SALALAH-QUY

(Summary: Paul and three other faculty members drive to Salalah Thursday 10/11 at the start of the week-long Eid El Fitr vacation, stay at resort hotel, take a driving tour of local mountains, and return Monday 10/15)

We’re ba-ack!

This Monday, fellow Language Centre teachers Helen (UK), Sandra (Canada), Wendell (US), and I drove all 1000 km back from Salalah, near the Yemen border, to Muscat -12 hours total. At least Sandra and I could rotate driving duties. I have to say I was glad to be done with Sandra’s two Keith Urban CDs that played over and over both down and back. And it was a pretty good deal as far as vacations go. The planefare would have been $237 roundtrip. Instead, the trip cost each person $44 total for the gas consumed. (Cheap Omani gas cost me about $15 to fill my tank.) The 5-star beach hotel was also a deal: $104 a night per person, sharing a double room.

QITBIT

Backing up to the beginning, Thursday morning, the start of the weekend and still in Ramadan daylight fasting time, we set out about 10:30 in two vehicles – my new Terios, which held up admirably, and Helen’s older 4-wheel vehicle. To break up the trip we decided to go most of the way the first day but stop in a rest house along the main road that evening in a town/pit stop called (variously) Qatqit, Qitqat, Qatbit, Qitbit, Quitbit … Every map and guidebook had a different spelling! (Qitbit, pronounced like “kit-beet”, seems the closest to the Arabic.)

Being Ramadan, there were no restaurants or food places open during the day, meaning we were on our own for food and drink. Just to be safe, I took two boxes of bottled water. We had to be careful no police saw us indulge in our carnal appetites – some Westerners have been fined or arrested during Ramadan, even drinking water from a bottle in their cars.

We pulled into the little one-horse town of Qitbit an hour after sunset and were pleasantly surprised to see our rest house motel was situated in the middle of a large grove of planted trees. October climate in the desert was dry and mild, with the temperature comfortably around 79º after sunset. Islam, the Indian hotel manager (with a degree in hotel management), helped us to the rooms with our bags. Rooms were $42 a night. A bit under Motel 6 quality (there was only a thin bottom sheet, no top sheet, and a polyester blanket to cover you), but we slept fine. The architect had taken the best of Islamic building conventions, including a two-story Omani fort-like tower on the front and a lovely courtyard in the center surrounded by columned walkways – like a European abbey. Simple, but attractive. Since we were literally in the “middle of nowhere”, after dinner we decided to see the best show in town – the stars. We walked away from the garish neon lighting of the gas station and truck headlights and got to see an unusually thick Milky Way overhead and the smudge of the Pleiades nebula above the northeastern horizon. I think I saw Leo, my “sign”, too, but it’s been a few years since I was in cub scouts!

DHOFAR

Oman’s southern “capital” and second-largest city Salalah lies in Dhofar (“though-far”) Province, a mountainous zone along the Yemeni border. It was famous in ancient times as a frankincense land and more recently in the ‘70s as the site of a civil war between socialist South Yemen-armed mountain guerillas and the central government in Muscat. (The government won with British military backing.)

You approach Salalah from the desert plateau, where all is dry and rocky and monotonous. Suddenly, you come in at the top of the escarpment, whose cliffs are a grassy green with leafy trees and wandering herds of cows due to the summer monsoon rains that hit this – and only this – bit of the Arabian Peninsula before hitting India. The rains had departed in September before we arrived, but their green effect was still noticeable, even more so after driving 1000 km through desert. The “camel crossing” road signs were now replaced by “cow crossing” ones. Salalah, our goal, lay down the hill on the coast at the end of the winding road down the mountains, and our Crowne Plaza Resort Hotel lay up the coast north from Salalah just a tad.

CROWNE PLAZA

Our 5-star hotel (the Hilton was the only other local hotel in its class) occupied a good bit of prime beachfront real estate with tennis courts, a driving range, and a health spa. In addition to the lovely sandy private beach with high waves crashing comfortably in the distance (more dramatically than most of Southern California), the most attractive feature was the outdoor dining area under the coconut palms wrapped in strands of lights at evening time. Every night there was a large and varied buffet and – after the Eid had started – wine on the menu. (Hotels usually serve alcohol - about the only place it's available - but not during Ramadan!) A mediocre Russian live music act entertained guests with badly pronounced English-language hits. (At least, I suspect it was English.)

