My FIFA moment

My vantage

The beautifully ornamented skywalk at Al Khwair catches the first rays of the sun as we drive down to Muttrah, the old port of the old city. On either side of the road, scores of banners announce a football match at the Sultan Qaboos Sports Complex. This match is between Oman and Jordan, a FIFA World Cup 2014 Brazil- Asian Qualifier. We are in Muscat, Sanjay Austa and I as part of a National Geographic Traveller India assignment to cover the best of Oman. He is a professional photographer, armed with his camera and other weapons. I am armed with my wits, mostly.

Banners, banners everywhere

Each day, as we move through the city and cover the sights, the port, the Grand Mosque, the Royal Opera House, these banners intrude on our consciousness. Oman versus Jordan. Until we can take it no more and  ask Joe, our host rather tentatively, if we can do something about it. ‘Khallas!’ he replies, as he has for our every request over the last three days. Consider it done.

 

Official press badge

At night, in our rooms, we are surprised to receive, not a ticket to the game, but a Press Card. It is encased in a plastic pocket, complete with a lanyard a quarter inch thick with FIFA 2014 BRAZIL stamped in tickertape fashion on it. It takes a while for this to sink in. I take a photo with my mobile phone, just in case the card dissolves in front of my eyes. We are going to go to a FIFA match! Not Brazil, but the next best thing.

The next evening, despite our efforts to complete our assignments on time, we are late as we arrive at the Sultan Qaboos. Soon after noon, large groups of people make their boisterous way in the general direction of the stadium. Some are dressed in red, the colours of the Omani team, others in the very comfortable national dress- a flowing white dishdasha, a turban, with a sheathed khanjar, or ceremonial dagger.

Before the match

The evening is just turning the shade of Syrah Rose and loud noises are already emanating from the bleachers. Joe tells us that every Omani in the city can be expected to turn up. Shouldn’t we hurry then, we ask? ‘Khallas!’ Joe responds, and we are transported into the complex, and as if on a magic carpet that does not quite know where it is supposed to land, hastily shunted through a side door, and deposited, not in the stands, but on the playing pitch.

 

Location, location, location

And so it comes to pass that, ten minutes after the kickoff at 17:00 hours, on the 16th of October 2012, I find myself planted squarely on the playing field of a FIFA World Cup qualifier, not twenty feet away from the Omani goalpost, a member of the Press. We are ceremoniously given press vests to put on over our shirts, and warned to return them at the end of the game. Like the players, I feel the weight of 26,500 spectators on my back. I walk up and down the sidelines, the best place to watch this match, with other members of the press, the photographers, the coaches and support staff. 

There is an incessant roaring in my ears, and from my vantage I hear cheers in 5.1 Surround Sound. A goal is missed on the Jordanian side, and, as if immersed in a Dolby universe, I hear the practiced genuflection of a Mexican wave whoosh past me, left to right. The sound a Mexican wave makes is much more impressive than just watching it, I can tell you that. It goes round the stadium two or three times before it dies out.

Putttroo, men!

The match, such as it is, is fraught with injury. Players make their mandatory dives and feints, everyone seems to be inspired by Arjen Robben. The injury cart is regularly trotted up the playing green and prone players are removed from the proceedings for triage and diagnostics. I have decided to become a partisan Oman supporter. Puttroo, men! I shout, several times, but my voice is drowned out in the general hubbub.

the injury cart

Before I know it, it is half time. 

Oman nil, Jordan, nil.

half time

half time

The match resumes, and just when the proceedings threaten to become dreary, at 62 minutes into the game, No 12, Ahmed converts a corner kick. Oman one, Jordan nil. General pandemonium and hot air ensues. The crowds are vocal, but not unruly. At 87 minutes, Darwish of the Omani National Team put in a second one. Congratulations and Celebrations. Much head banging. Someone in the far stand lights fireworks. Smoke billows, an unnerving sight, for a bit. But the beautiful game goes on. At 89 minutes Jordan equalises. Not a peep from the stadium. The silence of the dead, with hovering white shrouds everywhere. The crowd is as partisan as I am.

The moment Darwish of Oman puts the second one in

Oman two, Jordan one.

Soon 90 minutes are over and three minutes of injury time commence. Incredibly, Jordan scores. The referee declares offside. No goal. From every stand a high pitch whistling rises. Screeeeeee! Like a legion of bats has descended into the stadium. In the melee, the last minutes tick by.

