Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Modern Sports
A range of modern sports are popular in the region, including rally-driving, quad-biking,
volleyball and even ice-skating. At Ski Dubai, there are even five ski runs boasting snow.
You can't possibly talk about sports in the area, however, and not mention football. At
4pm on a Friday, the men of just about every village in Arabia trickle onto the local
waste-ground to play, all hopeful of joining international European clubs one day like
some of their compatriots. Football is usually a shoeless business, on a desert pitch,
played in
wizza
(cotton underskirt) and nylon strip but it is taken just as seriously as if it
were played in a million-dollar stadium.
BENDING IT LIKE AL-BECKHAM
One sure-fire entrée into conversation across the region is to talk about Beckham - or rather Al-Beckham - and
football (soccer) in general. Peninsula men are obsessed with the game. But what distinguishes the sport in Ara-
bia is not so much the players or the fans, but the extraordinary places where it's played.
There are pitches between fast lanes in Bahrain; motorway intersection pitches in Kuwait and shifting pitches,
like the one in the UAE sand dunes, which has usually blown away before kick-off.
It's in Oman, however, that pitches are taken to new heights - like the one on the top of Jebel Shams, with
goals strung out between two locally woven rugs, redefining the term 'mile-high club'. Omanis specialise in wet
pitches, like the one near Bandar Khayran where the goalkeeper's job is to keep out the incoming tide, or the one
cradled in the mouth of Wadi Tiwi and cropped by donkeys. Football even stops traffic in Oman. Best in the road-
stopping category is the pitch bisected by the road from Hat to Wadi Bani Awf. When a game is on, all traffic on
the only road that links both sides of the Hajar Mountains has to stop until half-time - a full 40 minutes of hold-
ing up one goat and a Lonely Planet author!
Many raptors are bred for falconry on the Asir escarpment in Saudi but the easiest place
to see a peregrine up close is in the Falcon Souq in Doha. The magical spectacle of birds
being flown can be seen in Dubai and at most festivals, such as the Jenadriyah National
Festival in Riyadh.
