Like the United Arab Emirates, in Oman, every official building must hang portraits of the founder of the country and the current leader of the country. This cult of personality is something that is strange to Westerners, particularly the British, where feelings towards the monarchy and the government do not any longer tend towards glorification or adoration. In all my time in the Gulf, I never heard a single local of any country I was in say anything remotely negative about their leaders. The bearded sultans stared down at me from beneath their colourful headscarves expressionlessly, benevolent and powerful. One of the intended consequences of the ubiquity of portraits of leaders in buildings in the Gulf is to give the sense that the leader is always in the room, always watching. I hoped that they were on my side.
Behind the desk, the large-bellied man in military uniform took my passport and the slip of paper and then typed seemingly endlessly into an archaic desktop computer, tapping and waiting, the keyboard thick with grime. Eventually, the guard disappeared into a back room with my passport looking confused. When he came back, he informed me in heavily accented English that I was to follow him to an upstairs office where I would mysteriously and disconcertingly meet the ‘boss’.
The boss’s door was open, and inside there was again nothing much except two more portraits of the sultans, this time less grandly sized, an omani flag in a small, pyramidal holder on a flimsy desk that was otherwise empty, a small black, plastic sofa and a coffee table upon which was a serving tray with an Arabic coffee urn and a bowl of dates. I received an apology that the boss was going to be five minutes late, but I was to help myself to the dates and coffee. I love dates and ate as many as I could as soon as soon as the official left without it being obviously greedy and impolite. As I was spitting out a date pit into a tissue, the round bellied captain that oversaw the border office entered with a reassuringly broad smile. The boss. He, also, wanted me to explain my plan, and once I had he shook my hand with excitement: he loved the idea, but he was sorry, due to it being their breaktime, my passport would take several hours to process. Either this was preplanned, or he saw the cleaned date pits on the tissue on the table and the look of disappointment on my face, but he then explained that to make up for this inconvenience that I would be joining them for lunch.
I presumed that this would mean eating at the border office vending machine, but I was soon taken outside and ushered inside a car. Although my addition to the car obviously required some explanation in rapid Arabic, the young guards welcomed me into the vehicle. I, of course, had no idea where we were going, but after thirty minutes of driving through the jagged landscape of Northern Oman, without passport or visa, we reached a checkpoint manned by uniformed sentries holding assault rifles. Behind the barricade, a tank painted the colour of the surrounding landscape stood, the barrel of its enormous gun pointing aggressively towards us.
We were waved through into what was clearly a military base, and I soon found myself inside a canteen full of soldiers being served food on long, metal tables. I collected a tray of food from the hatch: grilled fish, vegetables in a tomato sauce, a small cup of some sort of juice, sliced white bread. I went and sat with my new soldier friends, and whilst being relentlessly interrogated about my marital status (two of the men believed I should be married and have children already, and one believed I should wait as long as I could), I ate the surprisingly delicious flakey white fish and crunchy green beans. Every uniformed man that walked into the canteen stopped in their tracks when they saw me, in my grimy shorts and t-shirt, red from the sun. But they also all then immediately welcomed me into their world, smiling, asking questions, offering me more food.
After dessert of a thick sponge in some sort a cardamom flavoured custard, and depositing our trays in the designated area, I was taken back to the border where we were met by the smiling boss, my bicycle propped against the border post, and my passport stamped and ready for me.
Welcome to Oman!