Beehives and borders

Last weekend we headed to Oman with our friends Allen and Carolyn to see the beehive tombs at Al Jaylah. The first stop on Thursday night was the Ibri Hotel, home of the finest chips (French fries) in the Middle East. While the Ibri Hotel doesn’t pretend to be flash, its clean, secure and they do two important things well; (1) the bed is always comfortable and (2) the shower has reasonable water pressure plus the added benefit that you don’t need a PhD in hydranautics to operate it.

On Friday morning we drove from Ibri to Ibra, a trip of 3.5 hours. After a break for lunch we headed up into the Hajar Mountains to the Shir plateau in search of the Burooj Kibaykib-Al Jaylah tombs. On the drive up we followed the directions from the Omani government booklet on the area, they were pretty good, except some parts of the road had been washed out by Cyclone Gonu and the road position had changed since the book was published. The GPS came into its own again from that point.

We reached the top of the climb and as the road leveled out, in the distance the tombs could be seen rising out of the rocky plateau. They're awesome, these tall, stone towers standing like silent guardians over the broad, arid landscape. Sorry, I should have given a "flowery prose alert" shouldn't I? The tombs are of two types all built from the local rock. There are the large cylindrical towers some up to 5 metres high and then there are smaller Hafit/Umm al Narr tombs. The smaller tombs are thought to be part of a network as they have been found at several other places in Oman dotted along what were once trade routes. The tombs at Al Jaylah are believed to be 4,000 years old and while the local people knew of their existence, they were only ‘discovered’ by the West in the 1990s when an archaeologist looking through a book of aerial photos of Oman spotted the telltale shapes. The first archaeological expedition was mounted in 1991 and eventually 90 tombs were found in the area. In 1994 one of the tombs was opened and skeletal remains, beads and pottery fragments dating from the early Iron Age were found inside. Local legend has it that the towers were built by a man named Kibaykib who was half man-half jinn (spirit). I won’t go into the whole story, suffice to say its fairly gruesome and involves dark caves, dark deeds and a thunderbolt.

The plateau on which the tombs stand is 2,000 metres above sea level and until the 1970s, when contact was made by the authorities with the local tribespeople, was regarded as one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Oman. Life there is hard, the climate one of the driest on earth with an average rainfall of only 75mm, fortunately there are small minor springs in the area to supply water. The local people are semi-nomadic relying on their herds of goats and sheep for survival. Its still wild up there too; a woman was attacked by a wolf in one of the local villages only a few years ago. The locals have had some surprise visitors though, in April 1987 a plane crashed on the plateau during a demonstration flight for the Abu Dhabi Defence Force. Luckily no injuries.

While the use of the tombs as burial places is without question, there is also the possibility that they served as markers on the ancient trade route from the Omani interior (the Sharkiya) to the port at Tiwi. The copper trade flourished in Oman in pre-Islamic times with rich copper deposits in the Shir area as you’ll see from some of the photos.

After spending several hours at the tombs we headed down to the coastal village of Tiwi on a road described in one of our guide books as “challenging”. This road is not for the faint hearted, clinging as it does to the side of the cliff with nothing between you and oblivion but the piles of dirt pushed aside by a grader. One hairpin bend in the road is so sharp and so steep that it has been concreted (no idea how) but even then the Prado’s wheels slipped around trying to make traction. How they stopped the wet concrete from running to the bottom is beyond me though. This is not a road where you’d ever want to meet someone coming the other way.

We spent the night in Muscat and the next day visited the Sultan's Armed Forces Museum in Ruwi. If you're ever in Muscat, I'd recommend a visit to this museum, the display of militaria is varied and interesting, there's a comprehensive display detailing Oman's history and development *and* you get your own soldier-guide.

That afternoon we headed back to Dubai travelling on the new highway that runs parallel to the coast road that took such a hammering in Cyclone Gonu crossing the border back into the UAE at Hatta. It was only recently that I learned that a 10 mile section of the main highway on the UAE side of the border just out of Hatta, is actually part of Oman. When you’re on the road itself, the only clue to this oddity might be seeing an Omani flag on one of the buildings in the distance. Otherwise, you’d think you were driving in the UAE but you’d actually have driven in, and out of, a little piece of Oman without realising it. (This is unless you are unfortunate enough to have a traffic accident somewhere on that part of the road and you didn’t have Omani insurance.) Normally nothing happens on this stretch of road but on Saturday evening we ground to a halt as the Omani police assisted by the Army, stopped all road traffic at both ends of “their” section of the highway. The traffic was queued up for quite some distance at both entry points but the police seemed to be only checking trucks as all the cars were being waved through. Hmmm, interesting!

A resource on the beehive tombs at Al Jaylah is here.

