When you’re a grown-up, and you’ve made a giant leap away from your comfort zone, getting lost every once in a while can be good for you, because it helps you to find yourself
There’s a ghost town at Sharjah just outside Dubai, at a place on the map where a whole lot of nothing fills the view forever. The tiny outpost has drowned in the dusky red dunes over the years, abandoned now so that only the odd building rises half-heartedly through the sand.
Greta and I decided that we’d spend a day creating the kind of Instagram shots that would turn us into social media sensations, because we’re independent adults who can do just what we like. Being independent adults, we did the responsible thing and made sure that our desert trip would be safe. We had sunblock, Google Maps, a trusty Suzuki Jimny 4×4 and 12 bottles of water.
The first lesson is that sand dune sand is very soft. Very, very soft. As in ‘get your wheels stuck and never leave the desert’ soft. But Greta had done a desert driving course, so we were good. We Google Mapped ourselves as close as we could and under the blazing morning sun, set off on foot across the dunes for the last few hundred metres into the sand-submerged town.
We took photos. We drank water. We melted. And being independent adults on nobody’s time sheet but our own, we decided that we’d had enough fun. Fun seems to wear out a lot faster when it’s 42 degrees outside. We turned to go back to the car. Except we’d lost the car. Completely.
As far as the eye could see in every direction, the horizon was red-hot and sandy. Dunes. A million bloody sand dunes. No jaunty, cheery, and above all airconditioned Suzuki in sight.
This is where the second and most important lesson comes in. Independent adults always know where they’ve parked the car. They use landmarks. They can easily track their way back to the car. Independent adults never lose their cars in mall parking lots. Or in deserts. Independent adults never need anyone to tell them where their car is because they know where they parked it.
Well, you know how it ended, because here I am telling you about how we almost became those people that Discovery Channel makes documentaries about. We survived. We wasted precious little time chiding ourselves over our lack of planning, scurried up and down countless dunes and eventually found the car, and after a few false starts, the way out of the desert. It came down to perseverance and making alternate plans. Simple.
This whole lost-in-the-desert experience is not unlike my move to Dubai.
When I first told my mates I was moving here, there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. We’re a tight bunch, us, so I got that a cross-continental move to make a home in the desert would play havoc with our weekly promenade walks and the spur-of-the-moment visits.
“It’ll be okay!” I comforted them, “we’ll have Skype! But I need to do this for me, to go off into the desert and be all grown up and independent.”
Except that when I got here, it turns out that Skype is blocked, and so is FaceTime. All very well to call myself an independent adult and think I can still keep in contact with my friends back home, but technology failed me, and so there I was – stranded in the desert, 8000 km from home and everyone who loves me.
But just like Greta and I had to make a plan to forge our way out through the dunes and back to civilization, my friends back home and I had to find a way to keep in touch.
Cue VNotes (that’s voice notes, but you’re not cool if you say voice notes, my friend who is a mum of teens tells me) and videos sent over WhatsApp. Asynchronous messaging, just like in the good ol’ days of Mxit.
We’ve learned that WhatsApp has a maximum video length of 60 seconds unless you compress and completely pixelate your video file, and that VNotes of more than two minutes are suboptimal.
We’ve learned that it’s all very well to be independent and brave and make a home far, far away, but the best way to do that, is to have your support network and friends on-hand 24/7, technology willing.
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