The drive was the lunch

Every few weekends a car leaves Dubai early for the east coast, full of friends heading to a fish lunch in Fujairah they have heard about for months.

The road through the Hajar mountains is one of the loveliest drives in the country. The wadis are dark and quiet in the morning, the rock changes colour as the sun climbs, and somewhere near the top there is a roadside stall selling sweet tea in paper cups that tastes better than it has any right to.

Mostly, nobody notices any of it. The talk in the car is about the lunch: whether the table will be held, whether the famous dish will have sold out, whether traffic near the coast will cost them the seats by the window. The drive is something to get through.

Then they arrive, and the fish is good. Good, not life changing. They eat a little too fast, because now there is the drive home to think about.

And on the way back, with nothing left to hurry towards, the conversation finally loosens. Someone points out the light on the ridges. Someone insists on stopping for the tea. That last hour is the part they will still be talking about a month later.

It is easy to get this backwards. We fix our eyes on the prize at the end and treat everything before it as the cost of reaching it. Often the order runs the other way. The prize was only the excuse, and the thing we kept rushing through was what we set out for.

Before setting off on anything, it is worth asking which part is really the reward.