To celebrate the release of Book 3 in my New Life in Andalusia series, I’m sharing the Preface, which includes my driving misadventures in the Empty Quarter on the border of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and my first experience of driving in a snow blizzard in sunny Spain. Happy reading!
Amazon universal link to Olive Leaf Tea https://mybook.to/oliveleaftea
At a Crossroads
Most decisions we make every day are inconsequential. What kind of breakfast I eat in the morning, what T-shirt I wear, or where I walk my dog are unlikely to influence my future significantly. They are incredibly unlikely to change the course of my life, not to mention the course of history. We fill our days with minutiae which affect nothing and interest no one. Whether I take the stairs or the lift, eat soup for lunch or have a sandwich, or watch a film or a series is extremely unlikely to affect my future. Not every flap of a butterfly’s wings causes a typhoon. As we drown in prosaic trivia and banality, it is impossible to see when we stand at a fork in our life journey; when we are faced with a decision that may seem of little importance but turn out to be life-changing.
As I sat inside my car, watching the snow rapidly cover the windshield, I was oblivious to the fact that I was at a point where my life path was about to diverge. Every few minutes, I’d turn on the windshield wipers to remove the snow to see if Robert was coming in the four-by-four to rescue me from the mountain between Alcalá la Real and Montefrio. I had left home earlier that day to attend a job interview in Alcalá. It was the first week in January 2018, and just a few days earlier, we had hosted a barbecue with our friends to celebrate Epiphany.
I turned on the wipers again and saw yet another car skid down the road out of control, descending the hill in front of me. The driver must have been shocked by how little control he had over his car because, like me, he slowed down and parked on the side of the road to wait out the blizzard. There was now a long line of cars in front and behind me, all with our hazard lights blinking. By now, I had lived in Andalusia for almost four years and had only seen snow here once before. That first February, when we opened our little remote guest house, the guests woke to a white blanket covering the olive hills and their rental cars. But watching the snow gently fall through the window of one’s cottage while sitting next to a cosy fireplace is one thing. Sitting in a freezing cold car on the side of a mountain while steadily being entombed in the snow is quite another experience.
I learned how to drive in the United Arab Emirates, where the roads are predominantly straight, flat, and wide. Only once during those years did I find myself in a difficult driving situation. It was in 2012 when I agreed to drive our four-by-four American pick-up truck as a support vehicle across a small section of the Empty Quarter. Robert and his friend, Justin, put their dirt bikes in the back of the pick-up, and we drove south of Al Ain, along the Oman border and past Al Quaa towards Um Al Zomoul until we reached a gate into the desert that we had used on previous desert camping trips. From this point, Robert and Justin left on their bikes across the desert towards Liwa Oasis. While they went straight across the dunes, I was to follow in their general direction on a desert road that we had used many times before. We were supposed to meet in Liwa about five hours later.
As the dust kicked up by the departing bikes settled on the horizon, I proceeded to drive along the compacted desert track for several kilometres until the sand got soft. It was time to deflate the truck’s tyres, so I stopped by a small, presumably abandoned shack with a large veranda to work in the shade. A short man in uniform appeared in the doorway of the humble abode as I was checking the pressure in each tyre.
‘Are you lost?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I assured him. ‘I’m following two bikes to Liwa.’
‘To Liwa? It’s quite far. No?’
‘I’ve done this trip many times,’ I understood that seeing a solo woman in an oversized American pick-up truck setting off into the endless ocean of the Empty Quarter must have raised his concern, so I chatted with him for a while.
I learned that he was from Nepal and was working for a sheikh guarding the entrance to this section of the desert. It emerged from our conversation that he led a very solitary life, and several days would go by without him seeing anyone.
‘I wish I had some magazines or books to give you. Next time we come here, we will bring something for you to read.’
‘That would be very nice.’
It was time for me to leave. I took a sip of water and said goodbye.
‘Just be careful. Call me if you need help,’ were his parting words. He had informed me that a middle-aged couple from France had gone down the same route a month earlier and had got stuck in the sand, thus necessitating their rescue by the local police. He gave me his mobile phone number, just in case.
I felt pretty smug for the first hour or so of my journey across the desert.
