By Heidi Trautmann

...and the star shone bright to help the three kings find the way to the place where the new king was born and they brought with them gold, frankincense and myrrh.... so it is written and they rode on camels’ back.

We stood there under one of these trees that keeps, under its red skin, between the green and red layers, the precious tears the tree gives off when it is cut and injured, and I touched the tear… yellow. It is the Boswellia or Olibanum tree that grows in the interior of the country in dry and rocky areas. From the old ages we know of many other stories since it represented the riches of a country, the incense with its fragrant odor. Seafaring people from East and West travelled to the place and the Omani people became seafarers themselves because they own 3.200 km of coastline. The frankincense has a museum of its own and it is sold everywhere as souvenir of Oman and it is used in all households and shops, and to refresh themselves the Omanis lift their habit, step over the smoke giving incense stove and literally fumigate their body and clothes…something I would love to do myself.

Our programme took us from Larnaca to Dubai, a city we did not want to miss, known among others for its daring architecture and that was what we went to see by taxi, all the way down to the Burj Khalifa. By bus we were later taken to the border with the Musandam peninsula, an exclave of Oman and we enjoyed a three hour drive through rural country side where we saw goats run wild und unmolested across the highway, they were left looking for grass wherever they could find it. We had to pass through two borders of the Emirate of Dubai and Oman. We had to pay approx. Euro 20 per person at the first one.

We soon were captivated by the landscape, the steep cliffs Masandam is famous for, with roads cut into them, cliffs along beautiful bays with small fishermen villages like birds’ nests. We reached Khasab, a well-known port city, appreciated in the Middle Ages for its security in the Gulf of Oman with Iran just opposite a stone throw away, the Portuguese fort reminds us of these times, today a beautiful ethnological museum. From our hotel just outside of Khasab we could watch the fishermen come in through a canal on the one side which led to the inner city quay and on the other side the huge German cruiser’Mein Schiff’ which had just come in with approx. 3000 passengers on board; there are also daily ferries going south to Muscat and Salalah.

Here I need to mention the present Sultan Qaboos who since the 1970s has successfully brought unity to the various tribes, wealth and security, education and culture and so much more; when he returned home from his academic education abroad he realized in what desperate state his country was and he managed through an enormous effort to force the wheel around. People had left their villages for lack of everything and he knew that would be the end of it, so he promised them that they would have a better life if they stayed on and he gave them houses and boats, roads to connect the hinterland villages with the coast; he gave them credit and to all children, male or female, best education; he built schools and hospitals, museums, and everybody could come to him and ask for help. All the money that came in through the oil discovered in the 60s went back to the people. What he did: he hired and employed expert help from outside in order to achieve best results in the shortest of time. What we admired most was the cleanliness wherever we looked and we all said unanimously that the ministers of some countries should come here to learn how things are done.

I must not repeat the whole history although I read a lot about this fascinating country, but here you will find it in short….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oman

I was surprised to find the architecture in Oman wisely kept in the old Arabic style, it has despite all modernity kept its own character. The town of Khasab is reconstructed in sand-coloured clay structures, never more than two stories with clay walls around but with beautiful gates, even in the poor mountain villages each property has a somehow beautiful gate included in their walls. For three days we were taken to places high up in the mountains where rocks are dominating life, rocks with sometimes fossils in them, fossils of shells and fish, here on 1000 m height. Looking around us we saw the movement the liquid soil was one day driven up by the encounter of the continental shelves when our globe was still young, we could see the waves in all beautiful earth colours from dark brown and grey to sandy yellow, ochre and red. The people live here in clay houses and go to live in rock shelters in winter, it keeps them and the animals warm and in summer they keep their food in the rocky store houses while they go down to their new houses by the sea where they grow dates and go fishing, that is their trade here.

It is an old country, the petroglyphs prove it, we see them on pieces of rocks, the drawings of our ancestors; were they driven up at the same time as the fossils or are they from a later century, I wondered…while I stood there imagining those days…I touched the stone with the drawings by the hand of another artist of ages back.

Another day we spent on a local dhau exploring the depths of the fjord like deep bays and we encountered dolphins which come here to mate and breed, they like to play, just as the tourists.  In some cracks of the steep cliffs we saw fishing material stored, big nets, left by fishermen, perhaps they might need it in a case of urgency.  All around wherever there is a niche in the cliffs, there is a small settlement of houses, fishermen who havn’t known anything else; their only connection to the outer world is by boat, also their children are taken to school for the whole week, they only return for the weekend or after a whole term. However, wherever possible there is a school even in the most remote villages.

The food we got to taste is Arabic but often Indian, or of Philippine origin because the cooks are mostly foreigners; rice is predominant, the meat or fish is cooked with the rice. Goat and beef are mostly local, chicken and other meat is imported. The menus in the big hotels are very good, we felt very spoilt. There is no alcohol served in normal restaurants only in bigger hotels, but I have seen Omanis in their traditional habits, black and white, white the men, black the women, smoke and drink in public in the afternoon on hotel terraces, deeply involved in discussions.

Some more three days we spent in Salalah, the second biggest town in the South which we reached by Omanair, so beautifully kept with flowers and wide green park like areas along its highways. Along the mountain range the city is built on a relatively small coastal strip where the monsoon rain coming from the East will shed its water while the mountain plateaus further away from the coast will be left without. We visited all the highlights such as forts and museums, the antique Frankincense harbour, where you get the history told within an hour, concentrated,  but the two days we spent in the mountains were terrific; the abstract forms of sandstone, caves and cracks driven in by the wind, the beds that were formed by torrential downpours, the small community of hard plants that survives the hot climate, the few wadis where camels and cows are bred, goats yes – we did not see any chicken or house animals such as dogs… In one place we were shown baobab trees the seeds of which must have been carried in by birds….tourists? The roads cut into the mountains took us along the coastline with beautiful views, the blue sea seen from above against the rough coastline made us stop often, no people, just pure nature. In one of the natural caves we were served our lunch. Nature and its wonders are Oman’s assets and they are proud to show them to the visitors.

The final two days we were spending in Muscat, the capital of Oman, an hour’s flight  from Salalah, and again we were overwhelmed by its architecture, the big Mosque of Sultan Qaboos, his palace and the Opera House; here the traffic was enormous along the wide highways again beautifully kept – by the way, car owners will be fined if they let their cars get dirty – throwing rubbish into the streets will equally be fined – many restaurants along the coastal line for the inhabitants to enjoy the cool wind from the sea, I am sure they will need it in the summer months.  However, chains like Gloria Jeans, Macdonalds and the like are also present and the youths seem to like it. It is in the souks that you find the local tradesmen, spices and frankincense and dates; amazing are the shops with gold for the ladies, huge pendants, fleece like forms still belonging to traditional costumes.  Thousands of Americans were flooding the souks, they were taken there by bus from the big cruisers in the harbour.

It was certainly a great pleasure to spend our evenings in the luxury hotels outside of the cities, the service was overwhelmingly polite, with people from Sri Lanka, Africa, India, Philippines and so forth, from Syria and Lebanon, though we thoroughly enjoyed some meals in local souk restaurants.

The ten days short trip to Oman was for us an eye opener and we came back with great respect for the achievements done in the last decades by the present sultan. However, we heard that he is sick and people worry deeply how the country’s future will be, if his successor will continue this very humane government. We wish them well.

The tour was organised by Kaleidoskop Turizm in Kyrenia