While Dhofar waits in anticipation for the khareef, Jim Leary will
be happier just after. Come September and the southernmost coasts
of Oman will be green as pasture, the rain will be over and
the clouds will still be there. For a Canadian who came to the sultanate only after researching the biking possibilities, there can be no greater happiness.
“I calculated that if I rode 1,000km every weekend for six months, I would cover all the blacktop in the country,” says Jim. But after 18,000km just in the Sharqiya, where he taught English in Ibra, he’s moved to fresh, unexplored territory. And after the endless monotony of desert sands, he’s trying to come to terms with the explosion of variety that comes with the southern landscape. “The desert around Ibra was wide open – you fall into a zone, a kind of hum, and the engine sounds the same. Here in Dhofar the engine noise changes as you work the gears, twist and turn. It is dynamic – not necessarily better, just different. You can let go in the desert, but this is a different niche.”
“My favourite ride is from the coastal plains of Salalah up the mountains, going through the different zones of vegetation, each ecosystem with its own smell that you can only experience on a motorbike. The landscape itself reminds me of different parts of the world. West towards the Yemeni bodrder, around Rakhyut, I feel like I’m in the plateaus of British Columbia, running through the Rockies. This is dry but still lush, prime ranch country. The eastern extreme of Dhofar near Hasik reminds me of the West Coast, while the northern mountains feel like Death Valley and the Badlands.”
Still, Jim has only been in Salalah ten months, and gives up much riding time for diving off Mirbat, where the sea is at its best, while balancing a job at a technical college where he heads the English language department. He isn’t particularly happy about it, and hasn’t quite retaken the groove he had settled into while buzzing through the Sharqiya. “I haven’t found it yet,” says Jim Leary, “but I will, in September.”
Rainy days and dog-eared pages Monsoon literature
No Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or, even more clichéd, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for Jim Leary. He might wear leather, ride a Harley and sport Hemingway-esque stubble, but he isn’t that predictable. Current favourites include The Silas Stories, by W P Kinsella, a Canadian author who writes about the current state of native Indian affairs, as if he was one of them, broken English and all. The short stories are as funny as they are sad, and Jim swears he can identify every fictional character in the book with those from the vast Canadian outback, where distances are so great a 2,000km Muscat-Salalah-Muscat road trip “would be done over a weekend.”
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