Look at me! I thought to myself. I was in my mid-thirties and driving a three-tonne GMC 2500 across the biggest sand desert in the Arabian Peninsula, somewhere between Oman and Saudi Arabia. I’d stop every now and then, admire the stunning red dunes that contrasted against the deep blue sky, and take some photos to share on my social media accounts as soon as I could get a signal on my mobile phone. Little did I know how much my luck was about to change.
I arrived at a crossroads and, for the life of me, could not remember which way to go. The problem was that the last time Robert and I had driven that route, this area of the desert was completely empty, but now I could see several temporary buildings in the shape of shipping containers scattered around and an asphalt road that miraculously began in the middle of the sand track.
This must be a construction site for an oil well, I thought to myself. Not wanting to get into trouble for driving across someone’s precious oil field, I turned left. But after driving for another half an hour, nothing in the desert looked familiar.
Where is the oryx sanctuary? Where are the gazelles?
The highlight of my planned route was to see oryx and gazelles grazing under an irrigated forest of acacia trees, but I had not come across the forest on the track I was following. The dunes I found myself in seemed different, too, choppier and showing no sign that a vehicle had passed through. I consulted my GPS receiver, which, in those days, provided only very basic information about my longitude and latitude, and noticed that I was driving away from the Liwa Oasis in the Emirates and heading towards Saudi Arabia. It was 2012, and women in Saudi were banned from driving, not to mention driving in shorts and a T-shirt with their hair flowing out of a vehicle’s open window. Talking to a strange man without my dear husband’s permission might have added a few more lashes according to Shariah law, which is so piously concerned with a women’s modesty, purity, and general well-being.
I pondered how Locked Up Abroad might title my story. Girl Gone would work well and fit nicely between Dangerous Liaison, a story of a gay male nurse arrested by the religious police, and Saudi Bootlegger, the latter being self-explanatory. As I was making light of my predicament, I noticed that the sun had started to set. I checked the information in the battery-driven GPS and noted that I had about forty-five minutes before it would be dark outside. I zoomed in on the grey-scale map on the GPS and searched for a road. There was a very small dotted line, suggesting the presence of a road not far from where I was. I drove across a flat area in the desert in the general direction indicated by a small arrow on the GPS and soon joined a single-lane asphalt road that ran next to a very high fence topped with barbed wire and security cameras. As I glimpsed at the stunning sunset unfolding ahead of me over the giant dunes, I wanted to cry. My only hope was that I was still on the Emirati side of the border and had not inadvertently crossed over into Saudi during my meandering drive earlier that afternoon.
With no better idea in mind and no mobile signal to call anyone, I resigned myself to continuing down the asphalt road. Even though I had never seen this track before, I convinced myself it must lead somewhere. I was certain that, by now, Robert and Justin were at the hotel in Liwa where we were supposed to meet. They would be sorely missing the supply of wine and brandy that I had packed on the back seat, as well as their clean clothes and Justin’s insulin that was in a small fridge next to the wine. Few things in life can make you feel as totally useless as when you fail to deliver insulin to a person with diabetes, but I knew once the sun had set, I could not drive in the pitch black across the dunes. I resigned myself to the idea of spending the night alone, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, as these were the only provisions that I had in the vehicle.
Since I was alone and with no one around to judge me, I was about to turn on the waterworks when suddenly, in the distance ahead, I saw an official-looking four-by-four heading towards me.
How bad can a Saudi prison be? I weighed my options. Surely, they will let me go after a day or two or a few lashes. Hopefully, someone from the university’s HR team will inquire about me. I was not going to let this car drive past without asking for directions.
I put on all the truck’s lights, including the hazard lights, and got out of the car so that they could see that I was alone and unarmed. I waved frantically at the approaching car. To my relief, it was the Emirati border patrol with two friendly police officers inside. Highly amused by my story, they kindly said they’d lead me to a junction in the desert from where I could follow a road to Liwa Oasis without getting lost. I drove behind them for half an hour or so until we reached the crossroads where I had taken a wrong turn earlier that afternoon. They told me that what I had assumed to be an oil field was a construction site for a new road. After thanking the officers for their assistance, I drove off into the darkness, and after another half an hour, I was on a main road that I knew led to Liwa Oasis. As soon as I had a telephone signal on my mobile phone, I saw that I had received dozens of missed phone calls and messages from Robert, who had arrived at the hotel two hours earlier and had been sitting at the bar in his sweaty motorcycle gear, wondering where I was.