Game over. 

Oman two, Jordan one. 

I am happy to report that my newly adopted team, Oman wins. They will go on to play Japan in the next round, and be soundly trounced. Bleddy!

The Omani National Team celebrates on the pitch. The crowds celebrate as they leave the stadium. Roads  fill with cheering supporters. Makeshift musical instruments appear out of nowhere. Some vigorous dancing is punctuated by the ululating tongues. Some of the players themselves join in the dancing with the punters. It is a small country.

While returning to the changing rooms, one of the last players in, Abdul Aziz, I think, gets into serial handshaking mode with the enthusiastic crowd. One thing leads to another, and soon, clutching handfuls reach out to divest him of him team jersey. Off it goes and, in a blink, it is swallowed by the general populace. Poor Aziz has to go and face his team mates, half naked.

 

Aziz dis-vested

And now the hurlyburly’s done, and the battle lost and won. We are able, for few last moments, to walk on the playing field itself.  I cut a lonely figure on the FIFA pitch, take a photo of myself with one hand. All around my feet lie the debris of the match.

After the hurlyburly’s done

Joe and Sanjay

Turtle Watching in Oman

In the heart of darkness, life’s throbbing beats. In the semantic of the night, the possibility of survival. In the blackness of the Ras Al-Jinz, a quiet beach on the eastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula, the potential of life is fulfilled, or thwarted. Here, in inkblot holes created in the sand in slow, slow strokes, the travails of giving birth, the long, invisible dawn of incubation, the swift process of emergence and the launching of a career at sea are all realised.

The Green Sea Turtle (chelonia mydas) has preferred to nest in the sands of just one beach in the Sultanate of Oman. The fragility of this choice has made it an endangered species. Human presence over the years has frequently interfered in the precise motions necessary for the successful breeding of this species. Natural predators have been adroitly faced off by the turtles themselves, but they really cannot handle the potentially lethal presence of the one man-made threat- a flash of light in a moonless night.

Photograph above courtesy Sanjay Austa (c).

Less than a week ago, I was privileged to witness the entire egg laying cycle of the giant Green Sea Turtle on the Ras AI-Jinz beach, a fishing village on the Arabian Sea in the Ras Al-Hadd Turtle Reserve in Eastern Oman. The moonless night was moot to my being able to do so. Turtle watching is a popular tourist activity, but sensitively controlled at the Reserve. Its researchers are very careful about bringing humans close to the turtle mothers, who would really like to get on and get over their labour without being chased by gawkers and paparazzi.

The walk to the beach from the Reserve is a long one. Not easy, as the sand is not very firm. Often, each step you take puts you ankle deep in the sand and you have to drag yourself out of this rather wobbly position and take another step. It hardly helps that there is almost zero visibility other than the small light of the guide’s torch that you follow like a newborn turtle. My efforts slowed me down considerably, allowing me to appreciate the night’s moonlessness. Above me, the Milky Way was arrayed in swathe of sparkle and I could discern interstellar gases in dimly glowing patches around the stars with the naked eye (or with numbered spectacles, as in my case). Watching nebula in our upended galaxy was probably reason enough to be here on this beach. But this was the prelude to the main event.

Our guide and researcher, Kamiz, asked us to wait while an associate vanished into the night looking for nesting sites. As we fretted, he showed us other presences- small scorpions that inhabit the beach, or in absentia, the paw prints of foxes, the chief predators of turtle eggs. A mommy chelonia mydas, or the Green Sea Turtle is one of the biggest in the turtle species, reaching four feet from snout to shell. These lumbering female giants weigh anything between a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilograms. Most important, each fully grown mum may be between 60 and 70 years old. That’s twenty years older than I am, and I am no spring chicken. They come to the Ras Al-Jinz, once or twice a year and, if all the portents are well, lay upto a hundred eggs at one go.

 The attendant returned with news. In the dark, the green turtles had come out to lay. They did this by spreading out all over the beach finding their own space to do their duty. On the night we were there, only maybe ten or a dozen turtles had found beach-head. That’s how endangered they are. We walked to what looked like a boulder on the sand. Nothing moved. The breeze had stopped. Kamiz used a small flashlight to show us a dugout, about seven or eight inches across and a foot or so deep. Here was a large green turtle, nearly buried in the sand. Cantilevered over the dugout was a mother green’s rear, from which she quietly ejected egg after egg, bright white, catching the light of the torch, soft at the time of laying, covered with mucous, going plop! into the hole at the rate of perhaps one per minute. James Cameron got this right in Aliens(1986), where the alien queen lays her eggs with similar deliberation. The business of birthing is a patient one.

