The Wahiba Sands
The Wahiba Sands — the Sharqiya Sands on the newer maps — are the desert that Oman keeps two hours from its capital: a hundred and eighty kilometres of dunes running north to south from the Muscat–Sur road to the Arabian Sea, red-gold in the evening, forty metres and more high, with the camps of the tourists in the first belt of sand and the tents and camels of the Al Wahiba Bedouin deeper in. Bidiyah and Al Wasil are the gate towns where the tyres are let down and the 4×4s turn off the asphalt; the camps — a ring of barasti huts or canvas tents around a fire, a dune above them for the sunset — are an hour of sand in; the Bedouin women weave and the men race camels on the flats and pour tea for the visitor; and around the sands the east of Oman is close: Wadi Bani Khalid's turquoise pools half an hour away, Ibra's Wednesday women's market, and, on the coast, the turtles of Ras al Jinz coming ashore at night and the dhow yards of Sur.
The traveller drives out from Muscat in the afternoon — or comes on the loop from Nizwa — stops at Wadi Bani Khalid for a swim in the pools among the palms, lets the tyres down at Bidiyah and follows the camp's guide into the sand: the drive over the dunes with the light going long, the camp, the climb of the dune above it for the sunset with the sand cooling under the feet, dinner around the fire, the sky; the dawn from the same dune, a camel ride or the sandboard, a visit to a Bedouin family arranged by the camp, and the drive out; and, with the day, on to the coast for the turtles at Ras al Jinz that night, or back to Muscat by evening.
The Guide's honesty: the sands are a night, not a week — one or two are the measure —, and the camps range from honest to luxurious at prices to match; the driving in the dunes is for the camp's drivers or the experienced, and the tyres are let down and pumped up again at Bidiyah; the summer is unbearable and the camps know it; the Bedouin visit is a courtesy both ways — ask, buy a weaving, do not photograph the women unasked —; Oman is safe, courteous and dry outside the hotels; and the silence at the top of the dune after the sun goes, with the camp's fire a spark below and the whole sky lit, is worth the two hours from the city, which is why the Guide keeps this page in the desert's colour.