Mountain village with water containers.

I have another from this village somewhere on the blog: but I wanted to explain about all those white tower type structures.

Even though in most of these mountain villages, there is an abundance of water available; that is why they are situated where they are. None of it is piped into the house from source. It was a daily job getting water from aquifers with no certainty of mineral content (resulting in a lot of kidney stones) or cleanliness. The government now tests all water used for human consumption, so in these remoter areas it is delivered by water truck, hence the white tower containers on each roof.

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.

Into the unknown.

The problem with checking files after all my stuff was delivered from Oman is finding images that I had forgotten about.
I had a habit of using my Digital camera for colour, then moving the lens to a film camera for B&W. As long as I did not disturb the tripod, I was able to get exactly the same image on film. A laborious task you may think, but if someone saw me change cameras (especially when it was the D800 to Nikon F2SB) it always ended in a conversation about how old the camera was. Gosh you still use film, I remember my Father or my Mother had a film camera. You must visit my village and take coffee & dates, I will show you some good places for photographs. That statement was gold dust ! I have lost count of the times I had been shown a place I didn’t know existed.
The one thing I take away from Oman is the hospitality given to visitors/strangers: I miss the welcoming face combined with “can I help you?” or “please come and have coffee” we don’t have that here.