A quick jaunt to Oman

 

We should go to Oman more often, we concluded after our trip last weekend. It has everything. Huge rock formations....

 

 

Dinky towns that boast multiple castles.

 

 

Carpeted boats....

 

 

....fit for a young sultan....

 

...or even his lady.


These gentlemen are probably closer to being sultans than we are. When asked how many children he had, the man on the right first said he didn't know. Unsettled, the Dutch man who had asked inquired again, and got a vague mumble: "dozens." Nick had a brief conversation in Arabic with them, which involved much laughter.



We were on the Musandem peninsula, at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Though it is surrounded completely by the Emirates, it is part of Oman, a vestige of the tribal affiliations. And, unlike the northern emirate of the UAE, Ras al Khaimah, it is wonderfully empty.

Look carefully, and you'll see a tiny fishing town. No signs. No fancy hotels. Want to get there? You'll have to take your own boat, and you'd best speak Arabic.



There are other, more accessible towns, but they are almost as small and quiet as this one. And that means that their beaches are even quieter, though some are surrounded by little fishing boats. You can camp on many of them, including Bukha beach, with no questions asked. We will be back soon, sand tent in hand.


And when we do go back, we will take our new kayak, and will likely skip the carpeted boat. But the boat trip was marvelous. Here are butterfly fish (or so we're told), swarming to eat little pieces of apple.

 

And here are the peninsula's famous dolphins, playing nearby.

 

 

 

Perhaps they were more exciting in person.

 

The boat took us to Telegraph Island, which the British used to string wires to India in the 19th century.

 

 

We had a lovely hour of swimming in the coral reefs surrounding the island. We saw starfish, sea slugs, all sorts of medium sized fish, and a few different kinds of coral. And then it was back to Khasab, where there is a wonderful beach, just outside of town.

 

 

...with little huts to shelter in...

 

 

 
...lined by jagged rocks.


And populated by small children, a few people intently doing calisthenics, and some goats.

We ate dinner in the most beautiful parking lot on earth, surrounded by craggy cliffs, a crescent moon overhead, and calls to prayer ruffling the crowd mid-way through our meal.

 

 

We were happily reminded  of Washington's core strengths on the trip up.

 

 

No other apple comes close....but Oman's beaches will give Seattle's a run for their money.

 

Camping at Jebel Yibir

Despite a previous trip to the Northern Emirates, it was still odd to get an email from a friend suggesting we take a trip to the highest peak in the UAE, Jebel Yibir.  Isn't the highest point in Dubai?

It takes about three hours to get to the middle of nowhere, UAE.  (A bit less if you're not particular about the view.) To get there, take the bypass road to the Dubai bypass road. Despite the double bypass you will have performed, expect to find traffic. But there is happier traffic, as well: dozens of camels happily lolling beside the road.  Then, pass through a few small towns, on the lookout for any goats who may wish to cross the road. If you're hungry, stop off at one of the many Pakistani restaurants, where you can get delicious biryani, daal, fresh bread and tea with condensed milk -- but you'll have the wait until the Friday prayers are over.  Even the "24 hour" restaurants are abandoned during prayer time.

After some wadi wandering, we found a flat place for our tents.  It must have been a construction site at some point -- we found pallets and old metal doors with the UAE falcon, which were useful wind screens for the fire.

We went for a scramble downhill to a wadi, and up a cliff face the next day. Near the wadis there are amazing wildflowers.

From the wadi, we scrambled up our mountain...

...from which we had views of both the east and west coasts of the UAE.

On the way home we stopped off at some crazily orange dunes on the way to the UAE's (heavily irrigated) farmland. The dunes first appeared as a deep orange glow about the horizon....and slowly materialized, into burnt orange sand, stretching in every direction.

Our first weekend in Oman

We went on our first camping excursion in Abu Dhabi this past weekend, under the guidance of the Meetup Group UAE Trekkers. At seven hours each way, the trip was a marathon of driving ("that was a great three hour drive," our trip leader blithely miscalculated, as we stretched our legs at 4 pm, having set out at 8 am). With only one night outside, the driving seemed a bit much. But it was a lesson in border crossing, and a tour of places we'll definitely want to revisit when we have a few days off to see the area properly. 

(Yes, that's Steerforth - after his first try at off-road driving!)

The interior of Oman looks a lot like the interior of Abu Dhabi - scrub land, sand dunes, and not much else (though Oman boasts some very tidy, fancy looking houses in the middle of nowhere, which set us wondering about what one would do each day as a well-to-do, yet isolated Omani). But Oman also has mountains - funny, curious uprisings that look rather like whale skeletons in some cases, and like cliffs plunked down in the desert in others.

And it has castles. Like really, really old castles. Between locals' hyperbole and our trouble translating the Islamic calendar to Gregorian years, we can't pin down their age...but are reasonably sure that they are somewhere between a few thousand and 11,000 years old. Anyway, we saw two castles.

Here is our first (very near Wadi Damm, where we camped). Nick briefly took up residence.

