Dhofar: The Arabia You Never Knew

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse/ A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,/ Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse./ Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo/ Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,/ Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy, Canto XXVII

(Dhofar's Empty Quarter is here
The Thob Dhofari is here
The frankincense seller is here)

October 2005

I'm driving blind a few kilometres from the Yemen border, desperately dodging cows and camels in fog so thick visibility is down to ten feet. Somewhere over the edge, through these clouds, past the little jebeli settlements and over the sheer rock faces, lies the international border. Hours ago, the clouds had cleared briefly in the late afternoon sun, revealing a border crossing straight out of a tourist brochure. A bit of barbed wire, a mesh gate and a narrow lane, set against slopes of tangled vegetation and sheer rock faces set ablaze in the sunlight.

Days ago, I was at the other edge of the sultanate, on its south easternmost point. Here, a brand new road wound its way through the mountains, clinging to the edge of rock and sea. I had driven east of Salalah for 300km till the point where the road ended, asphalt disappearing into dirt tracks that curved into the depths of the Jebel Samhan. For most people, Dhofar usually means Salalah in the khareef, this little window of opportunity to the south. But I just made Salalah base camp, heading east to the Jebel Samhan and west to the Yemen border. These unknown and unexplored corners of Oman were so wild and fantastic that Salalah seemed like a garden in comparison, pretty in green but nothing more.

Southwestern corner: Sarfayt, on top of the Jebel al Qamar
Location N 16°40.987’, E 053°06.644’
Elevation 2,758ft

I stood at the mountain border crossing looking longingly over no man’s land, but the other side of the jebel disappeared into fog. Yemen was, this morning, cloaked in a carpet of cloud and mystery, a thick blanket of blinding white below me, vanishing into sky and horizon. I was at the end of the road, the south westernmost point of Oman. These upper reaches of the Jebel Qamar had risen up suddenly after Mughsayl, a beach ravaged by wind and sea, west of Salalah. The mountains went straight up and west, with peaks of ragged rock that crumbled into a surreal landscape of otherworldly boulders strewn haphazardly over grassy slopes, punctuated by the occasional silhouette of the red dragon plant, like some bizarre vegetal explosion on the mountain.

Minutes ago, I had sipped black tea with Saalim, a jebeli from Sarfayt I had befriended along the road. I had met him at a foggy junction a few kilometres down the mountainside, when I was looking for the border, the end of my journey. That search ended at his village, Oman’s last settlement. Sarfayt seemed like some hazy dream, cloaked in fog and obscurity, saved only from being forgotten by the world by the international border in its backyard. Climb on from Sarfayt and you will soon break through the cloud cover, into sunlight so bright you could be in another world. It is fantastically beautiful at the top, and even more so in the folds of the mountain, where the vegetation is at its thickest.

All this is so removed from the rest of the country it seems unnatural, almost out of place. Once you head west out of Salalah and past Mughsayl, everything changes. Right on top of the mountain you could be in another country, and this feeling is heightened by the couple of military checkpoints that you must pass through on top. Even the names of the settlements seem strange, like words out of some fantastic tale: Argutt Ashkarate, Mazahoob, Jeddert, Airdit, Shahab Asaib, Arift and, strangest but true, Furious. Like some journey through the Middle Kingdom, I passed them in a daze, agog at this plateau high above the clouds, hanging on to what seemed like the edge of the Earth. The road would unravel down one side of the mountain, dipping into cloud, rising out on the other through a series of sheer hairpin bends. The views are unbeatable, more Alpine than Middle Eastern, and this road is easily one of the most thrilling in Oman.

Sarfayt is a great experience, but you soon start running out of ideas if you don’t have a visa to cross over. I had spent the morning driving from Salalah, exploring the hillsides, occasionally turning off to lanes dipping south to settlements on the sea, like the sleepy little village of Rakhyut. Now, with the fog moving in again and the light fading, I had no appetite for the long and mountainous journey back to Salalah – the very thought seemed suicidal. Instead, I backtracked a bit, and turned off to the village of Dalkut, down by the sea. It is, of course, downhill all the way, and I crawled along in the half-light, desperately trying to break through the cloud and get to lower ground.

The road – barely visible – soon degenerated into a dirt track turned to slush with a spattering of rain. I slithered and bumped through it, just aware of the incredibly beautiful slopes on either side, of fresh green vegetation sprinkled with purple flowers, shrouded in mist.

The mountainside sloping to the sea might have been gorgeous, but Dalkut was not. It felt grubby and sticky, reeked of fish and seemed full of half-constructed buildings, like some abandoned town whose only stragglers gathered dismally outside a couple of bare restaurants. It is not a nice place to get stuck in, this muggy town wedged in between mountain and sea, but stuck I was. Perhaps it was just the night, but Dalkut seemed in direct contrast to the phenomenal natural beauty of the mountains, and the charm of the neighbouring settlements.

