Before you get excited, I should tell you that I'm not talking about the mildly psychoactive extract of cannabis. It's an easy mistake to make, and the reason that I now have six packages of Duncan Hines brownie mix in my kitchen cabinet. Just kidding. It's only two boxes.
No, when you say "hash" in Saudi Arabia, what you are talking about is the act of going out into the desert with a group of like-minded people for exercise and camaraderie. How it came to be called "hashing" is a long and convoluted story involving a group of Englishmen, two of whom were named Horse and Torch, which is just awesome. Back in the 1930's these guys were colonial officials in what is now Malaysia, and evidently they liked to spend their weekends drinking and carousing. Then on Mondays they would try to burn off the aftereffects by running around the environs of Kuala Lumpur like madmen. Eventually they formalized their little club and named it the Hash House Harriers in honor of the building in which they lived, which was nicknamed the Hash House for the bland and unappealing food served there (which makes me wonder how bad food has to be for English people to consider it "bland and unappealing"). Seventy years later the Harriers and the pseudo-sport they spawned are still going strong.
So, one sunny Friday afternoon (to be fair, pretty much all afternoons are sunny in Saudi Arabia) our group assembled at a prearranged meeting place for the ride out to the desert. There are only a few people who have cars, so you find a seat with whoever happens to have room. My friend Jeff and I ended up riding with a couple, whom I'll call Inge and Ivan, from the German embassy. Inge was a consular official, and Ivan was her husband, who was originally from Russia and spoke no English other than to point at himself and say "Russian. No Eengleesh." He repeated it a couple of times as if to prove it to me.
The day got off to a surreal start. As we were getting into their Jeep Cherokee, Inge asked me if I minded sitting in the front, since her husband didn't like her sitting next to him when he was driving. Okay, a little weird, but I thought maybe she was just a really bad "passenger-seat driver" or something. So we all climbed in, me in the front, Jeff in back with Inge, and Ivan behind the wheel. Here's what happened next: Ivan didn't know how to start the car. Oh, he turned the key, but only about halfway. You know, so that the electrical system comes on but the engine doesn't actually start? Then he put the gear shifter in reverse, and we just sort of rolled backwards for about ten feet. At this point he tried to go forward, and looked genuinely puzzled at the Jeep's refusal to comply.
From the back seat Inge said, "Ah, can you help?" So, after exchanging a what-the-hell-is-going-on glance with Jeff, I reached over, turned the key the whole way, and actually started the car. Ivan just shook his head as if to say, "Oh, yeah, I always forget that part," stabbed at the accelerator, and catapulted the car into traffic.
See, it turns out that Ivan didn't actually know how to drive. Apparently Inge had always been the family chauffeur, but in Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive, so that duty fell to him. He tackled it with all the enthusiasm and restraint you'd expect from the average fourteen-year-old. In a way it must be liberating to drive like Ivan. No worrying about things like speed limits or signaling for turns. No need for those pesky lane lines. Nothing but the open road, the feeling of speed, and the non-stop string of German and Russian expletives being hurled from the back seat.
I learned a couple of things on that ride. One of them was that I am capable of exerting sufficient force to leave a hand-shaped impression in the hard plastic molding of a Jeep's door handle. Another is that the kind of driving which is truly alarming on straight, paved highways becomes balls-on terrifying on twisting dirt roads. Roads carved through hard-packed, hilly terrain. Roads with open fissures, washboard surfaces, and sheer, 60-foot drops. Roads where the car in front of you kicks up so much dust that visibility is reduced to, oh, nothing. If any of this perturbed Ivan, he gave no sign of it. Certainly his speed never wavered. In fact, if I hadn't been so busy watching my life flash in front of my eyes I might even have admired his casual insouciance in the face of near-certain death.
But apparently fate protects fools and mad Russians, because we made it. And, once the dust settled and my blood pressure had returned to a state that didn't make my eyeballs pulsate with every heartbeat, I found that the desert was pretty impressive.
First of all, it's big. In fact not just big, but vast – and profoundly empty. You might even call it deserted, if you were the type to go in for puns and cheap wordplay (fortunately I would never sink to such cheesiness). Being in the desert is like standing in the middle of a fossilized ocean. It's a sun-dappled sea of beiges and browns that undulates across your field of vision, stretching from horizon to horizon. Here and there the stark landscape is broken by a wind-blown tree or low, scrubby bush clinging tenaciously to life in defiance of the serene desolation. But the overwhelming feeling is of boundless space and sublime solitude. If you were looking for something to make you feel truly insignificant in the face of nature's awesome majesty, you could do a lot worse than a trip to the Arabian desert. Allah does nice work.
One surprise was that it really wasn't very sandy. The ground was more like a hard-packed mixture of small rocks and dried clay. It crunches under your feet like gravel, and can tear sneakers to shreds with prolonged exposure. Serious hashers wear heavy-duty hiking boots or trail runners, and replace them frequently.
Another revelation was that there are baboons living in the desert. Quite a lot of them, too, judging by the number of, er, leavings scattered around. In fact, it's hard to believe that there's enough food in the desert to enable the baboons to produce that much monkey manure, but what can I say? The proof was right there on the bottom of my shoe.
We followed the troupe for some time (it wasn't hard – they kind of leave a trail), but unfortunately we never got to see any up close, although a few people thought they spotted some on the rocks far below a line of cliffs to which the primate poop path had led us. Still, it was well worth the chase. We had a rest on the cliffs, and enjoyed a fantastic view of the plain stretching all the way back to Riyadh. As the day drew to a close, we were treated to the most spectacular sunset I've ever seen. In fact it was nothing short of breathtaking – a symphony of color and light that rose to a crescendo, then faded wistfully away as the last rays dipped below the horizon. It was a moment of such august grandeur that it almost made me forget that my odds of surviving the drive back with Ivan were, at best, 50/50.
Almost.
