Jerry Buzzell

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JERRY BUZZELL

CLEANING UP THE WADI

Wadis are rivercourses, essentially dry but often with enough of a trickle to support some vegetation and perhaps a pool, or even a waterfall. As such, wadis are favourite spots for picnics and other activities, both by locals and by expats. Because of this, the wadi may accumulate quite a lot of rubbish, with the result that a scenic locality becomes an eyesore.

The Grade 9 students in Mrs. Bunn's and Mr. Meadows' classes at the Al Ain English Speaking School decided, as a class project, to effect a clean-up at Mahdahba, in Wadi Agran.

Brien Holmes (from Peterborough, Ontario, and coordinator of the Al Ain chapter of the Emirates Natural History Group) thought that this would be an appropriate project/outing. And so it was.

We met at noon at the Buraimi Hotel parking lot, distributed students and others amongst the vehicles (saloon cars and 4x4s), and set out in convoy. After driving about 20 km further into Oman, we lost the blacktop in Wadi Agran and continued, first on dirt roads, then on stony roads, finally on rocky tracks until we reached Mahdahba, which is little more than a few run-down and semi-abandoned mud and stone houses.

The 4WDs could drive directly into the wadi but the rest of us couldn't and parked our cars on a knoll overlooking the wadi. The others were below us and the kids already had their gloves on and were carrying bags and starting to pick up rubbish.

From our vantage point on the cliff, we had a great view of the wadi valley. Below us were several pools of clear standing water, connected by trickles and supplying a falaj system watering a couple of stands of date palms.

Brien dropped his gear and passengers below and drove his 4x4 up to us to ferry down our food and those who wanted to ride. The rest of us climbed down a steep rough path and into a little the date oasis, watered by a falaj and blocked off into plots by low concrete dikes.

We each had plastic shopping bags or pails for collecting rubbish, and collect it we did. Bottles and cans. Plastic bags. Paper. Alfoil. Fabric. We went up the valley, picking as we went.

At the pools of water, the debris was either fished out by the kids using stripped palm leaves or, as the day got warmer, by hand following total immersion.

By the time we finished, we had filled five big garbage bags and several smaller bags, and there was nary a dry teenager.

The kids did most of the work, leaving us adults to wander behind them, picking up the odd piece of overlooked trash, in order to justify our presence. For me, it was mostly a time to take pictures, and a very photogenic place it was.

Except for some thorny bushes, most of the vegetation was down by the cars. Upstream, the locals have made several small dams along the trickle of water and these were full of clear clean water.

It's a mystery to me where the little fish in these dams came from, but they certainly were there.

The wadi lies in a valley cut (presumably by erosion at some time in the past few million years) in the surrounding hills, leaving steep cliffs on all sides.

At the top of this valley is a waterfall, about ten metres high, with a mossy face and falling into a small but deep pool in which many of the kids swam after fishing out trash.

The rock face beside this waterfall was climbable and so we climbed it and faced another defile in the rocks, leading to a much higher waterfall and larger pool. It is not a very spectacular waterfall but it is very pretty. The kids had a good time diving for garbage in the pool, which is very deep in places.

Apparently, the waterfall is a permanent one, suggesting that it is fed by a spring near the summit. There was no obvious way to get up there to confirm this so I'll have to take it by faith.

Heading back down the valley, some of us took our bags into the bushes on one side of the valley and found that there was still a lot of rubbish left. By the time we got back to the vehicles, we had quite a bit to add to the garbage bags. That done, it was time to socialize and barbecue.

And time to get rid of the garbage we had collected. Brien emptied his vehicle, filled it with garbage bags, and went off down the road to find a dumpster to deposit it in. It took them quite a while to return. Turned out that they found a dumpster fairly quickly but then were waylaid by 'local hospitality.' It took time to break away and return.

Expats in the Emirates are prepared to rough it, but still like our creature comforts. We had eskie with food and beverage, though our barbecue was in the car at the top of the cliff. However, Brien fired up his barbecue, got the coals nice and hot, and Linda put our hamburgers on, Mrs. Bunn put on her sausages, and Sylvia put on their teryaki chicken skewers. The kids had brought sandwiches and filled up the spaces by sharing our food and drink. We sat and socialized, surrounded by the natural beauty of a newly cleaned wadi.

We did not have the wadi to ourselves. Wadi Agran is a popular spot and there were several other groups of people, Omanis and expats, who came by.

Some were tourists to see the sights. Some were workers who probably came there to have a bath (one man had a bottle of shampoo with him) and so were probably not too happy to see us. A group of Omani boys came down from the plateau and disappeared up the wadi.

But the afternoon was getting on and we began to contemplate the state of the track leading out of Mahdahba and the advisability of tackling it while there was still sunlight. We loaded, backed around, and headed back past the village, over rocky track, stony road, dirt road, blacktop, and finally to Buraimi, Al Ain, and home.

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