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Tea for the Tillerman
The Musandam Peninsula is certainly spectacular, but getting there can be fraught. First, feeling our way through the smaller emirates, Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah, in the absence of clear signposting, and then the border control between United Arab Emirates and Oman. We had an urgent text message from the car rental company when we were about 250km out of Abu Dhabi to say that we lacked the necessary insurance documents to get entry into Oman. Perhaps they should have provided them before we left. Even when faxed through, there was still an interrogation at border control about the car documentation. But we did get in, the upside being that New Zealander tourists don’t have to pay the usual $NZ50 entry visa fee.
Musandam is remarkably mountainous and remote. Right at the northeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, it faces Iran, and looks out on to the Strait of Hormuz which separates the Persian and Arabian gulfs. The region is part of the Sultanate of Oman, split from the rest of the country by parts of the Emirates. The main town Khasab was only linked to the rest of the region by road in the 1980’s, until then reached by foot, donkey or boat. It has just recently been opened to tourists, although as yet the town shows few visible concessions to the twenty-first century.
We did the recommended dhow trip, through the fiords where the barren Hajar Mountains plunge into the sea, watched rare white-sided dolphins, drunk sweet tea, and passed (at a circumspect distance) remote fishing villages and cave dwellings to which there is still no road access. Then Telegraph Island, described as a “desolate lump of rock that rises from the heart of one of these cavernous inlets”. This is the place from which the saying “going round the bend” originated, referring to the psychological state of mind of some of those stationed there during the British Empire’s attempt to run a telegraph cable from Bombay to Basra. As for us, we anchored the dhow, and plunged into the ocean depths for a lunchtime swim, mad tourists no doubt providing the tillerman with wry amusement and a living far more lucrative than fishing.
A journey is often as interesting, or even more so, than the destination as we travel to places such as the Musandam Peninsula. The mosques, the domes of which seem to have regional colour variation (purple-blue in this area), forts, signposts and such things as the speedboats which come over the Strait from Iran to trade. There are the date palm plantations in walled compounds, the old towns with rutted streets and crumbling buildings, goats foraging looking for edible traces among discarded plastic and cows wandering aimlessly on roadsides. Along the Emirates Road heading north, camel enclosures and, in the dusk silhouetted against the setting sun, Arabs hooning on sand dunes in four wheel drives or quad bikes, and sand tobogganing down huge slopes of brown-red sand. Unforgettable too the sweet smells of Shisha, as groups of men sit and smoke their fruit tobacco through hookah pipes to while away the evening hours.
Tomorrow for us, off by road to Muscat, border control permitting.