La Tarzane leaves the urban jungle: The Peaks of Musandam

I have finally managed it - a holiday! While the Arab world celebrated Eid Al Adha with prayer and a lot of dead animals, I ran away with a friend of mine to Musandam in the north of Oman. Musandam is a peninsula that juts out into the Arabian Gulf, and is only a hop, skip and a jump from the shores of Iran. But more of that later ...

There are several things that Musandam is famous for; smuggling, sealife, inaccessibility and a good line in strange houses among them. But probably most impressive, and certainly the first thing you notice, is the geography - it's so mountainous that almost all of it is inaccessible by anything except a boat, and the majority of roads call for a pretty sturdy four wheel drive. And as my mate Ken says, it is proper mamba country - miles and miles of bugger all ...

It's not particularly gifted with greenery either, so the geology is all very in-your-face, and there's a good reason for guide book writer Diana Darke's extensive use of the word 'vertiginous' (although twice in one page is just sloppy editting ...). Four wheel driving is not for the faint-hearted ...

... but definitely worth the gripping-the-dashboard-for-dear-life experience, as winding to the top of Jebel Harim, the highest mountain in the area, brings beautiful plateaus and a proper sense of wilderness.

The whole 'mountains falling into the sea' topography means that Musandam also lays claim to the title 'the Norway of the Gulf' (with a slight temperature difference!) because of its fjords -

And then there's the geology ... bendy bits and pretty stripes which probably have interesting scientific names, and frankly cool fossils of ancient deep sea life at 2000m altitude. I'll come back to the geological uniqueness that is Oman, but for now here are a few tasters to get the amateur's juices flowing ... and for the rest of us plebs is just damn pretty.