Travels in Oman: Mountain Country

Oman is a country defined by its mountains. None are very tall (the tallest, Jebel Akhdar, which we approached was about 3000 meters or 9800 feet) but all are striking due to the variegated colors of their minerals, ranging from gold to greenish-brown to ochre red. In the midst of these mountains lie verdant oases called wadis, like the one seen in the top photograph, which in the summer are filled with flowering fruit trees, like pomegranates and apricots. Everywhere, fruits and vegetables also grow in abundance on the steep mountain terraces that lead down to neat whitewashed villages. Water is supplied by man-made falajes, an ancient Omani irrigation system in which underground water is supplied to the villages by subterranean channels. In the winter, however, no vegetation was growing and no villagers were around during our mountain trek, which made us wonder if the population had grown so prosperous that they could afford second homes in the city.

Another remarkable feature of the landscape here was created when the first organisms inhabited the Earth: the tectonic plates here were arranged in such a way that the primeval ocean moved on top of the soil. As a result, large swaths of the rock here are imprinted with fossil impressions of million-year-old marine organisms, such as snails and trilobites, which makes walking around Oman country truly a wonder.