We all watched in quiet awe, standing in a hushed semicircle behind the mother, ensuring no inadvertent distractions. The turtle herself remained stoic and stationary, only the eggs emerged, one after another. Some light illuminated part of the giant lady’s enormous shell, oval like a Grecian shield, hued in a deep Chinese jade, with textures and patterns on her back like a piece of the Jade Hut on the golden beach of Keelawee from the Lee Falk’s Phantom comics. Then we walked away, backwards, and the mother was slowly smothered into the sand and negritude.

Kamiz walked us along a deliberate path, showing us may bumps and troughs. ‘Under this here, two feet below’, he would say occasionally, ‘are eggs, laid several days ago, being incubated in the sand. You can walk on the mound; they are safe below it, from both humans and predators. Watch out for the hollows.’ The eggs take around two months to hatch. We came upon another boulder on the beach.

After laying all her eggs a mother turtle crawls forward by one body length. This one had done so, her eggs well below the level of the beach. Here, she was slowly covering them up, shovelling sand behind her over her potential brood with paddle-like forearms. Once more we took up a position behind her and watched. There was zen-like calm to her shovelling: one stroke every once in awhile. One. Two. One. Two. Very mystic. We drew closer, and some of us got a faceful of grit. We had entered the parabolic catenaries of her slinging motion. The whole act would last more than two hours. When she was satisfied, she would move away, leaving a modest mound behind her. She would then dig up another trough in the sand- a decoy hole to misdirect foxes, crabs and gulls that would inevitably come out, day or night, seeking succulence in the sand.

Her annual chore done, the old lady took off sea-wards, and we followed her, like supplicants, and said our goodbyes as she hit the waves, which consumed her as she swam away, eastwards in the direction of Bombay. The Green Sea Turtle never looks back. Once done, she plays no maternal role in the upbringing of her baby turtles, which fend for themselves after hatching. She lays a large number of eggs, and very few of those will survive into full grown adulthood to live their lives out over a century or so. She will repeat this process decade after decade until she is 80, then stop coming to the Ras Al-Jinz and live out the rest of her retirement years in the sea.

Then suddenly, out of the darkness, to the surprise of all, including Kamiz, three hatchlings scuttled into the torchlight, babies pitch-black in their infancy, which made their toddler’s way towards our guide. 'I am not your father!' Kamiz scolded the 4 inch turtlets, wagging his finger at them like a school marm. We became self-conscious, and checked around our feet so as not to step upon any more babies of the night.

This is the speed bump in the green sea turtle’s cycle of life. The hatchlings should ideally make their way back to the sea, immediately after breaking out of their eggs. This increases many-fold the possibility of their survival. To hit the surf, they use the ambient light of the galaxy reflected on the waves to find direction. Any other light source, and they scuttle towards it instinctively; and this is potentially lethal. The guardians of the turtle reserve have ensured that the beach remains in total darkness throughout the year, and that no ambient or reflected light from the Reserve reaches the beach.

Kamiz then mounted an impromptu rescue operation, pointing the beam of his torch on the sand. The babies moved towards this circular patch, which moved too, this time to the water and the surf. Bye, bye babies!

What are the odds that this cycle could get accomplished successfully? There are so many obstructions in the way. Even the consistency of the sand (its chemical properties and temperature will determine the sex of the babies) is tested by the mother Greens before they decide to lay their eggs or abort. The Ras Al-Jinz is a safe haven. The Sultanate of Oman’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs have made significant inroads to alleviate threats from humans and have tried to preserve the habitat of the turtles in as pristine a manner as possible, preventing excessive footfalls, littering and light. The encouragement of sensitive and sustainable tourism probably helps in this preservation. The Reserve’s commitment to their charges is probably the only bulwark against the extinction of these lovely giants.

The father turtles are an absent presence, never leaving the sea for land; the only visible males may be some of the babies who sprint to the surf with the first light they see. But I am touched to witness these matriarchs at their most intimate and vulnerable moment. It is an honour. As a friend would later describe: a bucket list moment. 

All the images above are by Vipasha Rathore (c) , except where mentioned, for which many thanks!