Abandoning Wadi Bani Habib

August 2007

It is six in the morning, and while the mountain village should have been waking up to heavy breakfasts, it is disconcertingly quiet except for the birds on the pomegranate trees and the wind through the valley. Wadi Bani Habib looks idyllic from a distance, but the closer you get the stranger it seems. Nothing moves. Roosters aren’t announcing themselves. Children don’t run around and doors stand half open, listless.

You reach the first house but find it empty, move on and find the next as silent. You slowly realise, with each passing house, that the entire village is empty, full of walls and doors and windows, creepers, handles and locks, but devoid of people. It wasn’t always like this.

Wadi Bani Habib must have thrived for hundreds of years, perched on the inner slope of the mountain, looking down on the riverbed and the plantations that followed in characteristic Jebel Akhdar style. There was water from mountain springs and a falaj system to channel it. Walls of rock on either side protected it from the elements and the canopy of leaves, still alive and well today, gave plenty of shade under which children played with mulberries, staining the walls of the gardens purple, secretly splashing through the water when no one was looking. 60 years after he first started playing here, Saif Hamood doesn’t miss a beat as he runs down the stairs that go down to the wadi, his wizened face cracking into a smile as he pretends to run out of breath. After 27 years in the army and a lifetime in the mountains.

He used to live here too, along with perhaps 700 people, up along the opposite slope, past a near vertical footpath that squeezes its way between mountain rock and the homes of as many neighbours as the jebel has contour lines. Above, overlooking the bend in the wadi and the plantations below, is his old house, or what is left of it: caved in roof, now open to the sky, half-erect walls and a single, still-locked door, slightly out of alignment.

“In the old days,” Saif says, “the people here didn’t have roads, and used donkeys to get to Birkat al Mawz, Nizwa and even Wadi Bani Kharus. In time, roads and vehicles were introduced to the jebel, but neither could get up and down the steep wadi to the village.” And that is when, beginning in the mid-eighties, the villagers moved to the other side of the mountain, where a road could reach them. This was also a good opportunity to start afresh, abandoning ancient earth and stone houses with no plumbing and electricity for a new township of concrete villas, blacktop road and electricity wires streaming with gay abandon across the landscape.

It is difficult to find the new village charming, this one-road succession of heavy-set bungalows without style or art, with their backs to the beautiful old houses a hilltop away. But it is still populated by the same people who welcomed travellers into their homes for generations, and you will find that same level of hospitality in the new town. Saif offers us dates and kahwa in his massive new house, with its many rooms that open into a central courtyard, tiles stacked at one end hinting at extensive renovations to come. This is sure luxury compared to the old house where Saif lived, its tiny quarters encompassing an entire extended family. “This is where I used to sleep,” points Saif, over his old house, “this is where my brothers were, that is where my mother used to cook.”

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