The first day, we had agreed to just decompress at the hotel, sit around the pool or nap in our rooms. I napped and read my Niall Ferguson history of WWI and WWII. The second day, we piled into my little Terios – it stood up to four passengers much better than I expected - and took the main road south along the coast towards Yemen. In the distance, the escarpment was still green with brooding gray clouds sitting on the peaks.

Driving through a mountain pass out into the coast we happened on a beautiful unspoiled white-sand beach that extended for five miles at least. There were government-built shelters for day trippers but hardly anyone there. We parked and waded around and explored the cliffs and surf. At the other end of the beach were the Mughsail blowholes, which unfortunately had become the major family tourism site that day – crowds of mainly Indian families, many having driven down from Abu Dhabi and Dubai for the holiday judging from the license plates. The blowholes weren’t “blowing” very much, but the cliffs were impressive.

BRIDE OF FRANKINCENSE

Then it was up and up the wild mountain road (the mountains were wild; the road was new and well-engineered) along the cliffs towards the Yemeni border. I think we were above 3000 meters towards the end. It was also the native ecosystem of the famous Boswellia Sacra, or frankincense tree. One of our guidebooks even mentioned how many kilometers in to stop to look at a “particularly good” grove. There were a few smallish trees in a gully that we spotted first, so we dutifully got out and hiked over to check them out. As we got to the scene and touched the smooth bark and sniffed our fingers for the tell-tale scent, we realized we were surrounded by the well-camouflaged trees, which headed up the hillsides on every side as far as you could see. They didn’t cluster like a forest, but were evenly spaced up and up to the tops of the gray-stone hills. The few smallish leaves (it is a desert, after all) clump around the top ends of the branches. It’s not a “leafy” tree, but it is a true tree.

The frankincense comes from the resin of the tree. Harvesting is by cutting gashes into the branches and collecting the congealed sap once it dries a bit. New frankincense, an emerald brown, is still pliable, like chewing gum, and is chewed for its medicinal properties. After several weeks it hardens into stony amber lumps, and can be melted with fire to release the characteristic smoke and smell that centuries of religious ceremonies have sought after.

Today, Dhofari incense is still considered top-of-the-line, but it’s surprisingly cheap. For about $9 I bought about 5 pounds in the Salalah bazaar. In ancient times, it was like petroleum, a commodity that netted fortunes for growers along the south coast of Arabia – Sheba and Ubar.

CLOUDS FROM BOTH SIDES NOW

After touching, probing and smelling the trees in easy reach, we headed back to the car and continued up. At one point, we passed camels grazing on the mountain grass on both sides of the road. We stopped to get pictures, and one curious female – a bit narcissistic, I thought – came near to pose, stopping right in the downward lane for several minutes while we got good angles. We were now driving along the top of the seaside cliffs with the Indian Ocean stretched out us below, and the ecosystem had changed from mountain desert to seaside desert, and the plants were mainly succulents like yucca. But the climb hadn’t ended. We drove up further until we could look down at some clouds hugging the cliffs to our left and were equal level with a line of clouds out at sea. We finally came to an Omani army checkpoint, where we explained we wanted to go just a bit farther “for pictures”. By that time, it was only about an hour till sunset, so when we reached the summit and had gotten our fill of photos, we decided to head back to Salalah. It gets dark fairly quickly once the sun goes down.

Day 3 was the last day before we were to undertake the 12-hour trip back, so most in our group voted to unwind a bit more at the hotel during the day, going into town in the evening to eat and shop. One woman stayed behind, so the other three drove into town for dinner, stopping at a roadside coconut and banana stand to get pictures. The Indian workers chopped the top off a green coconut for Sandra and me, and we sipped the milk through a straw. We ended up at a Lebanese restaurant downtown (Baalbeck), which was very tasty and cheap – especially compared to the $26 buffet dinners we’d been having at the hotel.

We then headed for the silver and gold bazaar, but because it was Eid and a holiday for almost everyone, we found only a couple of shops open. I wanted to buy a traditional silver incense burner but couldn’t find one. And I didn’t need bracelets or Bedouin jewelry. So, a bit let down, we headed back to the hotel after a short wander-around.

Day 4 was 12 hours of flat desert, forgettable gas station stops and bad food. It was dark already by the time we get into the Muscat area on the divided highway. (I kept expecting to see signs for La Cañada and Santa Clarita, it felt so much like Southern California.)

Back home, I found piles of grading waiting to get done before school starts up again Saturday. One more week, then finals. But we all needed the break!