Lore of the landscape
Journeying through Oman, where the culture has been shaped by shifting sands, stark mountains and a millennium of trade routes.
The Oman desert does not look like sand. The dune I’m sitting on is the color and consistency of sifted wheat flour. Durum with a dusting of cayenne. In its grooves are impressions from everyone around me: the long bare feet of my bedouin guide; the deep crescent hoofs of his camels; tick marks from small desert birds, beetles and iridescent scorpions.
“Nothing comes through this desert without leaving its mark,” my guide says, refilling my cup with saffron tea, “Not even something as weightless as the wind.”
He’s right. The cratered landscape of Oman’s Sharqiya Sands is shaped by conflicting winds that howl through the Arabian Peninsula. I watch gusts wipe this sandy slate clean, turning our tracks back to ghostly ripples. It seems that after only a few minutes, the desert’s history is rewritten.
The powdery sand rests in 300-foot-tall mounds, dunes so high they lend a new perspective of the Middle East, and as the orange sun that’s been dominating the sky all day drops behind the farthest drift on the horizon, I reconsider what I know — or thought I knew — about this part of the world.
“This dune we sit on now will shift to a different position by sunrise tomorrow,” he explains, and I slug back the last sip of saffron tea, now bitter and cold from the wind.
Back at the Nomadic Desert Camp, a bedouin camp travelers can stay at, carpets are rolled across the sand outside of my palm frond hut for a makeshift terrace under a star-studded sky. As I tear away at a piece of charred “fire bread,” flatbread baked on embers and ash, I’m reminded why it was Oman’s geology that drew me here: to discover a country with little else to tell its story other than what’s recorded in its ever-changing landscape.
From the Sharqiya Sands to Nizwa, the band of freshly paved highway is lined with rock quarries, “For Sale” signs to empty desert lots, dust devils and billboards of popular leader Sultan Qaboos bin Said. Because the country’s tourism industry is young and small — the doors only opened to outside tourists in the early 1990s — Oman is still a country primarily designed for locals, not foreigners.
The map on my iPhone only displays a large swath of beige as we weave our rental car around Kias and pickup trucks full of camels. We pass gas stations where robed men linger over plastic tables, and sand-colored hamlets hallmarked by mosque domes that resemble imperial Faberge eggs.
Soon we pull in to Nizwa, an ancient city wedged at the foot of the Al Hajar Mountains, a sawtooth range that separates the country’s northern coast from its desert interior. To the southeast is the lonely edge of the Ar Rub al Khali, or the Empty Quarter, the largest uninterrupted expanse of sand on the planet.
Nizwa was Oman’s ancient capital dating back to the sixth century, and it has been a religious center and a vital stop on trade routes for more than a thousand years. As such, it’s the best place in the country to experience Oman’s timeless traditions and craftsmanship, and to understand how they relate to the land.
It’s Friday, Islam’s holy day, and the town square is swirling with men in colorful turbans, with jezail muskets over their shoulders and curved khanjar daggers strapped to their waists — the national insignia. I make my way through a parade of goats readying to go up for auction, then veer through the souq, a maze of stalls hawking crafts and goods.
It is a showcase of the mountains’ many resources — silver, copper and marble — for which the ancient trade routes were created. Tables are splayed with hammered silver jewelry, marble decorative objects and rose-hued clay water jugs. Farmers sell pyramids of sticky dates and amber cubes of locally harvested frankincense.
The desert I first saw as simply barren continues to show me all the ways it’s not. As one of the craftsmen hands me a copper necklace, I realize this souk is just one example of all that the land actually has to give, and how the Omani people have cultivated it in ways I wouldn’t have expected.
Other than some modern trinkets and conveniences, the scene probably is not much changed in 150 years, back to when the Omani empire included portions of Abu Dhabi, Iran, Zanzibar and the East African coastline down to Mozambique.
Nizwa has its share of historical sites — the imposing Nizwa Fort is among the country’s most popular monuments — but portions of the town itself are a living museum of a culture shaped by trade, by the desert and by the people who came through one to do the other.
