White Sands & High Mountains

Day 1: Welcome To Oman

Arrival at Muscat International Airport, where your English-speaking guide meets you and the journey begins. First the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque. It is an architectural work rather than simply a mosque: five minarets for the Five Pillars, a dome fifty metres above the floor, and a prayer hall that holds more than six thousand. The carpet beneath your feet was woven in a single piece by six hundred women in Persia over four years. The chandelier above you is eight tonnes of crystal, and large enough that there is a staircase inside it. Then a photo stop at the Royal Opera House, faced in Omani desert rose limestone, where the walls of the auditorium open and close to retune the room between opera and concert. Check in at the hotel, with time to rest. In the afternoon we go into old Muscat, to the Al Alam Palace with its gold and blue columns flaring outward, flanked by the Portuguese forts of Mirani and Jalali. They have guarded this harbour since the 1580s, and the palace itself stands on a Portuguese sea wall. We walk the Muttrah Corniche as the light softens and finish in the Muttrah Souq. Omanis call it Souq Al Dhalam, the Market of Darkness, because the roofing is so dense that traders have always worked by lamplight in the middle of the day. It is one of the few markets left where you can buy gold, frankincense and myrrh under a single roof. Dinner and overnight at the hotel. Grand Mosque: open to visitors Saturday to Thursday, 08:00 to 11:00. Women are asked to cover shoulders, knees and hair, men to wear long trousers. Shoes are removed before the prayer hall. If your flight lands too late for the morning opening, we move the mosque to another day.

Day 2: Down The Coast To Sur

After breakfast we take the coast road south, the Gulf of Oman on one side and bare limestone on the other. The first stop is the Bimah Sinkhole. Omanis named it Hawiyat Najm, the deep well of the falling star, because the obvious explanation for a round hole full of impossibly blue water was that something had fallen out of the sky. It is in fact a collapsed limestone cavern, six hundred metres from the sea, and the sea seeps in through the rock to give the water its colour. The name of the meteorite that never was has stuck. Then Wadi Shab, and a walk into the gorge between the date palms and the falaj channels that water them. You go as far as you wish; your guide keeps whatever pace suits you. There is time for lunch in Sur, at your own arrangement, and then the boatyard. Sur built the ghanjah, the ocean-going dhow that carried Omani trade to India and to Zanzibar, and the last yard in town still builds them by hand. There are no drawings. The whole ship lives in the head of the master carpenter and passes to his son by working beside him. We continue to Ras Al Hadd. Dinner and overnight. Wadi Shab: the walk is about an hour each way over pebbles and boulders. Comfortable shoes and a swimsuit are recommended. Beyond the first pools a swim through a cleft in the rock leads to a hidden cave and waterfall; after rain the cleft is underwater and the cave cannot be reached.

Day 3: Where The Desert Meets The Sea

A long and beautiful drive today, south along the shore through small fishing towns and long stretches of empty coast. We arrive at the Sugar Dunes, where something rare happens: dunes of dazzling white sand run straight down into a white sand beach, with nothing else for miles. The sand is pale because it was once alive, ground from shell and coral by the sea and blown ashore. This desert is not made of rock but of the sea beside it. The afternoon is yours. Swim, walk, or sit and watch the water. Before sunset we walk out into the dunes, which begin just behind the resort, and stay for the light. Dinner and overnight at the resort. There is nowhere to buy lunch on this stretch of coast. Lunch can be added at the resort, or we carry a picnic from Ras Al Hadd; tell us at the time of booking and we will arrange it.

Day 4: Across The Sand Sea

After breakfast we set off across the desert. This is the drive people remember afterwards. There is no road, only sand, and its colour moves through copper and apricot and ochre as the hours pass. The Wahiba Sands run some 180 kilometres north to south. The Royal Geographical Society spent two years surveying them in the 1980s and found something unexpected: the dunes are watered from the air rather than the sky. Humidity at ground level reaches saturation at night, and the dew that settles is enough to keep trees standing in open sand. We reach the camp in the afternoon and climb a dune for sunset. Dinner and overnight at the camp, under a sky with nothing in the way of it. Lunch on this crossing is a packed one and can be added at the resort before we leave.

