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

The Depths of Musandam

There is no middle ground in Musandam - you are either up or down, standing on its highest heights or looking into its murky depths. So, apart from the obligatory mountain safari, you cannot spend time in Musandam without at least one day out on the ocean, staring up at the cliffs and down into the water below ...

Omanis are proud of their history as a seafaring nation - it was apparently an Omani who showed Marco Polo how to get to China - and they have lots of different kinds of boats which they still make by hand. In Musandam, the boat of choice for exploring is called a dhow, which is really beautiful to look at and seems stable in the water (although I haven't tested it in a storm like the one that was looming when we went out ...)

There are loads of little fishing boats too, and a good number of smuggling boats which very blatantly race between Musandam and Iran - 45 minutes on a good day I hear. The authorities really don't seem fussed about this, I think they claim to keep an eye on it and step in when things more harmful than cigarettes and TVs are being off-loaded, but i have my doubts ...

But despite all this choice, I ended up spending most of my time out at sea on a classic dive boat - a couple of big off-board motors, some uncomfortable benches, a bunch of smelly divers and the peninsula towering above us ...

I had a ball snorkelling, but unfortunately a mix of poor visibility and not charging up my camera means that I don't have any photos of the most fabulous bits. But here's a little taster of the colour and marine life out there - can't wait to go back for more ...

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.

multi-coloured dreamscapes ...

a fish (complete with eyeball!) and strange pointy shell thing ..

and can you spot the starfish?!