Vol 38 Road Trip

Road trip, road trip, rah, rah, rah! There is a song my brother sings at the start of every road trip with his kids. Damned if I can remember it though. Mahfood and I took a road trip on Friday. We left at 9:00am and got back around 9:00pm. We borrowed the company SUV in case we needed it.

The sloppy pink line is our route. We started in Muscat. Then Izki, Nizwa, Tanuf, Ibri, Bahla, Rustaq, As Sib and home.

Unremarkable landscape for the first bit.

Then Mountains. Beautiful. Then into Izki, where we saw….actually, I can’t remember much about Izki…. Whoops. I really should write stuff down right when it happens. Mahfood says I need to upgrade my memory…..

Then into Nizwa. Nizwa was once the capital of Oman (until the current Sultan came into power and moved the capital to Muscat). The most notable feature in Nizwa is the huge fort. Dating from the 1600’s, Nizwa fort is built on a stone foundation from stone and mortar and has been completely restored.

The adjacent fort is from the late 800’s. And someone's house is a couple of feet from it (on the right). Imagine having a building from 870AD in the US or Canada? That's 1100 years old. Old to us is 200 years. Now imagine building a house right beside it! They are living in the midst of their history.

Ummmmm....... I'm trying to think of an appropriate remark for this photo.

There are several wells inside the fort.

The architecture is beautiful.

This is a bathroom. The little round dots are pipes coming out of the walls.

And this is the potty.

These images are scratched into the original mortar.





Gotta little staircase theme going here.....


Inside the huge tower.

Took this right before I realized I was getting heat exhaustion. It was only 38 degrees that day (100), but running around in the heat and sun, climbing all the stairs, basically, I was exercising in a sauna. Whoops. When I got to the top of the tower I was whoozy and feeling sick. Took some view shots and came back down. We hightaled it out of there. By the time we got back to the car I couldn't decide which to do first- pass out, crap my pants or vomit. Mahfood said I was bright red. He took me to an air-conditioned hotel lobby where I enjoyed a cold beverage and some time out of the sun. 40 minutes later I was right as rain (pretty much) and off we went to Tanuf, the ghost town Katie had told me I must visit.

We 4-wheeled our way into this area where we saw this wall:


There are staircases cut into the wall leading to Tanuf. It lies on the other side of this rock wall
This falaj is right as you enter the village. A falaj is a man-made series of canals that carry water where needed. Oman has many ancient, functioning falaj systems. It's how farmers get water to their fields and they run through palm groves too.



Tanuf is a mud brick village that was bombed by the British in the 1950's. Quite similar to the ruins I found in Fanja, though Fanja had not been bombed.







This is one of the staircases that lead to that big rock wall. No, we didn't go down it. Too scary.

Then we were off. To Ibri. Then Bahla, where we had lunch and stopped by Jabreen Fort, which was closed for the day. I'm going to have to go back to Bahla. It is a walled city and the main fort there is a Unesco World Heritage site. Also in this area is the Al Hoota cave and in Bat and Al Ayn there are beehive shaped tombs from the 3d millennium BC- another Unesco World Heritage site. We had no time to explore these in detail.

Then we hit the road again and as we were heading into the mountain pass it started to rain. And then it poured. Within two minutes of it starting to rain it started to DUMP. And it was ridiculously windy. At one point, for about 20 seconds, we literally could not see the pick-up truck right in front of us. It was raining and blowing that hard. I have never seen rain like that in my life. And I'm from the Pacific North West. The road was flooding in one spot.

Then, as suddenly as the rain started, it stopped.

This was taken maybe 5 minutes after the rain started.

This was taken maybe 2 minutes later. You'd never have know it was raining a couple of miles away.

After we got through the mountain pass, we came back out into plains. Nothing for miles around. And in the middle of nowhere were these guys. There are wide strips of plastic sheeting stretched along the ground and on them are dates, drying in the sun. We were imagining these guys saying to each other "So where do you want to lay the dates out to dry? In the back yard? Beside the house?" "Nah! Let's drive out to the middle of nowhere and do it there. You know, along the highway, so they can get dusty as they dry."

Then just outside Rustaq: it happened. One of the things I have been waiting to see since I got here. There on the side of the road- camels. In the wild. Back home we see deer. Here, it's camels. And let me tell you, they're cool. They look pre-historic.


We 4-wheeled our way off the highway to get close enough for these photos. I was one happy camper. Or road-tripper. Or whatever. Now I need to see the sand dunes in the desert. Visiting the Wahiba sands will be another road trip. Mahfood wants to wait until the weather is not so hot.

And now, your reward for reading this far. My first real video. Meet my friend Mahfood. And since the poll has ended it looks like the next video will be of Mahfood dancing in a fountain and then enjoying a meal provided by me.

This video was so much fun to make. We laughed and laughed all day long.

In hindsight, we should have washed the car window before starting our journey. Did you hear him telling me not to get sick when we reached the top of the hill in Tanuf? And no, that's not his real voice.