camping in the sand

The other part of my holiday in Oman - the part I enjoyed the most - was the time spent out in the desert.  If you've read posts from my louiseinsenegal blog on my various trips to deserts, or heard me talk about earlier trips to Mauritania, northern Mali and Sudan, you will know how much I love the desert.  You can't describe its beauty and you can't photograph it, as it encompasses the vastness, the emptiness and the silence as well as the shapes and colours of the dunes and shadows. However I think the photo above, taken at sunrise on 31 December, captures some of that.

I walked about on the dunes, I watched the occasional bird (brown-necked ravens and desert wheatears, mostly), we drove to places where there were camels and beduin encampments, and whilst in the Wahiba Sands we also drove to the coast where we watched fishing boats and gulls and camped on the beach for two nights.  It was lovely to go to sleep with the sound of the waves breaking onto the beach,

My favourite times though were in the Empty Quarter.  This is the largest sand desert in the world, covering 650,000 km sq, and sitting atop a dune watching the sunrise or sunset you really do feel a million miles away from work and the pressures of the modern world.  This picture of our New Year's Eve camp gives some idea of how remote it was.