GOAT’S HEAD IN THE SAND

MARK JONES GETS A TASTE OF TOURISM

THE PAVED ROAD had run out way back. We were heading into the Empty Quarter. It’s the biggest continuous stretch of sand on the globe and even a few cautious kilometres in, it felt like you’d found Nowhere and wouldn’t see Somewhere again anytime soon.

The Bedouin forge a living here, as they’ve done for millennia. Their latest venture was tea for tourists like me. Maybe they were inviting tourists for tea in Roman times, but it felt like a more recent innovation.

It was my first Empty Quarter tea. I wasn’t expecting

cucumber sandwiches and scones. I looked around for the raw materials of The Ritz, Bedouin-style. But there was only sand. And goats.

Think of the travels you’ve done. Now think of those times when you’ve had to be really brave, when

someone offers you a very foreign dish in a very

foreign place.

Then think how I felt as my hosts offered me a plate

of bloodied pulp with white bones sticking out of it. One gravely nodded towards the goats. My stomach knotted. The sacred traditions of hospitality and the slightly less sacred, but nonetheless serious, obligations of the travel writer kicked in. I took a liberal handful from the dish. They were mashed-up dates.

Sound travels well in the desert air, and they must have heard my hosts’ laughter in Muscat. I laughed too. At myself, at my kind. This was the late 1990s. This conservative Muslim country hadn’t long opened up to foreign visitors. I’d been walking around in a state of advanced earnestness, eager to please and more eager still not to displease.

It strikes me that the one tribe of people whose culture you’re allowed to make fun of with impunity is tourists.

I don’t see Unesco protecting us anytime soon.