This one is not so much about the bags but about the rest of my weekend away in Oman.
It’s not all Desert
After spending the Friday morning travelling down the flat desert coast route from Fujairah to Muscat and a lovely weekend in the city, we decided to head back to Dubai via the mountainous route.
About 2 hours drive west from Muscat brings you to the beginning of one of the mountainous regions of Oman. Of course there is a tarmac main(ish) road across but that is much further north than we wanted to go and also, possibly quite a boring drive, so we headed off on a track that promised to take us to somewhere 40km away. It must traverse the mountains, we thought!
A Helping Hand
A few kilometres into our track and steadily going up-hill, we were overtaken by a speeding local. Good news because at least we know now we’re on a real ‘road’ (the Garmin GPS thought we were totally off road). We followed him but at a much slower speed for half an hour or so.
As we approached the summit of one part of the tour we noticed Speedy Omani had stopped at the side of the road. As you do, in these situations, we stopped to enquire if he needed a hand with anything. He certainly did. With one of his tyres totally slashed and no spanner to loosen the spare or to take the slashed wheel off, he was stuck.
We stopped to lend him our wheel nut spanner and to help.
More re-inforcements arrived so we bid our farewell and left the locals to sort it out.
Amazing Scenery
Further on, we took a break to take in the breathtaking views and were promtly overtaken again by a convoy of six 4×4’s, clearly all on an off road rally together. The sand that blew up as they passed totally wiped out the view so I’m not sure what the tourists in those vehicles could see of the scenery!
A little later we took a wrong turn and caught up with the tourists who were having lunch by this very deep and narrow canyon.
In this close up (of the photo above) you can see people sitting on rocks having lunch. Hopefully that will give you an idea of the sheer size of the canyon.
After checking with the 4×4 drivers we re-traced our steps and took the missed turning, the turning we were warned not to take unless you have a 4×4 with low ratio gears. The track climbed up to 700m then down into a green valley. Up again to 1000m and down to another oasis in the mountains. It went on like this for about 20km. Finally we reached the summit at 2000m.
The drive was amazing, even if I was gripping onto my seat most of the time. The road was long and winding (you can see it in the valley below) but finally we reached tarmac and then it was all downhill to the highway and off to the border and to Dubai.
That was my amazing weekend! I’d love to hear about yours 🙂
