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 ...

Getting into the Xmas spirit ...

I am four days away now from being on holiday (hoorah!), but locally they're not even off for Xmas day. However, we are still managing to get into the Xmas spirit of eating, drinking and being merry - having survived the office Xmas lunch (turkey and stuffing?! really?!), we sidled off today for champagne brunch at one of those lovely five star hotels in town. Wow ... as you can see, a balanced meal, with all of the major food groups represented (red, brown, yellow etc, and surely there's at least two of my five a day?)

Life in the Fast Lane

Muscat may be a capital city, but it's got a lovely village feel to it. It really is teeny tiny compared to other great capitals of the world, and it's practically stone age compared to the neighbours in Dubai, where I had the dubious pleasure of making a short visit this weekend ...

From sleepy little Muscat ...

... to the Big Smoke of Dubai

Actually, there was nothing really pleasurable about it - in fact, downtown Dubai is my idea of hell on Earth. Flashy consumerism, great hulking piles of glass and steel, and most of all no soul to speak of, no history or culture of its own has had time to develop, just reflections of some far away vision of wealth and success.

OK, so the Burj Al Khalifa is pretty amazing - 164 floors, half a mile high and weirdly organic in the way it points its crooked finger skywards. I was suitable impressed, it was too big to even get into a single photo ...

But then turn around and it's Dubai Mall, the faux mud walls of Souk Al Bahar, too much Louis Vuitton and not enough Middle East for my liking. And the people - hordes clutching their designer shopping bags and munching on fast food as they waddle or totter on inappropriate footwear from air-conditioned mall to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned home ... although the setting sun did manage to give it all a slight air of romance, it was just too artificial for me, too clean and shiny and stuck in shades of silver and charcoal.

I'm sure I'll go back at some point - a girl needs to dance every once in a while, and there are apparently the world's fastest flumes - but it'll be a calculated dash in and out with friends. A quick taste of the high life in the fast lane, and then hightailing it home to little old Muscat ...

Sensitive souls

Coz some words are just too 'borderline' for Omani sensitivities ...

Yep, definitely in the Middle East

Living in a barren land

Well, you'll have seen that Musandam is the kind of place that words like 'barren' and 'inhospitable' were made for, but like so many remote parts of the world where even cockroaches seem to be having a hard time, people have managed to move in and find a way to survive whatever nature can throw at them - no flat land? scarce water? no greenery? temperatures over 50 degrees for half the year? not a problem! Bring it on!

To be fair, a lot of Musandam is completely uninhabited, but then most of it is at the very least near-vertical and inaccessible, even for one of those little donkeys that seem to get into most nooks and crannies. But wherever the land levels off even for a moment, there seems to be a little house or what looks like a field, just waiting for some rain ...

There are even places where people have decided that horizontal living space is unnecassary - on the way up to Jebel Harim, even the smallest caves have been turned into shelter from the elements, although you wouldn't want to have vertigo or sleepwalk ...

hard to see where mountain rubble ends and house begins ...

To cope with the extreme temperatures, the locals move up into the mountains over the summer, and used to live in these stones houses called 'Houses of the Lock' which are half underground. They're not very easy to get in and out of with only a two foot high door, but the thick walls and being in the ground make a massive difference in temperature, and mean that they can store things in the house and lock up while they're down at the coast during the winter ...

They also used to have summer houses, which have walls that let in any little gusts of wind but a roof to be able to sit in the shade - they look a bit like the kind of posh summer houses you get in gardens in Surrey, but probably a lot less sturdy (and a hell of a lot cheaper!)

Of course, these days even this part of the world has succumbed to the appealing cheapness of breezeblock and air-conditioning, made possible by the free electricity and water tankers supplied by the government to encourage people to stay here rather than flocking to the comforts of urban life down the coast. The new houses are much uglier and probably nowhere near as suitable, but there's something about having a 'modern' house that makes up for it. And of course it's safer and more comfortable to have fridges and cars and mosquito nets, I'm not a complete head-in-the-clouds romantic, but don't we also have something to learn from the past? It took the people of Musandam hundreds (thousands?) of years to learn how to live with nature without destroying it, and I can't help lamenting what we've lost as well as what we've gained ...

juxtaposition of the old and the new -

a traditional dhow and newly-opened Lulu's supermarket