OMAN
known as ‘Muscat and Oman’ — the former stood for the cosmopolitan coastline, the latter referred to an interior of mountains and deserts, a terra incognita to the wider world. Only in recent decades have the tentacles of modern life extended to traditional mountain villages. Mains electricity now serves places once reached by shepherd’s trails. Villages where water was carried in goatskins now have modern plumbing. Concrete compounds are displacing cave homes. But the pass at Wadi Bani Awf retains part of its old wildness. Some days before, Nawaf had been driving this same route when a sudden thunderstorm flooded the canyons, washing away concrete bridges and uprooting the date palms. He drove as fast as he could up the mountain and narrowly escaped the deluge. Further into the pass we come to Bilad Sayt,
a mountain village where flowering gardens of palms and bananas punctuate the parched expanse of the hills. Rising over this little oasis is a miniature castle — one of a great many guarding the passes of the Hajars, and a key draw for visitors here. Not far from the mouth of Wadi Bani Awf is
the behemoth of Nakhal Fort, its turrets linked by rambling stairways and topped with iron cannons that are white-hot to the touch in the midday sunshine. There are more — Nizwa with its hulking keep, Al Hazm with its three- metre-thick walls. Their towers are aligned to catch soothing breezes and their gatehouses designed so cauldrons of boiling honey could be tipped on assailants from above. Oman’s castle-building frenzy peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the country was a patchwork of competing dynasties. The most famous have been restored — in some instances it seems like the last workmen only downed tools yesterday. But more evocative are the ruined watchtowers, solitary and
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sentry-less, with sparrows nesting in their crevices. Crumbling ramparts stretch up and down mountains. It can often be hard to guess what they might have been defending, or indeed against whom. Eventually we reach the top of the pass. The
afternoon call to prayer drifts from a mosque somewhere down in the haze below. Other 4x4s swoop along the track, dwarfed by the plumes of dust rising in their wake — clouds that billow like peacocks’ tails, or something released with the rub of a lamp. From up in the mountains, all of Arabia
seems to unfurl beneath our feet: to the north is the sea, running to the Indian Ocean in the east. Out of sight to the south is the Empty Quarter — a vast expanse of sand, where dunes roll to the Saudi Arabian border. And to the west, the blade of the dagger continues on its upward swoop, culminating at the Musandam Peninsula.
Onto the water The sea is still as our dhow hauls out of Khasab harbour for the day: a mirror to a cloudless morning sky. Oystercatchers flit along the shore. Shallow waves slip from our wake. I sit on the deck, under a hessian shade strung from the mast, feeling the chug of the engine beneath a thick Persian rug while scanning the water for movement under its surface. It’s not long before a presence is ghosting
about under the hull. Suddenly a bottlenose dolphin torpedoes through the water, emerging in a blossom of surf. For a while, a pod races our boat — all eyes on board are fixed on their acrobatics as they arch through the spray. Only when they disappear are we able to look up and fully take in the drama of our position. Musandam is where the Western Hajar Mountains rise sheer out of the turquoise depths of the Gulf. Here, long
Clockwise from top: Traditional dhows racing with dolphins amid the khors of the Musandam Peninsula; snorkelling off the coast of Telegraph Island; an Omani coffee break in Old Muscat
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