Heading for the hills ... Oman does green!

It's winter here - a bitter 15 degrees last night - and it's the time of year when you can properly explore this beautiful country without constant sweating and seeking out the nearest source of AC at every turn. And Oman is a beautiful country - beautiful in a very dry and savage way, but still amazing and so much more interesting than the modern skyscrapers stuck in acres of sand that you find in other bits of the Gulf. There are plenty of ex-pats here who don't often leave the comfort of the five star hotels and shopping malls in Muscat, but as you know, that's not really my style. So let me show you some of the great little haunts up in the mountains that I've discovered over the last couple of months ...

Villages teetering on the precipice ...

The Jebel Al-Akhdar (it means the Green Mountain) is a little jewel, just an hour and a half's drive from Muscat. Only four wheel drives are allowed beyond the checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain, not because it's off-roading (it has had a tarmac makeover to put European roads to shame), but because it is so steep for so long - low ratio all the way up, and definitely all the way down (certainly if you want to have any brakes left by the end). 

Our lunch spot - not one for the vertigo sufferers among us

And what is there to greet you at the top? steep drops down  into canyons, villages clinging onto the sides, and fields cut into the almost vertical drops to make use of every little bit of water as it runs off the mountain tops. The combination of water and a cooler climate (it's a couple of thousand metres up) means that this little corner of Oman is home to all sorts of agriculture, especially pomegranates and roses. So nice to be somewhere that you can almost sometimes describe as lush ...

A rare pool of water

Rose bushes and pomegranate orchards

Inside one of the little villages on the Jebel

Indigo man

So, I'm pleased to say that there is a happy ending to the tale of the mystery door to the shop of Oman's last indigo dyer - we found him! Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit his workshop, which wasn't behind the shop - it's apparently a bit too smelly to have in the middle of the market place. We did meet the man himself though - 80 if he is a day, as tiny as his door, a typical charming Omani with a smiley shyness and proud of his art. So sad that once he goes, another local craft will be lost to the cheaper Indian market forever ...

Life is art

An amazing quote from Virginia Woolf that I wanted to share with you - when I see water rippling with the wind, a sunset painting the sky, the neon shops signs and dancing lights of traffic streaming by at night, people singing on the beach ... it's all art baby, it's all art ...

" It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a delight to put the severed parts together [...] From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art [...] We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

Knock knock ...

There's something about entrances and doorways -sometimes it feels like they're inviting you in, but you're cautious at the same time when you don't know what's behind them ... hidden treasures, or someone's junk? a buzzing household or an empty ruin? are they keeping people out or hiding them away? It all brings out the curious streak in me. Oman has hundreds of beautiful doors and gateways, is famous for them even, and there are so many different types - old and new, simple and ornate, huge and tiny, plain and extraordinary, and all seem to want to tell a story ....

Imagine this as the entrance to an Alladin's cave,

for those that have followed the quest

and found the golden key ...

Perhaps the crooked doors to the beach-side shack

of a rugged old fisherman and his daughter ...

Keeping the hoi polloi locked out ...

or the beautiful people locked in?

Door to the fish market in Nizwa

- or was it Narnia?

The tiny door to the traditional 'House of the Lock',

with it's huge wooden key -

if this door could talk,

what stories could it tell from through the ages?

Door to Oman's last indigo dyer -

we never did get to see inside ...

but I do hope he's there,cooking and pounding

to make beautiful cloth for the hidden ladies of Bahla

Camping desert style

It's winter, the nights are chilly, the days are at their shortest ... time to go camping! There have to be some advantages to living in the hottest part of the world, and one is that it never gets too cold to sleep under the stars somewhere far from the madding crowds. And that's exactly what we did for Christmas, just a cushion and a sleeping bag and the stars at night, and waking up with the warm sun on our faces ... lovely ...

sleeping like babes ...

... and waking with the sun

Geology paradise

As you may know, my Mum and step-dad were here, and as he is (among many other things) a geologist, I organised a two day geology tour to take in the sights of Oman. It turns out that Oman is fairly unique in geology terms, as it's one of the few places on earth where you can see rocks formed on the ocean bed (ophiolites) and the earth's mantle. Yes, the bit under the earth's crust - apparently, the earth is like a peach, with the skin being the crust, the flesh being the mantle, and the stone being the earth's core. The skin / crust can be up to 35km deep, so you can imagine that being somewhere where the crust is under your feet is pretty exciting for geology types.

Anyway, as my long-suffering mother seems to spend a lot of time sitting around while her other half looks at rock faces, I thought it would be good to have someone else to take him to the best spots and talk rocks with him - and it was actually really interesting for me and my mum too, and took us to some great out-of-the-way spots. Oman rocks really do rock!

So, here are a few highlights of our trip;

The Geotimes Pillow Lava Formation - this is lava that has flowed out of a crack in the earth and then solidified under the sea. Of course, the lava flows we saw would have happened many thousands of years ago, but it's still happening today in the oceans around Hawaii and other places where there are undersea volcanoes;

Above the pillow lava, there are layers of sedimentary rocks - muds and other materials that have settled on the bottom of the ocean on the floor and eventually been turned into rock. All sorts of different minerals create a range of colours, and the stripes are always interesting to look at.

Below the pillow lava though, there are other kinds of rocks made by the magma chamber that the lava has come out of - there are dykes that flow upwards, and the magma in the chamber also cools when it reaches the outer edges of the chamber, creating a different kind of layering called layered gabbros -we walked up the beautiful cool stream of Wadi Haylayn to see these examples;

And than below that, the mantle - and here is one of the places where you can see it really clearly, in Wadi Abyad at the bottom of the Hajar mountains in Oman. You can see the darker rock under the mantle - we think this was Dunnite - and the lighter gabbros above it. And as you can see, we even got a quick swim at the end of our dusty rock-hunting! It's not all dry desert here, you know ...