I woke up after a night in a little room above a restaurant, where I had gone without dinner and tried desperately to sleep. At half past seven in the morning the town was misty and deserted, though the road up was much clearer than the night before. I barely made it back to the last filling station west of Salalah, a lone building at Mughsayl. Further west you might be able to buy fuel out of drums in the villages if you’re lucky, but don’t count on it.

Southeastern corner: Hasik, at the foot of the Jebel Samhan
Location: N 17°26.967’, E 055°15.724
Elevation: sea level

It is twilight, and the clouds are barely a hundred feet above. I’ve got my back to the sea, sitting on the dirt by the road, facing a crack in the Jebel Samhan. There is, of course, the ever-present roar and hiss of ocean, a sound that followed me from the beaches of Salalah to the cliffs of Taqah, through the ruins of Mirbat and along the coast, right till the end of the road, in the mouth of the jebel. But sit awhile and you’ll notice other sounds too: the echo of the sea against the sheer rock face, the hiss of wind as it gasps through the crack, the sharp but occasional birdcall. Perhaps one’s senses are more tuned to the mountain in the half-light, but the jebel seemed to be making almost as much noise as the sea. These slabs of rock are so smooth they look like they have been sandpapered, even the parts that have crumbled away with wind and water, like some half-eaten termite mound left in the rain.

This south easternmost corner of Oman, so remote even Salalah hasn’t heard of it, could easily rival most other places in the sultanate. There is nothing you would want to change about it, this is as close to perfection as it gets. And while the western corner with Yemen is also thrilling, the east is more desolate, drier, sparsely populated and much wilder than the soggy cliffs around Sarfayt. The monsoon clouds seem to brush past this outer corner, leaving the ground beneath with nothing more than occasional sprinklings of vegetation, as opposed to the rampant, tangled undergrowth in the west. While you can barely see past the next cliff face, or curve in the mountains on top of the Jebel Qamar, you have a sweeping, majestic landscape of rock rushing out of sea here, criss-crossed by wadis, some half-choked with grass taller than a man. The people seem softer here, perhaps more Mahri than Jebeli. Even the rock is different, varied hues roughly the colour of unfinished plaster, one on top of the other.

It might have been beautiful in the twilight, but with the clouds lower and the light almost out on this corner of the map, it was almost ominous the longer one lingered. It was time to head to Hasik for the night, the last settlement on the asphalt, a few kilometres before it ended. Known more as the end of the road than anything else, this is a sparse, open collection of houses around 300km northeast of Salalah. It might be the end of the road, but Hasik seems to come alive as the sun goes down. With the brand new road, electricity through the day and water from a nearby wadi, this settlement is at its liveliest. I sit outside one of its two restaurants, joined by a few teachers from the school, just opposite. Mohammed Yasser teaches Arabic there, and we soon become friends. We talk through the night, in the middle of nowhere, developing an easy bonhomie, just like my meeting with Saalim of Sarfayt. Hasik suddenly has a face, and I know I will be well taken care of. He buys me dinner and offers me his house for the night, but I have already paid for a little room around the corner, bare except for an air conditioner and three beds, their mattresses wrapped in plastic. It was squeaky clean too, and by the time we finish talking, well into the night, it’s a great place to crash for the night.

It is seven in the morning the next day when I'm near the end of the road, a few bends further east of Hasik. I'm sitting on aeolianite, rock that was once sand, now cemented together. I wait for the thick blanket of clouds to pass so one has more light to photograph the cliffs that the road cuts through. This could take hours, though, because the clouds seem to stretch to the horizon, without a break in sight. Instead, I make my way down the rocks, back to the road and car and across to the other side, to the crack in the rock I had sat facing the previous evening. This break in the cliff face, chiselled by water and rain over millions of years, reveals layers of rock receding into the mountainside behind. And then, in the soft, diffused light, something very small and very light jumped out of the crack on to the ledge beneath and stared straight at me.

It was so small and had such delicate balance I thought it was a cat of some sort, this little white thing half crouching against the soft off-white rock. But after staring back at it agog for some time, I made out a face that was pointed like a fox, with oversized sharp ears and a tail fluffy like a squirrel’s. A half-minute later and it pitter-pattered softly along the ledge, stopping a few times to look at me as it climbed to the next level, before disappearing into the mountainside.

Base camp: Salalah
Location: N 17º01.475’, E 054º06.864’
Elevation: 128ft

Salalah has a pretty back yard, with rolling green hills, quite picture perfect when the fog clears a little. With an airport, a range of hotels to choose from and a highway to Muscat, it seems the obvious choice. But there’s a lot more to the south of Oman than this city. If you follow my routes east and west, you could elevate your trip from a pleasant holiday to a thrilling experience you wouldn’t forget. Salalah might be a thousand kilometres from Muscat, but it still makes sense to treat it as base camp. Fly into it, rent a 4WD and head out, as far in both directions as you can manage. Starting with Salalah is fine, as long as you end up with Dhofar. Cloaked in mist, mountains and mystery, its furthest corners are also some of Oman’s finest.



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