Blogs from Oman, Middle East - page 5

I transferred about 30kms from Nizwa to Al Hamra first thing in the morning, arriving around 9am, so clearly too early to check into my next abode, so I headed straight out on my bike. Today’s aim was to recce the second major climb featured on the Haute Route - Jabal Haat. It was a similar amount of vertical, at nearly 1400m, but much less steep. I knew the base of the climb was somewhere near the Hoota Caves so I followed the signs for that, although on arrival I realised that I had overshot the turning so I had to backtrack. Almost immediately the road ramped up and I quickly dropped down to my lowest gear again, but the gradient then ebbed and flowed quite a bit which was a nice relief after yesterday’s unrelenting ... read more

I arrived in Nizwa after driving from Muscat at about 10am. As my hotel room was not yet available I headed straight out for a ride. My plan was to follow part of the Haute Route Oman Route, needless to say without any navigational tools to do so, and also, stupidly, without even jotting down where the route went. Far be it for me to let such minor details get in the way. I had at least looked at how to do as little time on the highway as possible to get out of town - just one short section of it, which resulted in one new member of my fan club! The stretch of road up to Tanuf is a busy main road, straight as an arrow so not very interesting. I turned off of ... read more

My cycling (and a bit of other stuff) trip didn’t get off to the best start when my bike failed to depart Heathrow on the allotted plane. To be fair Heathrow was completely mobbed, and probably had been so for the last week or so, it being Christmas Eve when I travelled out. Luckily I was booked to stay in Muscat for a couple of nights, not that far from the airport, so the fact that Gulf Air don’t deliver late baggage was not nearly as inconvenient as it could have been. So day 1 was a case of Plan B. As I crashed out on Christmas day at about 9.30pm, having not touched a drop of alcohol (usually unheard of in my case!), I was up bouncing around by 6am. I popped on my trainers ... read more

We had stopped in Sinaw earlier in the day, primarily so Nawaf, Ahmed and Idris could shop for the next few days’ provisions. Sinaw has the raw-ness of a border town, which in a sense it is. It is here that the Bedouin come to trade their camels, stock up on modern amenities, and sell their crafts to the few tourists who make it this far. Sadly, it wasn’t camel-market day when we were there, though there was a solitary animal “parked” by the near-empty arena, cheek-by-jowl with somewhat less photogenic 4WDs. Wandering around the main souq, we encountered Bedouin women wearing a variety of burqas – not here the mesh-faced, body-covering sky-blue garment of Afghanistan, but a form of face mask, originally designed in pre-Islamic times for sun and sand protection. I’d first seen them ... read more

Squint hard at a map of the Arabian Peninsula and you’ll see, towards its eastern end, a triangular spike of land that appears to be trying to prod Iran. A good political map of the area will show that the very tip of this spike, guarding the Straits of Hormuz, is a different colour from the rest. This is the Omani exclave of the Musandam Peninsula, entirely surrounded on the land side by the United Arab Emirates. Here the Hajar Mountains, the spectacular backdrop to Muscat and the cities of the Batinah plain along Oman’s northeastern coast, finally win the day, crashing dramatically into the ocean, allowing man only the occasional narrow valley for his habitation. Flying over the Peninsula, I was staggered that anyone has even bothered trying to fashion a living here in these ... read more