A weekend in Oman

The photo is of Balat Sayt a village in the Omani mountains. All the photos are here but first the story:

We left Dubai late on Thursday afternoon, crossed the Omani border and stayed the night in Ibri. Ibri is the second largest city in Oman and is about a 3.5 hr drive from Dubai.

The next day Colin took me to see the pre-historic tombs at Al Ayn. He's seen them several times before but I'm a first-timer and they amazed me. The first view of the tombs is spectacular, twenty-one beehive shapes standing in a line on a ridge silhouetted against the imposing bulk of Jebel Misht. The tombs, which date from between 3,500BC to 2,500BC, were built using flat stones that have been layered one on top of the other, almost like weaving. Nothing has been used to hold the stones together, no mud to act like cement or anything like that, the beehive is held together by its own weight. Even after all the centuries several of the tombs are intact, though others have succumbed to the ravages of time and have fallen over into well organised piles of rocks. There is a small opening at the front of each beehive and I was able to crawl into the largest tomb and stand up inside.

Wadi Dham was the next stop, another new place for me. We walked a short way up the wadi but I wimped out of walking too far as it was hot, damn hot. We stopped off next at Jabrin Castle. It was closed because it was Friday but that was ok as we've both been there before.

On to Misfat Al Abreyeen, a village built on the side of a cliff. I was there a couple of years ago with my brother (kia ora Bro) then a drive up into the mountains to the top of Jebel Shams arriving after dark. Jebel Shams is the highest point in Oman (3075m). Spent the night at the camping ground that has bedouin style tents, very nice. After the 40 degree temperatures on the plains it was a shock to the system when later in the evening the temperature dropped to 16.

The next morning we went along the top of Jebel Shams to see the Wadi Nakhr Gorge which is known as the Grand Canyon of Arabia for good reason. It must be thousands of feet deep and being the Middle East there are no safety barriers or anything wussy like that! No, on second thoughts, at the most popular viewing spot there's a bit of wire half heartedly strung across a small section of the edge. The edge is a vertical drop. Misjudge it and over you go...next stop China! I walked over to the edge (not the wussy part with the wire) and jumped up and down a few times which seemed to get Colin's heart rate up a bit, can't understand why. A short way along is the village of Al Khateem and a track that goes round the lip of the canyon and ends at an abandoned village but being pressed for time we had to move on (meaning that I wimped out again).

Next was a drive on a rough goat track road to the village of Balad Sayt. The trip itself was only about 40 kms but it was hard driving all the way. The road was like Horsemans Road in Waitakere before they did it up, but without idiot sheep making sneak attacks from the bushes. Anyway as usual I'm off on a tangent, so let's get back to the story. Colin was going to Balad Sayt on a mission. Last year he and his son Daniel were exploring the village when they met an elderly gent named Hadth bin Nasser. They took some photos of Hadth that Colin's since had enlarged, printed and framed so the plan was to take them up to Balad Sayt to deliver to Hadth. The village is very old and the 'streets' are about as wide as a suburban footpath at best and at their narrowest about the width of a house hallway. There's no vehicle access naturally, cars are parked down in the wadi and people walk into the village from there. On the walk up to the Hadth's house we met a local youngster named Saud who spoke very good English. Saud rounded up Hadth's grandson and they showed us the way. Hadth was so pleased to see Colin that he ran outside and just about jumped into his arms. Saud translated for everyone which was a God-send (also meant that he'll be the centre of attention for days as the boy who spoke to The Foreign Visitors, so it's good for him too). After we had coffee, oranges and dates with Hadth, Saud took us to see his school. Saud told me that there's no medical clinic in his village and when I asked him what he wants to be when he grows up, he said without hesitation "A doctor, so I can come back to Balad Sayt and look after the people".

From Balad Sayt we...and when I say ’we’ I mean Colin...drove down the valley to the entrance to Snake Gorge where we stopped for coffee (but no scones). Along the way I noticed what looked like piles of timber lying at the bottom of the cliffs, but it's not timber it's rock that has fragmented off the cliffs. The land formations in Oman are fascinating. In some places the earth has been squeezed into shapes resembling rolling waves of different types of rock. A bit like a bowl of cake mix after someone's passed a knife through it. There was a place where a huge cliff of black rock suddenly changed direction and appeared to plummet headlong into the surrounding countryside, it made me think of the Titanic's last dive. It's hard to contemplate the power of the forces required to manipulate the earth into such torturous shapes. Ok enough from the amateur geologist, sorry Ian, I should leave it to the experts shouldn't I?

Down to the Batinah Plain and following the wadi, which is also the road. There’s been heavy flooding in the area recently and the damage has been quite extensive. As you'll see from the photos, the water level was high and the debris that was washed down can be seen in the branches of trees, and in the wiring of power pylons.

From there it was back to Dubai, though in an indicator of what could be waiting for us in the Gulf region this summer, it was still 40 degrees at 5pm. To quote Colin "It's going to be really hot when summer comes...."