Written and photographed

by Philip Game

e tiptoed around the circular stone huts, fitted with hand-hewn wooden doors and frames, and still secured with colossal crude padlocks even though the palm thatch roofs had long since collapsed. Many huts held clusters of unglazed earthenware vessels, some decorated in red ochre. Stone towers rose nearby, with images of stick figures of people and animals, scratched laboriously into the hard stone. It had taken me 18 years to visit this deserted village in the Musandam Peninsula.

Musandam

Hajar Mountains

Inaccessible to casual visitors, the desolate purple Hajar Mountains, which march up the Omani coast into the Musandam Peninsula, hold many secrets. Uncharted tracks lead to sweeping vistas of contorted rock, villages of isolated  tribes, ruined forts, rich veins of fossils and unexplored Bronze Age archaeological sites.

Exploring the ranges

Soon after moving to Abu Dhabi in 1983, I began to look for opportunities to explore the ranges along the Omani border. It was not long before I was introduced to the Natural History Society, where I found enthusiastic companions with suitable vehicles.

Maps were usually unavailable. At best, we could pore over a simple pen and ink blueprint drawn up by the electricity authority; we compiled sketch maps and track notes as we went.

Dibba

At midday on a typical Thursday, as Abu Dhabi locked up for the weekend, we natural historians would head off in the British Embassy's no-nonsense Land Rover. This time we were headed for the Gulf of Oman, specifically the town of Dibba which sweltered under the lee of the haze-shrouded Musandam Peninsula. This is something of a bottleneck which squeezes the Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz. Adrenalin surged as we bowled along Dibba's Corniche, a feature dear to town planners in this part of the world. Would we be turned back at the Omani border, just beyond the town? Only time would tell.

Grazing goats

Musandam is of course separated from the rest of the Sultanate by the UAE's Emirate of Fujairah. Omani visas were rare, but we had heard that sometimes you could get through around Musandam. At the large blue sign welcoming us in both English and Arabic to the Sultanate, the six lane esplanade narrowed abruptly to a no-nonsense two lane road. Yet nothing constrained our run up to the mountains. The coastal plain soon gave way to a steep walled wadi reminiscent of the red sandstone gorges of Morocco or Central Australia. Goats grazed and ragged children emerged, waving, from stone huts. Social progress was evident in the galvanised steel water tanks, all newly installed.

Boulder-strewn roads

Soon the gravel road began a steep climb into the barren ranges. Rock-solid, the Land Rover came into its own on these boulder-strewn, precipitous roads, although the temperature gauge climbed alarmingly as we switchbacked up to the top of the range. Huge, bare, contorted folds of rock were revealed like a diagram in a geology textbook, no vegetation veiling the outcrop. So just what did those goats actually eat? This was the land of the Shihuh, a dwindling tribe of hardy mountaineers, speaking an archaic language. Most had now been lured down to the coast by the government's new schools, electricity, running water and clinics, their old hamlets and terraced fields seemingly abandoned to the pitiless sun. We met a lone Shihuh who gestured politely for some water to refill his jerry can.

Giant hornets

The aridity of these mountains was emphasised by the dramatic terraced fields, sometimes climbing a thousand metres above the gorges and remarkable for their utter barrenness. One sheer cliff face, reached only by a trail which proved treacherous even in our solid leather boots, held caves painstakingly walled in beneath an underhanging ledge - an impregnable fortress; a refuge from who or what? Today the greatest dangers were from sunstroke, mechanical breakdown, or the giant black and yellow hornets, which droned endlessly above our heads.

Ultima Thule

Descending from the main ridge through yet more hairpin bends, ever mindful of the sheer drop below, we finally reached the wide flat floor of the Wadi Bih. The Omani flag fluttered above a lonely crossroads.  Here we were politely but firmly turned away from the northbound fork zigzagging up the far wall of the Wadi Bih towards Khasab, the Musandam capital. That track remained an ultima Thule, always just out of reach.  Instead we would turn west through the mouth of the wadi and back into Emirates territory, into the old Trucial Coast port of Ras Al Khaimah.

Purple bougainvillea

18 years later, the world has changed. It took five years to carve out a road westwards around the cliffs between Khasab and the UAE border. Tourists can drive north from Dubai in three hours, or fly in from Muscat. As the Oman Air flight descended into Khasab I marvelled once more at those forbiddingly stark ranges, barren puce-coloured ridges, whose naked spurs have been colonised by tiny rock-walled fields. The airstrip is a military affair: government safety notices, khaki uniforms, four-wheel-drives pulled up in the gravel outside. The Khasab Hotel has the demeanour of a small-town motel, comfortable but utterly unassuming. Clumps of purple bougainvillea enliven the dusty whitewash.

Khasab

Air-conditioners rumble constantly: in late September the heat remains fierce and the tourist season is only just resuming after the summer lull. Khasab, the place I had so long imagined as some rugged outpost, is a quiet town. There's not even a souk, market, just a string of dealers flogging bulk cigarettes to those who have crossed the Straits for the day.  At night, the Shell station is the nearest thing to bright lights.

Kumzaris

Khasab has its Kumzar quarter, to which the fishermen of that isolated township further out in the Straits migrate in summer, dealing in dates, when their home base becomes too fiercely hot and difficult to access and the fishing catch dwindles. The Kumzaris speak a patois of English, Portuguese, Arabic, Urdu and Farsi. The squat fort beside the waterfront was first built by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, a fitting backdrop for the dhows, fishing boats, beached nearby.

Two-thousand year old petroglyphs

Panoramic views unfold from stony ridges, out across the Straits towards Iran. A dozen little white wakes across the waters tag the speedboats.  Little girls in brightly coloured dresses play in huddled villages where their mothers watch over them in the late afternoon.Two-thousand year old petroglyphs depicting camels, mules and dhows are etched on boulders which have tumbled off the cliffs at Qadah.

Jebel Harim

Turning south, we climbed up out of Khasab towards the 2,087 metre Jebel Harim, topped by a military communications station. For 40 years an 82-year-old hermit named Sultan has inhabited a cave above a bend in the road. His goats browse around a trio of huts squeezed onto a ledge. Passers-by offer food and the weekly tanker tops up his drinking water. From the shoulder at 1,700 metres we looked south through the haze, across the long tongue which descends into the Wadi Bih, a deep canyon cut through the strata at our feet.

Fossil remnants

Bands of exposed rock stitched together an entire escarpment. Fossil remnants of five-inch marine creatures crowded the grey limestone boulders and at a cutting a few bends further down, starfish were clearly visible amidst a clutter of other marine life. Hamlets like A' Saye, perched at 1,100 metres, were stark clusters of concrete boxwork, chain link fencing and low stone walls, often nestled under vertical cliffs.   Crude headstones clustered inside the low freestone walls of centuries-old graveyards. Donkeys sheltered around the water tanks, black and white goats browsed in dusty date palm orchards.  We learnt that habitations seemingly abandoned are revisited in cooler months by their former residents, in search of grazing.

The Rawdah Basin

As we reached the valley floor, clouds rolled in from the Indian Ocean. The Rawdah Basin is a flat, dusty bowl, denuded by goats but shaded by flourishing acacias and cedar trees. The bare bones of a community materialised amidst the dust: water tanks, a government building and a solitary public telephone. I stifled the impulse to pick it up and call one of my former travelling companions. Nowadays, he prefers the green vistas of England. Dwarfed by the barren mountains, several pre-Islamic tombs have almost disintegrated into piles of boulders, their doorways barely discernable. Time changes everything