Day 5: Bedu Country And A Wadi That Never Runs Dry

We leave the Sands in the morning and stop at a Bedu house on the way, to see how families still live out here. Then Wadi Bani Khalid. In a country where a wadi is by definition a thing that is usually dry, this one runs all year, which is why it is the most loved in Oman. There is a walk along the water and pools deep enough to swim in, and the overflow is channelled down to the village fields. There are simple places to eat here if you would like lunch. In the afternoon we drive on to Nizwa, for centuries the capital of the interior and the seat of Oman's imams. The souq is at its best in the evening, when the lights come on and the town comes out for the silver, the dates and the halwa. Dinner and overnight in Nizwa. Wadi Bani Khalid is a public place. Women are asked to swim wearing a T-shirt and shorts over their swimsuit, in keeping with local custom. Men may swim in swimwear.

Day 6: Castles, Villages And The Canyon

This morning belongs to the old Oman. Jabreen first, which is less a castle than a fortified palace, and the most beautiful interior in the country: painted ceilings, carved date-palm beams, and a council chamber whose fourteen windows are really a machine for moving air. The imam who built it lost a civil war inside it in 1692 and is buried in the room where he prayed. Then a photo stop at Bahla, Oman's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, an oasis held inside a wall of mud brick some twelve kilometres long. Omani tradition has long associated Bahla with the jinn, and one story says the wall went up in a single night. Al Hamra next. Its houses stand three and four storeys tall, built of mud brick four hundred years ago in an idiom that came across the water from Yemen, and they stand almost empty: the families moved a few hundred metres away and left the old town where it was. Then Misfat Al Abriyeen, for a walk through stone lanes beneath terraces of date palm. The water here is measured in time rather than volume. A household does not own a quantity of water but half an hour of the stream, and those shares are inherited, traded and auctioned. By day the turn was timed by the shadow of a pole; by night, by the stars. There is a good place for lunch in Misfat. In the afternoon we climb to Jabal Shams, the Mountain of the Sun, a little over three thousand metres and the highest in Oman, and walk out to the rim of the canyon Omanis call the Grand Canyon of Arabia. Dinner and overnight on the mountain. It is cold, it is very quiet, and the stars are worth the extra blanket.

Day 7: Down The Mountain

We come off the mountain down a graded track of switchbacks that drops through Wadi Bani Awf. The rock you are driving through is old ocean floor, lifted onto the continent rather than pushed under it, and geologists travel from all over the world to walk it. On the way we pass Bilad Sayt, a village of stone terraces stacked up a hillside and watered entirely by gravity, from a spring above it. There is no pump. It is the only green thing for miles. At the bottom we stop at Ain A'Thowarah, the thermal spring at Nakhal, where water runs blood-warm out of the mountain into the falaj, and visit Nakhal Fort above the palm oasis. The fort was not built on its rock but around it, so the mountain still pushes up through the floors of the rooms. There is time for lunch nearby, at your own arrangement. From there the road is easy, through Barka and back to Muscat. Dinner and overnight. Wadi Bani Awf is a genuine off-road route and can close after heavy rain. An alternative road through Al Hamra is always available.

Day 8: Nine Islands And Clear Water

A boat takes you out to the Daymaniyat Islands, nine uninhabited limestone islets strung across fifteen kilometres of sea, protected since 1996. The reefs below them are among the healthiest in the region. Green turtles feed in the water, and two to three hundred hawksbills, one of the most endangered turtles in the world, nest on the beaches every year. For half the year the islands close to people altogether so that the turtles and the seabirds can have them to themselves. Picnic lunch on board, and this one is included. You come back in the afternoon, and the evening is free. Dinner and overnight at the hotel in Muscat. The guide does not come out on the boat; the crew are English speaking. Reserve permits are included. The trip is weather dependent and the islands close to visitors for part of the year, in which case we replace the day with a coastal cruise and the Bait Al Zubair museum.

Day 9: Ma'a Salama

Breakfast and a free morning. Transfer to Muscat International Airport in good time for your flight home. We hope you go home with sand in your shoes and a reason to come back. A late check-out can be arranged against the room, at a supplement.