Dazzling white rocks and clear water at beautiful Wadi Bani Khalid, and in complete contrast, spectacular dunes in the Wahiba Desert.
It's a long drive from Jebel Akhdar to the Wahiba Desert so we set off straight after breakfast. We had a break to refuel the car and ourselves with excellent cardamom/saffron tea and cheese and honey Omani bread, the honey was dark so possibly acacia. Four hours to reach this picturesque wadi.
Dazzling white rocks and green water make this a popular spot, but there weren't too many people there. Some swim in one of the pools but the rest of the extensive wadi is people-free.
On to the Wahiba Desert, our driver/guide Kareem first stopping at a tyre shop to drop the tyre pressures down from 35 to 18psi for driving on deep sand.
We paused at a Bedouin camp where only the elderly matriarch of the family was home, again someone Kareem obviously knew well. Everyone else was either working or at school. Kareem had brought a gift for her, which he gave to me to give. He brought gifts for everyone he knew along the way.
We took our shoes off and sat on carpets and cushions for the coffee and dates which are always produced for guests. We were in a vast structure of palm straw matting on scaffolding - not really a tent, though very traditionally furnished and carpeted. There were Bedouin tents nearby, black material supported on poles, mostly ringed with a striped cloth and looking more modern in construction than the long stretches of black cloth traditionally used by the Bedouin.
Nowadays most Bedouin live in the towns and villages on the outskirts of the desert, though many will also maintain a tent in the sands. The traditional nomadic Bedouin life seems to have almost completely disappeared but they still love their camels, above everything else. There were a good number in pens outside the tent, and two very special racing camels, which had their own personal attendant.
We drove on into the desert, stopping two or three times for the views.
The patterns in the sand were fabulous.
We also had to stop to rescue a self-driving tourist who had tried and failed to get up a dune. He was travelling on his own in quite a low-powered car. Fortunately Kareem was able to direct him to an easier route.
We arrived at our desert camp, Thousand Nights, at around 4pm. It is around 45km into the desert, the furthest of all the camps. There are one or two closer to the town and we saw a big one being built on the way to Thousand Nights.
Before meeting Kareem for a drive into the dunes I went for a walk and discovered quite a few camels grazing in the desert - no idea what they could be eating, there didn't look to be anything growing at all!
Kareem loves off-road driving. He'd been fantastic crossing the Hajar mountains on vertiginous dirt roads and negotiating rocky wadi floors and now he was thoroughly enjoying himself racing up the dunes - this was by far the scariest driving as Kareem had to keep the speed up so we were going very fast, but we felt completely safe with him.
We were here for the sunset. No-one else was on the dunes with us. We could see a few tourists who had been taken to a lower set of dunes in the distance, but other than that there was no-one.
We headed back for the buffet dinner; quite a lot on offer but it wasn't great quality apart from the fresh orange juice! Afterwards we walked back to our tent under a sky covered in stars, amazing.
Breakfast next day was much better than the dinner - between us we had freshly made cheese omelettes with baked beans and hash browns, followed by a freshly made waffle and a pancake with Nutella for me!
I went for a pre-dawn walk to watch the sun rise on the dunes, just beautiful.