Just outside of Nizwa, I’m standing on fossilized coral and fish skeletons stamped into a limestone rock. Long ago, this mountain was wedged at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. Today it crests at one of the highest points in Arabia, 93 miles from the coast and nearly 10,000 feet into the sky.
Jebel Akhdar is a far cry from both Oman’s sea and deserts in many ways, and its stony mountainsides, wide plateaus and vertiginous valleys are oases of Eden-esque farms I was not expecting in Oman.
“These are the best pomegranates in the Middle East,” my guide says, gazing down the
valley. “People drive pickup trucks all the way from Dubai to fill them up.”
We stumble down the hill to an opulent village he says was built from pomegranate money. Its homes — a cluster of apricot-, lavenderand pistachio-colored compounds — parody a still life. Behind iron gates front doors are dizzy with Islamic geometric patterns, and reflective gold windows allow residents to see out and prevent outsiders from seeing in.
For a moment, a music box melody drifts through the stagnant afternoon air, followed by the call to prayer. Old, weathered men in light white dishdashas assemble in the street and slowly walk past us, aided by whittled olive branch canes, then slip into a violet mosque.
Rose farms cascade down rocky terraces beneath us, where rosewater is harvested for medical, culinary and cultural uses. Farther down are hardy date palm orchards and olive groves fenced in by dusty rosemary shrubs. Beyond, walnut and peach trees as well as apiaries line the horizon. Connecting it all is a web of Omani aflaj irrigation systems, tranquil narrow channels engineered to water crops that can be traced back 5,000 years. All of this amasses to a profound feeling of peace and serenity I had not anticipated on a trip to the Middle East.
“We always come to the table if peace is on it,” my guide says. “And these days, it’s increasingly up to us to provide the table as well.”
After overcoming a violent history of tribal warfare, Oman has quietly been a rising force for peace in the region, promoting religious tolerance and serving as neutral ground for diplomatic talks. The term “Switzerland of the Middle East” has floated past me a few times.
In the evening back at Alila Jabal Akhdar, one of the newest hotels in an area quickly amassing more, my deck opens to the socalled Grand Canyon of Arabia. As the sun angles toward the horizon, massive shadows play like puppets across the yawning canyon. Shaggy free-range goats bleat as they clomp over piles of rocks to tear small thick leaves from the branches of an acacia tree.
The architecture is made in the image of traditional Omani villages, lined with stone walls and thatched fences. In the rooms are handwoven curtains, Omani wedding chests and what’s become the comforting scent of frankincense. It all reflects the mantra three people I’ve met in Oman have already told me, “Travelers are not tourists; they are guests.”
There are scenes along certain sections of Oman’s coastline reminiscent of California’s Highway 1. An hour south of Muscat, swallows swoop over placid estuaries, cliffs plummet into a swirling ocean, old shipwrecks crest the shallow waters, and a man sells dates and watermelon slices from the back of a Westfalia alongside the serpentine road.
But other parts remind me that this is the Arabian Sea, not the Pacific. Sand-castle-like fortresses freckle the bluffs, and parts of the drive are queued with evidence of Oman’s
changing landscape: lines of construction workers in baby-blue jumpsuits picking away at the mountains, and a gridlock of tankers, loaders and excavators clearing the way for more transportation infrastructure, part of an ambitious plan the government is striving to roll out over the next few years.
It’s hard to imagine that less than a century ago, this peaceful country was the Arabian Peninsula’s capital for arms and ammunition trading, and entrenched in a bloody war. It’s almost equally difficult to imagine that if all goes according to ruler Said’s plan, in a few years their economy will be oil independent and a fleet of shiny new trains will be hauling a new generation of tourists along this beautifully desolate coastline.
When we reach Al Sifah beach, we are greeted by the resident goats and donkeys but no one else. We haul our rented camping equipment to the farthest dune and pitch our tent in a soft bed of pink sand a few yards from the water — in Oman, you don’t need a camping permit, or even a designated campground, for an overnight.
The beach is empty except for a few fishing boats with peeling paint, and the silhouettes of a group of women strolling the shoreline. We hadn’t set out to camp at this specific beach, we merely followed the wind down the coastline and slept where we were at the moment the sun begins to set.