Category: Black & White.

Rocks in wadi.


This sort of choke point is quite common in most of the major wadis in Oman. Finding a way around or over can be a challenge, especially in the summer months when the rock is warm (hot) and covered in fine dust.
Accumulation of rock like this one is the result of the many Cyclones Oman has endured over the centuries; well trodden paths and even Falaj get blocked. There are several instances were a whole village has moved because of the loss of water when a Falaj gets blocked or damaged beyond repair.

Tombstones Musandam.

A rework of an old negative from my days at Khasab:
Nikon F4 T-max400 @ iso320.

Unfortunately a number of these negatives got irrecoverably damaged when Cyclone Gonu hit Oman in 2007.
I was working on Jebel Shams at the time, needed stuff from Muscat and had a rather traumatic encounter with a deluge of water hitting the road we were on. Eventually got back to my house, only to find rather a lot of water in the rooms; one of my files got wet with rain coming through the window edges – it was all my Khasab negatives. Managed to save a number by rewashing in Kodak Photoflo solution, but some had gone beyond even the wonders of scanning and fixing in Adobe Photoshop.  I was a lot more fortunate than many people, I’m only complaining about negatives while others lost their lives, houses, belongings and some businesses never recovered.
Hay-ho  such are the tribulations of life.

Not much information about these tombs, rather a lot of them with no real indication of which village they came from, even their age was in doubt; I got a lot of conflicting answers for that question.

Salalah/Muscat via Route 31.

It’s approximately 1000 km from Muscat to Salalah and this must be about halfway.

At least 2/3 of the journey is across desert and in the summer the temperatures can be upwards of 50 °C (122 °F) which takes its toll on both car & driver. Travel is best done at night in the summer months, but this has the added danger of Camels walking in the road. Sometimes there is very little if any cell phone signal, so don’t breakdown otherwise it’s a long walk. Although phone coverage is a recent worry for some people; it’s not very long ago that there was no communications at all outside the few towns that were en route. People forget that up until the late 1970’s there was no tarmac roads outside Muscat, so phone coverage was the least of travellers worries.