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Published: January 20th 2007
the camel
well, what've you got to say for yourself? And I've got nice teeth too! I'm talking about the camels of course.
Salalah, Oman - down near the Yemeni border.
Our camping/driving holiday from Al Ain, UAE to Salalah, Oman (near the border with Yemen for those of you without an Atlas close to hand) went pretty well. Only bogged once, only 3 hardship causing windy nights and a few other misdemeanours based on camping incompetence.
The windy nights hardship went as follows: (and they weren’t all consecutive thanks be to Allah).
Night 1) caused food preparation to take place in the boot of the 4x4, but dinner was achieved sans sand - an impressive feat, you had to be there - wind died down around 8pm and we experienced a glorious first nights camp in the middle of nowhere. (Okay, for those of you with the Atlas, 100km past Adam, one of the few simple and easily pronunciable town names - Adam south of Nizwa).
Windy Night 2 ) caused us to abandon putting up two tents, so that we all slept in one after moving it into shelter of the 4x4 - more handy than you’d think these vehicles. This was
lots of camels
and ive got road rights too at the edge of the Wahiba Sands - an area of sand dunes 80 km x 200km, that’s a lot of sand. As we were struggling with the tents, a young local boy came up to ask for help, he wanted us to pull out his sand-bogged vehicle. We knew we’d just get bogged ourselves and trying to explain that when neither has the other’s language was a bit tricky, but headlights in the distance sometime later told us they were okay.
Windy Night 3) wind caused so much tent flapping noise it was impossible to sleep, we had to sleep on the side bits of the tent to keep it from taking off and taking us on a magic-tent-ride. In the middle of the night John hit on the great idea to turn the tent around so that the wind blew through it rather than onto 1 side of it. That helped slightly, but I eventually opted for outside the tent sleeping on fist-sized pebbles, gave that up and retreated to the back seat of the 4x4 - further evidence of usefulness - I gather the boys didn’t sleep that night. Robert’s tent was in even worse state
the sea
just north of Salalah, Oman than ever come morning, he’d lost the fly (we didn’t bother using ours on most of the trip, but Robert had a very old borrowed tent with holes in it, probably had even bigger rips and really was on last pegs (ha ha - actually we never bothered with pegs, we used stones). Wind blew ALL NIGHT, even breakfast was windy!
At Sharbathat, we got sand-bogged - this is the place where I chased and photo shot the flamingos too, well I stalked them first. We got bogged in the sand leaving the next day and had two of the local women come to sell us hand made baskets, which we bought. They didn’t see us get bogged though, that would have been embarrassing.
In all our camp spots we were alone, was wonderful, the sea was calm and clear and great for swimming - one of the few coastlines to measure up to my exacting standards of how a beach and sea should be. Although getting stung by a bluebottle at Muscat beach and last swim was a great disappointment.
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Jim
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Nice Pix Jane
Like the blog site, Jane - really inspires a trip to the region. Sounds like you're having some great adventures. Will send you our blog site with recent Vietnam pictures, soon.