I Rode 265 km at 4AM to Beat the Crowds to This UAE Viewpoint. Everyone Beat Me.

There are three of us on this ride. Hadi has a Harley-Davidson Pan America Special. Qasim has a Kawasaki Ninja 1000SX. And I spent the morning on my BMW R1250 GSA, watching the other two get smaller. I’m not bitter. I’m 56. I have made my peace.

What I had not made my peace with was the plan: up at half past three, 130 kilometres in the dark, up a mountain before sunrise — so that I could have the Al Suhub viewpoint above Khorfakkan to myself.

03:54, and a stranger at the petrol station

The GPS says I left Silicon Oasis at 03:54, and the GPS does not care about my feelings. At a petrol station in the middle of nowhere, at four in the morning, a stranger pulled up to ask for my Instagram. He had seen three bikes and the logos, and decided one of us must be famous. It was not the famous one he approached. I gave him the channel name. One subscriber, acquired in person, at four in the morning. That’s how it’s done.

The hole in the map

Somewhere after the ADNOC the bike’s tracker lost the sky, and didn’t find it again for 65 minutes and about 50 kilometres. According to the official record I left a petrol station in Dubai and materialised most of the way up a mountain at twenty past five — which is roughly what that hour in the dark feels like.

The Sharjah–Khorfakkan road

I maintain it’s the best piece of tarmac in the country: 89 kilometres, 24 of them carved through the Hajar mountains, five tunnels and a surface so clean it feels like the engineers are watching you use it. In the first tunnel, Hadi went past. No indicator, no wave. Then Qasim came past on the Ninja like the tunnel had personally offended him. Their speeds are, for everyone’s sake, redacted. I went through at adventure-bike speed. Pension speed.

Clouds in September, and the climb

Coming out of the tunnels the sky did something I have never seen it do on that road — great dark slabs of cloud sitting right down on the mountains, in September, in the Emirates. Not a drop of rain. Keep that cloud in mind. At ten to six we dropped into Khorfakkan at sea level, and then the road stood up: sea level to 557 metres, hairpin after hairpin, in about seven minutes on the GPS. This was my third time up here — first with Balaji, then as a newbie trying to survive Al Suhub road.

06:00 at the top — and the crowd

We came over the last hairpin at six o’clock. Sunrise was at 06:03. Three minutes in hand. I was, frankly, magnificent. Then I looked up: a couple of hundred people already lined along the railing, all the way round the curve and out of sight. Families, kids, people with flasks. Every one of them had got there before me.

The view

We stood at the railing and looked out at the most beautiful sunrise any of us has ever seen — which is to say, we were inside the cloud. They call it the Cloud Lounge; I had always assumed that was poetry. For about 90 seconds it opened, just enough to see the road we had come up folded down the mountain like a dropped ribbon, and every phone on the railing went up at once. Then it closed again. Three bikes, three men, one photograph, and a wall of cloud where the view should be.

Breakfast, and the verdict

Down the mountain at Rukn Al Hadaf in Khorfakkan, three grown men ordered parathas, eggs, keema, chana and kaleji — and then a second paratha each, because nobody was going to be the one who said no. There is no photograph of the food, only of what was left. At no point in that meal was I the slowest.

265 km, 4 hours 56 minutes, over 2,000 metres of climbing, home by ten to nine. I was passed in every tunnel, beaten to the top by people who hadn’t even ridden there, and I never saw the sunrise I got up for. Best morning I’ve had in months. That’s the thing nobody tells you about being the slowest one: you get a much longer look at everything.

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