Day 23 – Friday 5 January 2018

A late start this morning with breakfast by the pool again.  Monica isn’t feeling well, she could have picked up a stomach bug.

We got away around 10am on our journey to Nizwa, in the Omani mountains.  As soon as we left Muscat we were in the mountains & started to climb slowly away from the Gulf of Oman.  The road again is superb, streetlights down the middle of the dual carriageway.  The suburbs of Muscat stretch up into the mountains, it is amazing, there are so many new & nice looking houses.  The road follows a dry riverbed & again it is a superb piece of engineering.  The traffic is good with not too many speeding crazy drivers, we did pass one ute with a load full of goats in the back held down with a net.  Oman seems to have a lot more water available than the UAE, there are gardens, date palms & food crops scattered all along the roadside.  Every now & then we spot a lonely watchtower on a hilltop & the occasional herd of goats & camels by the side of the road.  We are continually impressed by the ruggedness of the landscape & the sparseness of vegetation, we even saw a goat up in a very prickly tree standing on a branch grazing the leaves off.  Yet there are lots of people living out here, in nice houses.  We reach our hotel in Nizwa after only an hour & a half of driving & check-in, drop our bags.  The Golden Tulip Hotel is amazingly beautiful with lovely gardens, swimming pool & inside marble floors, Omani decore & furniture in the reception/lobby area, stunning.  Our bedroom is western style & we are sharing room with Austin (lucky us, we will have an early morning wake up kiss).

We are on the road again, our destination this afternoon is Jebel Shams, the highest mountain in Oman & supposedly very scenic.  The drive is 2 hours according to Google so we head straight out. We drive out through the backstreets of Nizwa & further into the mountains.  The road is very good for the first hour, then we turn at Al Hamra & follow another dry wadi up into the mountains.  As we get higher there are more twists & turns, amazingly beautiful scenery with high mountains, rocky ravines & rock everywhere.  There are still lots of houses out here, even more amazing is how nice they are in that unique mainly sand colour & Arabic architecture, flat roof & those different shaped & sized windows & doors.  Out in the country they seem to build high solid walled fences around their houses & they have a reasonable distance between the neighbouring houses.  We wonder what the heck these people live from.  Then the dirt road begins, my goodness is this rough & windy & steep.  The scenery gets even more stunning & the really high mountains surround us as we climb further & further.  There are lots of other cars heading this way as well & when we finally get to the Jebel Shams viewpoint we discover that most of them are Indian tourists.

Jebel Shams viewpoint has an amazing view of the mountain, with a couple of large radar dome installations on top.  Monica & Jackson decided to walk further up & we follow over a rough rocky path, it was worth the climb, we see so much more.  The amazing thing is the huge ravine, an impossibly deep & very large canyon with steep cliffs to the rocky creek bed below.  The Wadi Ghul below us is 1,000 metres or more deep & is a truly impressive sight, but I am nervous getting near the edge, it is a very long way straight down.  There is a creek with water down below.  We are at 2,020 metres above sea level & it is around 17C temperature.  Jebel Shams itself is still 1,000 metres above us.  Our drive back down the mountain is just as rugged (but this time we are driving near the rock wall not at the edge of the road) but the different viewpoint looking the other way was just as interesting, truly beautiful.  We pass a few ancient ruins along the way & about half way back to Nizwa we take the turn to the city of Bahla.

Bahla is a large spread out city & has a very large fort at a high point in the city.  As we get close to the fort the old city walls can be seen clinging to the ridges leading away up into the hills.  The fort is shut, today is Friday, the holy day & lots of places are shut, so we take a walk around the outside perimeter of the fort.  Around the back of the fort we discover a clutch of derelict mud brick houses, abandoned & falling apart, we wonder how old they are.  At the front gate of Bahla Fort is a pair of old British cannons, one has a date of 1797 on the barrel.  The fort itself is impressive, very large & tall, an imposing structure made from unbaked mud, repaired & restored over the centuries due to the ravages of time & rain.  Historians say that the oldest parts of the fort were built around 500 B.C.  It is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, the only fort in Oman listed.

Our trip back to Nizwa is uneventful.  We explore the hotel & grounds a bit more before we have dinner in the hotel restaurant, Monica is still not well, she hardly touched her food & left the table early, may be just as well that we are going back home (UAE) tomorrow.  We are all very tired especially Charles & looking forward to bed.

Charles did in excellent job driving us safely there & back over some fairly bad & very winding road.  Another great day.