A few more pictures from our trip yesterday. These are the main roads through the desert and you often encounter forks in the road where you have no clue where they will take you, one may go back miles and end up on the real highway, or it may just go round in a loop or end up at someone's palace, an abandoned fishing village or just a really nice beach. We usually find that taking the "one less travelled" is not necessarily a good idea as you run the risk of getting stuck in some deep sand in over 40 degree celcius heat - not a good idea. Anyway the point I wanted to get across is that this is a "main" road, what we get to after this is a lot less easy to follow. Next trip I will remember to take some photos of our usual roads. Often they are a barely defined track in the sand or well used but very rough and stoney as was the case today. Very sharp stones as it turned out!

As the sun was going down, we headed back to Al Ruwais area, near the docks where all the newer fishing boats are, these are some of the older more weathered Dhow's that I have seen, especially the one that looked like a dead fish! People were gathering on the docks to watch as the sun was starting to go down so we rushed to get further down the coast to an old fort and fishing village we wanted to see before it got too dark.

We seemed to miss the ones we were aiming for, the map reader was obviously sleeping, but this we reached just after the sun had gone down, we got to it over a very stony dirt track and as I got out of the car to take this picture, we hear the ominous whomp, whomp, whomp of the tire!

Sure enough, the tire was flat as a pancake. I had the manual in hand reading out directions while Derek did the work, until the part where we had to lift this really heavy tire onto lugs, by which time the sun had pretty much gone! Anyway, the teamwork paid off and before too too long, we were on our way back to the highway and home. We wont be going too far afield today though as you wouldn't want to get caught without a spare tire. We phoned the number we had been given by the rental company for emergencies, but the answer was pretty much, it is a three day Eid holiday, call me at the end of it! Put very politely though! So, we will try to get it fixed or more likely, just stay and see things closer to home and on better roads! It certainly was a shocker though, these tires are really heavy duty, so dont know what we could have gone over that would made it go that flat. All part of the adventure I suppose!