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Published: February 3rd 2024
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The Musandam peninsula is strategically important as it dominates the Straits of Hormuz, which at the narrowest point means that Oman and Iran are 21 nautical miles apart. The Musandam peninsula is almost all mountains, and we certainly experienced that today with a 4WD trip up to 1600m at the very north of the peninsula.
The day started more pedestrianly, with a visit to Khasab castle. This was built as a fort by the Portuguese in the 17
th century, and was subsequently taken over by the British, but it has been completely rebuilt and turned into a museum. It’s small, but interesting enough – or at least, it would have been if we hadn’t experienced a second day of long power outages. It’s hard to see the exhibits in a museum with no windows and no lights on! We followed this with a short drive round the town, where new buildings are springing up everywhere. The government has given every citizen a free plot of land, and the Berbers have also received a large contribution to building costs. The peninsula only opened up when the new road from the UAE was opened about 20 years ago.
We headed out
of town along a wide flat valley flanked on all sides by the same limestone cliffs we’d seen on our arrival yesterday. The valley floor was virtually devoid of vegetation, being just miles of grey rocky ground looking like the dried out river bed it was once was. Everywhere, new homes were being built. We drove up to a viewpoint to see the coastline and the fjord, as it is called, and then carried on into the mountains proper. We both had a small wobble at the start, as neither of us likes driving on steep narrow roads with a vertiginous drop to one side, but managed to set that aside to enjoy the stunning views. The road was, in places, exceptionally steep as it wound up a series of tight hairpin bends, and was not metalled but nevertheless had a good smooth surface. We were fortunate not to have been booked to go yesterday, as all trips were cancelled due to the rain, which risked bringing down rockfalls and mudslides from the soft limestone cliffs. The cliffs are mostly highly stratified, then tilted and bent from the collision of three major tectonic plates. They appear at first sight to
have nothing growing on them whatsoever, but close up you can see small clumps of grass and tiny bushes, all covered with grey dust.
Halfway up there is a village with some fields planted with grass. Our guide told us it’s pretty much empty at this time of year, but fills up in the hot summer months when the farmers bring their goats up to graze, and to shelter from the 45 degree+ heat down at sea level. We kept climbing until we came to a small group of military buildings (with injunctions not to take any photos). This serves the radar station on the top of the mountain, another 500 metres up, stationed to allow the Omanis to keep track of what’s happening in the Straits of Hormuz. Apparently British military attend too from time to time.
Coming down was scarcely any faster than going up, and we felt like we were speeding when we finally rejoined the main road. We drove past a heavily fenced area by the port that our guide told us was used to import animals from Iran. Iranian livestock cannot be sold in Saudi Arabia, so the goats arrive in Oman, are
held for three days or so, then checked by a vet and certified as now being Omani so the Saudis will buy them. It seems that the Iranian sailors aren't allowed past the fences and barbed wire either!
Our last stop was to see some petroglyphs. We assumed we would be visiting a cave, but it turned out some rocks containing stone art from 2000 years ago had just fallen off the cliff into a village a few years back.
Scroll down for more photos.
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Musandam Peninsula
To be honest, I'm not familiar with any part of Oman; however, I recently saw a tour for the UAE and Oman advertised that piqued my interest. The steepness of the roads you described made my knees weak just reading about them! We had a similar "light out in the museum" experience in Tirana, Albania, but fortunately there was some window light. Nice photos!!