I recalled my little automotive desert adventure as I now sat stuck in a blizzard only half an hour from my house. The blizzard was getting worse, but Robert promised to collect me in the four-by-four. The sedan which I had driven that morning to the job interview was not going to make it through the ice and snow. Since I did not fancy falling down a roadside cliff, I had prudently stopped and waited. However, I didn’t want to use up my phone’s battery reading mindless social media posts, so I looked at the white windscreen and reflected on my current situation instead.
It had been almost four years since we packed up everything we owned, including two Arabian street cats, and relocated from Abu Dhabi to southern Spain. Fuelled by romantic dreams of a pastoral Mediterranean lifestyle and with no road map to follow, we set off to start a new life among the olive groves. In the first two years, we renovated an old farmhouse, or cortijo, and turned parts of it into rental apartments for tourists. We now had experienced two seasons of paying guests, but there were still many improvements that we had to make to our house. This wasn’t helped by the fact that we did not hold steady jobs, making our new life quite stressful and difficult to predict at times. To help with our finances, Robert had travelled to Oman to help a former student open a private school while I stayed in an empty house, looking after guests. This was very different from what we had imagined our lives in Andalusia might be like.
By January 2018, I had been alone, on and off, in my dream house for almost ten months and decided that I had had enough.
There must be better ways to make some money than travelling across continents every few months. I questioned our rescue Bodeguero, Bobby, who, in all fairness, had never travelled beyond the vet’s office in Alcalá and was unable to comment on the rest of the planet.
And that’s how I ended up accepting a job interview at a local language school in the nearby town of Alcalá la Real. I thought that if I had a steady teaching job, combined with the holiday rentals, my writing, and Robert’s translation work, we might be able to live together again.
‘If you like these conditions, you can start on Monday,’ Belén, the manager of the language school, announced. She was sitting on the opposite side of her desk in a mustard-coloured office. We had just discussed my teaching career and what I had been doing in Andalusia for the last four years. Belén spoke excellent English, even though she unconsciously switched between a somewhat forced version of the Queen’s English and her normal English, which was marked by a slight Spanish accent. I felt that she had put on the RP for me, which was strange because I was Polish and did not particularly care about English accents.
Was she trying to impress ME? I wondered because it was me who was supposed to impress her.
‘Thank you,’ I said before leaving the school. ‘I will think about it and get back to you later.’
‘Can you let me know this afternoon? It’s because I really need someone to start as soon as possible. My old teacher has passed her oposiciones, and she has to travel to Cadiz for her new post.’
At that time, I didn’t understand what Belén was referring to, but I let it pass.
‘OK, I will send you a WhatsApp message later today.’
‘Perfect.’
I bade her farewell and, while leaving, cast me eye over the brown walls of the school’s corridors and the dark, burgundy waiting room. I wasn’t over the moon at the prospect of going back to teaching, but I also wasn’t excited about spending another winter alone in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe I should go back to Oman with Robert and teach at Samira’s school. I thought to myself as I appraised the brown and beige stripes that decorated the school’s interior. Did Belén decorate this school? I wondered. It looked as if the colour scheme in every room at the school was taken straight from the 1970s Manchester set of Life on Mars, a depressing and strange mud-inspired combination of brown.
As I returned to my car, I weighed my options. Admit defeat, go to Oman, and be miserable. Or teach in an outdated local language school in a small town and earn peanuts. By the time I was stuck in the blizzard on my way home from the job interview, I knew where my heart was.
But for a moment, dear reader, let’s stop here and rewind to seven months earlier when I was alone in my house, learning how to drive a manual car, recovering from a fall that had left me slightly concussed and with a broken arm, attending to paying guests and trying to make new friends.
Amazon universal link to Olive Leaf Tea https://mybook.to/oliveleaftea
Sabina Ostrowska 