Wow, six of the Hatta area caches found today, all the ones we went for! (Even though we got really lucky on a couple of the caches, which could have taken us much much longer.) It was brilliant, with a nice relatively cool start to the day, with temperatures starting at 32 degrees and reaching a bearable 35 degrees at noon. It slowly started getting warmer from there on out, and finally reached around 42 degrees at around 4pm. So we were fairly lucky with the temperatures today.
I got to experience a whole new side of the UAE/Oman again today, seems every weekend we see something completely different.
One of the highlights this time around was my very first puzzle cache, Rubik Challenge, which was, well to say the least, uhm, challenging. Holly molly. You can only shower blessings on the soul that invented air conditioning, and then the schmo who figured out how to install it in cars. Reason why I mention this is cause solving the puzzle takes quite a bit of time, and well, there ain't no shade or escaping the insane heat in the wadi's in this part of the world. And seems to me that more than a few people cheated this one, but you will see for yourself when you visit it.
Anyway, once we solved the puzzle, we headed off to the indicated location, only to spend a further couple of hours reducing my official body water content from 75% to ... well... must have been close to 50%!! Damn, I can't remember having sweated (dang, what the heck is the plural of this - howz this for a guess) so friggin much! Two hours is a long time in the heat, and not many of you out there will really understand how hot it gets out here. Anyway, yet again, I digress!! We finally found the bugger hiding in not quite the expected location, with a little help from our friends (don't you just hear the Beatles now!!). After almost packing up, we decided to use one of our life-lines and phoned a friend, and he managed to indicate where we had misinterpreted the "corrected" instructions.... I am really not going to share anymore, cause I wouldn't want to deprive any other cachers out there of the fun experience we had trying to figure this one out. Anyway, it was a very satisfying experience, all in all. What a find! Plus the cache was wicked cool.
All in all though, almost all the caches were awesome. Really nice and packed full of interesting things.
One of my highlights of the day was finding the cache in Mahdah! It could only be more perfect if the final cache location was free of litter, oh my, was the place polluted! This is apparently a very popular location for the locals, and clearly they haven't learned the importance of looking after the environment. The garbage all over the place, obviously remnants of some or other get together, was just plain wrong. Wow! It reminds me of the formerly nice locations in South Africa that have become totally ruined by visitors.
All that aside, these are some of the photos I took on the way to that particular cache.
On the road to the cache!
Up the hill and down the hill... what an amazing view!
At the cache site, in the Wadi. Very nice, but if you look closely, you will see the spray painting on the boulders, and man, I just couldn't take a picture to the left/right/behind of here, it was just wrong.We had lunch at the Hatta Fort Hotel, which was really cheap and not bad at all. We then went for some of the other caches, seemingly along the road. Oh my, where is a helicopter when you need one. Did some of the most insane mountain climbing ever, in the heat and everything. If I ever have to climb another Kilimanjaro wanna-be, I swear, I might just go postal!
The Hatta GOLF cache was the last one for the day, and while the cache is just plain amazing!! and that it was, the climb up was just too much to round out the day! Holy crap, I thought I was gonna pass out on the way up, and when we finally got there, we had no water on us and I was just dying for a drink. The stay up top was very short, although the view was just plain amazing. I hightailed it back to the car, 30 minutes later, I was just too happy to be back in the comfort of the well A/Ced car and even happier to be making our way back home!
Ten hours later, back at home, a shower was sooo in order, and what can I say, I am gonna sleep well tonight!
