An Omani Gift

The first two steps would be easy, but the third may have disturbed my sleep the night before. (Or it could have been the chilis.)

Phase One was catching the bus from Sur at 8:30. Long range buses are unpredictable, so I chatted with a man from Kerala from 8:00 to 9:00. A large portion of the people I’ve met in Oman are workers from the Subcontinent, mostly Indians but plenty of Pakistani and Bangladeshi people too. The latter two get a little suspicion from the Omani, which surprises me since they’re more likely to share a religion. But from my shallow exposure, it seems to be a good situation all around, missing the exploitation and tension seen elsewhere.

The bus idled after we were on, and two more people showed up. The driver told me to move back. You can’t have men sitting near women. I joined the boys at the back of the bus, and felt wonderfully far away from the big yellow bus to middle school. If I could show my life now to the lad of me then, I hope he would have smiled real big.

About 40 minutes later I stepped out onto a sun-blasted shoulder and started walking. This is the softer season, merely low 80s instead of summer’s 120. The Omani sun is unapologetic. Fifteen very bright minutes after that, I climbed in a boat with a French family and started Phase Two. From the Arabic for “Gorge between cliffs,” and within an easy 2.5 hour reach of Muscat, the ravine of Wadi Shab is a popular destination for locals and tourists. A lot of Oman is rocks, lovely rocks, hot rocks, so a walk and swim up into a canyon sounded perfect.

An oasis is a specific kind of heaven. The first mile or so was between little farming terraces that might be finished? Palm tree shade, giant blue dragon flies, and the few other walkers gifted me a background soundtrack of languages familiar and unidentifiable. I love that. The hike’s second half climbed over boulders, with little sections of cement paths helpfully laid down in places, and when you can walk along the irrigation channel it feels like the freeway.

Eventually the water spans cliff to cliff, and the ecstasy begins. The sweat washes off, your feet fly free below you, and to be immersed in green water is always a joy, made all the more poignant when you’re at the foot of a great desert and surrounded by a stone oven. At the top, a crack in the cliff looked like the end, but everyone knew you can swim through, or under, to reach a waterfall cave within. It was exactly wide enough for my head, which brushed both sides briefly and reminded me I am not a caver by nature. Stone is just so relentless.

Inside was like a natural shrine, and everyone is welcome to worship as they wish. Soak and feel small. Drift and feel held. Slowly tread water in the politely insistent current and feel loved by the land itself. Climb the waterfall with the disintegrating ropes and jump off while your girlfriend films. Everything is welcome, everywhere is beauty, and I found myself smiling at everyone like a proper weirdo. But they all smiled back. Bunch of weirdos.

The bag I had brought to protect my phone for the swim proved to be full of holes, so I had to hope somebodies have taken and shared adequate images. (This guy did, video here.) For me it was enough to add it to the museum of beauty that lives within me. What a fantastic world we have.

Walking back, I swear I was going to put my shirt back on in just a second, but lord it felt good to move and feel the sun. The white stripe from my bag is unsurprising on my well burned shoulder now, but it was worth it. The boat ride back was included in the one rial price (about $2.40) which is quite steep for a 30 second ride, but I am happy the locals are getting paid for the beauty they share with us. I wonder if it’s like Cuba, where anyone lucky enough to get in on the stream supports a big family network.

Then Phase Three. The bus back toward Sur would pass in something like five hours, but they don’t stop unless the driver both sees you waving far enough in advance, and he feels like stopping. They do not have a good track record. There’s one bus per day. Plus, five very warm, very hungry hours before I would find out. Don’t think about 29. (There’s a little cafe there, but no electricity that day so only soda on offer.) I walked back toward the freeway with my hitchhiking thumb ready.

This was the part that replaced sleep with images of sleeping hungry in a cement drainage ditch if I was slightly lucky, feeling the disgust of being looked at and declined over and over for sun blasting hours, and of course the whole murder thing. That one didn’t worry me much. Violence like that mostly lives in the Western Hemisphere.

The first car was leaving a little hotel right as I walked up, but she smiled apologetically and drove away. The guy in the second car looked at me like I was trying to sell rocks. Not a great start. A donkey was standing in front of a road sign. He looked at me with as much disinterest as the third car.

The first car came back to take a photo of the donkey. She pondered my suggestion, long and hard. Then that marvelous German woman gave me a ride back to Sur. What a fantastic world we have. Sure, Sur stretches way down the coast in a sprawl of one-family sultanate compounds, so it was over an hour walk from there to my hotel, and I’d used up my day’s karma so for the first time since coming to Oman there were zero taxis honking their offer at me. But even an hour later when I got to the hotel, feeling like a barbeque pit on the 5th of July, I was amazed at this fantastic world we live in.

And hungry. But the guy I met at dinner is another post.