Episode summary:
I travelled to the Jebel Akhdar mountains in Oman to spend a peaceful, sun-drenched day marvelling at the magnificent geology of this ancient range and learning about its hardy goat herds. If you’re asking yourself ‘is Oman a mountainous country’ or ‘is Oman tourist friendly’ this podcast might be able to help. Oman is one of my favourite places to visit – I consider it the ‘real Arabia’, with hundreds of preserved forts, mosques and souks, and spectacular landscapes.
Listen to a podcast about visiting the breathtaking mountains of Oman.
Transcript – S1 E11: Among Oman’s breathtaking mountains
This week we’re communing with goats in a geologically stunning landscape in the Sultanate of Oman.
It’s high noon in the Jebel Akhdar mountains in late May. The temperature up here feels like it’s in the high 20s Celsius. It’s very pleasant, especially compared with where I just came from, the ancient city of Nizwa on the baking rocky desert floor where the mercury was over 35 and that was only shortly after breakfast.
On my drive up the mountain I pass only small clumps of greenery, date palm plantations and olive and fig trees mainly, with herds of goats sheltering in their shade. Higher up I pass more and more juniper bushes. My guide, Abdullah, stops by a particularly gnarled and twisted juniper for us to have our Arabic coffee elevenses and tells me the tree is more than a thousand years old. I have no reason to doubt him because as I’m learning in Oman everything seems to be very old. Oldest of all is the geology, which is nothing short of spectacular. From up here in the mountains the entire landscape looks like it belongs in a museum of natural history, or even a modern art gallery given the colours and exuberant paintbrush swoops of the giant rock folds.
I persuade Abdullah to take a break at the nearby luxury Anantara al Jabal al Akhdar resort where, he tells me, his cousin works. It’s mainly because I want to be alone for an hour or two. Slightly reluctantly he agrees and I backtrack a kilometre or two to a small stone mosque I spied en route. It looks like it hasn’t seen prayer for some decades but it makes for excellent photography. Once I’ve got the shots I want I take a lungful of clean mountain air and walk over the warm flat rocks to the dizzying edge of a cliff. The rocks are oddly and alarmingly smooth and slippery here and the drop is vertical – about a thousand feet straight down – so I creep along holding on with my hands until I can find a safe spot to sit.
I can see for miles, deep into the canyon in front of me, to the end of the narrow V-shaped valley to my right and beyond to lifeless rocky peaks that have baked through millions of sun-drenched days such as this one. It may sound odd to find natural beauty in a landscape practically devoid of life, yet I do. As well as feeling joy in the green of a wood, the turquoise of a glacial stream and the deep blue of an ocean, I also feel it in these dramatically sculpted rock walls and knife-edge ridges. I wonder if any human has ever scaled them or are they among the few parts of the planet where we have not scuffed our size tens.
A turbulent geology
The Jebel Akhdar mountains are part of the longer Hajar range which has undergone some of the most fantastic turbulence of any rocks in the world. They lie about 100 kilometres (or 62 miles) inland from the Omani coast and rise to a height of just over 3,000 metres (about 9,870 ft) at the peak of Jabal Shams and – just slightly lower – Jebel Akhdar. Over millions of years the rocks have been sucked 80 kilometres or 50 miles down into the scalding mantle of the earth and then dragged up again to the heights we see today. This is why geologists have found sedimentary rocks from old seabeds sitting up at more than 2,000 metres (or 7,000 feet) above sea level. While all this was going on the rocks were squeezed and stretched like putty, layered like millefeuille and then twisted and folded into great loops and arches.
The result is a series of breathtaking peaks where fused rock layers climb vertically from the valley floor then turn abruptly down again in a 180-degree hairpin bend, only to twist some more on the way down and finally disappear beneath the valley floor. Other sections maintain a perfectly horizontal pattern along a valley wall before – en masse – kinking down and plummeting at 45 degrees towards a dry riverbed.
World’s toughest goats
The only sound I can hear is the mournful bleating of goats. They’re somewhere on the impossibly steep slope on the other side of the valley but I can’t see them. I guess it’s maybe a kilometre (or a little over half a mile) across the valley at this point, maybe slightly less. I get my binoculars from my rucksack but still struggle to locate the goats. Then, there they are! Black dots making their way along the thinnest of tracks. How do they stay attached to the valley wall? How do they not slip on the loose rock and plummet down into the abyss? I know this balance and sure-footedness is what mountain goats are known for but it’s still quite amazing to witness it. There’s no human shooing them along or calling for them and there’s absolutely no vegetation anywhere for them to eat. They’re just out for a stroll in the sunshine, I think.
A shadow passes behind me and I turn with a jolt. Abdullah has found me. He sits and shares with me sticky sweet halwa paste from a plastic tub. He explains how his uncles used to keep a few herds up here and sometimes they did not see them for days but they always showed up again at the farmhouse hungry and glad to be home. Where did the goats go? I ask. “Nobody knows,” he replies.
© copyright Matthew Brace