The second castle we visited was under renovation, the Omani man employed to keep visitors out let us in and gave us a tour for a small tip. He explained that the castle was occupied by two families who got along, until they didn't. They ended up fighting each other, then abandoning the castle after it sustained irreparable damage. It was rediscovered in Islamic year 1375 (November 4 is the beginning of year 1435 -- happy new year!).

This castle's buildings are a mix of Persian and local architecture. They are made out of the rock mixed with straw -- even in these ancient structures you can see the straw in the walls.



Near our camp, we saw the beehive tombs. Not much is known about them, but apparently thousands of them have been discovered, strung over the hill sides. These ones were particularly impressive, because of the funny, jagged jebel (mountain in Arabic) in the background.

The rocks in Oman were wonderfully varied, and made us want to learn more about rock identification (something that always seemed a bit too dull to be memorable before). At the tombs, it seemed as if every nearby rock was a fossil - we saw leaf-like prints, shells, and funny textures.

Even the caterpillars are orange!

Once we got to the Wadi, we saw rocks of even greater varieties. There were still fossils galore, but there were also zebra rocks, black rocks with big stripes of quartz running through them at regular intervals. And there were the sandy rocks that make up the California cliffs....and there were jagged, redder rocks that looked almost like hardened mud. And there was also mud...lots of it!




We went for a run, and then clambered up to the biggest pool we could find and went for a swim. The rocks were slippery, so the easiest way in was to make a big jump off a rock, about a meter high. It took Nick a while to be reconciled to this method. It was a lovely pool - a waterfall on either side of a deep, greeny-blue swimming hole in the hollowed-out rocks. We didn't end up taking pictures of our swimming hole, but this one (from a nearby canyon) looks rather like it.

When we got back to camp, dinner and a sky full of stars were waiting for us.



On the drive there and back, we were delighted with many run-ins with camels.

There were real camels, grazing in the scrub lands on the sides of the road....there were herds of camels right at the Abu Dhabi side of the border, in some kind of camel farm....and there were camels getting transported....all of which made us very happy. We have a tourist's delight in seeing camels in any and every context.

We also learned the relative confusion of border-crossing here, which probably accounted for an hour or so of our trip each way. To cross into Oman, we had to leave Abu Dhabi - pay, get passport stamps, get our car vaguely looked at and waved through. Then, we had to enter Oman - that's right: pay, get passport stamps, get our car vaguely looked at and waved through. On the way home, there was the added necessity of showing that we had previously entered Oman (people have nightmare stories of too-faint entrance stamps that officials won't acknowledge) and exited Abu Dhabi. Contrary to the signage, the process was anything but peaceful.

Next camping trip will definitely be on the Abu Dhabi side of things - we've got some good tips to go to Wadi Kitna next time, which has a cave!

On Friday, we went to Kirby Cove, which is one of those places that I see and regret not having known about it before. It is the perfect place to take out-of-towners for stunning views of the Golden Gate, the city, and a taste of the Marin Headlands.

Park at the first lot on the left on Kirby Cove Road, and check out the view from the fort before heading down the track that leads down to the beach. The beach is small, secluded (save for two geese), and has brown-black sand and funny caves all around.
 

And...especially because the walk is short...
be sure to take a picnic to match the view.

Last weekend, we went to Joshua Tree for mind-blowing night skies, desert flowers, bouldering, running, hiking...and eating. Eisha and I are hoping to expand our (somewhat lacking) ability to feed ourselves well while camping, and car-camping in J-Tree was the grand beginning of our culinary quest.

We may have gone overboard in this endeavor. Marinated thin cuts of beef, veggie packets, roasted bananas with marshmallows and chocolate, and (Anson's almost successful experiment) roasted ice cream cones full of marshmallows and chocolate.

Beef Marinade:
3/4 cup soy sauce
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup water
1 garlic clove, minced
2 green onions, chopped
1 tablespoon Asian (toasted) sesame oil
2 pounds Korean-style short ribs (beef chuck flanken, cut 1/3 to 1/2 inch thickness across bones)

Virginia Woolf said that it's impossible to "think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." All well and good, but one cannot dine well if one has not played well. It was a tall order to get hungry enough to eat all our sensational food -- but we managed. We hiked to an abandoned gold mine closed in the 19th century, our trail sparkling with fools' gold the whole way up; we climbed a brief mile and a half up Mount Ryan to see the world laid out before us, stubby tree after stubby tree. Nick and Eisha and I ran on the road from our campsite (Hidden Valley was a great place to stay), as well as on a few trails. We all scrambled over all the boulders we could muster, including a gleeful sojourn for Eisha in the eye of Skull Rock. 

The flowers we found along the way were lovely -- unexpected, often hidden -- familiar ones like daisies and evening primroses and cactus blooms, but also the truly peculiar -- flamboyant yucca blooms, and a plant with poppable flowers strongly reminiscent of bubble wrap.





Our night skies were stunningly clear....a lovely excuse to stroll and chat after our feasts. The rocks were still warm from the hot day. 

What a lovely way to start our cooking extravaganzas...we have set a high bar for our Yosemite trip in July!