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.

the Sultanate of Oman

You know you've had a great holiday when you can't let it go after arriving home.  Five days after getting back to Panama, I am sitting here with a coffee flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, and I have a small dish of dates beside me to nibble on.  If my luggage weren't still somewhere en route for home, I would also be burning some of the frankincense I bought in Salalah.

My eleven days in Oman covered a mixture of culture, nature, and what I suppose you would call 'adventure travel' when we camped in the remote desert, first in the Wahiba Sands and then for two nights in the Empty Quarter.

The culture began in Muscat with the modern era - a visit to the rather beautiful Sultan Al Qaboos Mosque, one of the largest in the Gulf, able to hold up to 20,000 worshippers.  Whilst Muscat is in many ways a modern city, it also has plenty of visible history, being surrounded by watchtowers and forts mostly dating from the century of Portuguese rule.  The twin forts of Al Mirani and Al Jilali are the biggest in the city although not open to the public as they are now used by the police and military. Outside of Muscat we saw the forts at Nahal (above), Bahla (UNESCO-listed and the second largest mud building in the world behind the mosque in Djenne see my post on mud marvels of Mali), Nizwa, and Jabrin.  The latter, built around 1670, was nothing to look at from the outside but its warren of rooms contained many remarkably preserved painted wooden ceilings - not easy to capture in a photo but here left is an attempt to show part of one.

Some of the watchtowers out in the countryside were built to guard the falaj water channels - an ancient irrigation system (also UNESCO-listed) which distributes water from a few springs along many miles to support habitation and cultivation.  Our final UNESCO site was actually a group of archaelogical sites linked to the ancient frankincense trade.  All three (Shisr, Sumhuram and Al Baleed) are now in an advanced state of ruin, but their historical significance is important given that the frankincense trade routes stretched, 2,000 years ago, from China to the Mediterranean.  Sumhuram was said to have been one of the Queen of Sheba's palaces.  The region of Dhofar, around Salalah in the south of Oman, is still known for its quality frankincense although the trade now looks a little different from how it must have been in medieval times.