2nd day of Eid, 1423 Finally the end of the month of fasting, Ramadan, was upon the Islamic world and since I had an open schedule for the day, I decided to hop in my little car rental and take a nice daytrip inland of Oman to check out the towns of Nakhal and Rustaq which are located some 175km/110mi from west of Muscat. My travel companion Lonely Planet: Middle East wasn't terribly informative about what I'd actually find in Nakhal and Rustaq other than mentioning that there was fortress located in both, with the enclave of Rustaq also having the honor of once serving as Oman's capital during the Middle Ages. What better reason to drive out into the desert should I need than that! My trip started with a quick gas-up at the local Shell petrol station where I stocked up on a bagful of treats at the accompanying minimart, and then I hit the road by jetting out onto Sultan Qaboos Highway - direction west. The drive itself was pretty straight forward - just keep driving down Sultan Qaboos Highway (a.k.a. Highway 1) through the huge round-about intersections every so few kilometers and just making sure not to get dumped off in the wrong direction on accident as exited them, and follow the signs toward Barka which would be my turn off onto the Highway 13 Loop which would take me both to Nakhal and Rustaq. As I drove along Highway 1 I could see huge tracks of artificially forested lands located between the road way and the coast which was about a kilometer to the north. More like orchards, or a park. In any case, they were all closed off and posted as private lands of the Sultan. Driving up the highway with me as well was a modern-day caravan of brand new darkly colored Ford Expedition SUVs forming part of the Omani national security forces and they were doing some sort of cruising, stopping, and speeding exercise most of the way up toward the Barka turnout. As I drove along the highway I would see their lights flashing then they would speed past on my left in formation, suddenly pull over onto the right side of the highway and stop, then 10 or 20 minutes later I'd see them pull up from behind and overtake me, and further on down the road I would see them parked again on the side of the road. This continued on for quite some time, until I reached the Burka round-about and began my trek south into what looked like a wide, dry river valley lined on both distant edges by arid, treeless rocky mountains. Scattered here and there across the parched landscape were tiny shrubs that seemed rather adept at extracting precious moisture from the ground since they were all nice and green and full of life. They were few and far between, but those that were there seemed to be living a rather successful existence! As I approached my first destination, Nakhal, I could see a definite greening of the landscape off in the distance, which seemed to spring up just on the far side of town extending toward the base of the mountains as they rose up beside the flat and stony valley. I approached, I was greeted by a friendly "Welcome to Nakhal" tourist sign (very unlike Saudi Arabia!) where I was instructed to turn left and was then guided easily toward the fortress located right in the center of the village perched upon a huge boulder which almost magically jutted up straight out of the flat and dusty surroundings.

I parked the car near the fort and decided to take a walk circling around the southern and western sides of it to get some nice sunlit pictures. Surrounding the base of the monstrous boulder on top of which the fortress sits is a nicely manicured ring of hedges and flowering bushes. Clearly, war has not afflicted this site for a very long time. As I made my way toward the far side of the fort I noticed a small peppering of dusty one-story Omani homes with the sounds of families going about their daily business within emanating out through the open windows. As I approached one - standing right where I needed to crouch down to get some good shots of the fortress - I suddenly noticed two young boys burning rubber out of a small alleyway around the corner of their whitewashed home and greet me cheerfully, "Hello! Hello!" "Hello to you too!" "Take our picture! Take our picture!" "Are you sure???" (thinking back to the children in Mutrah who had wanted me to take their picture just days before when their mother jumped outside and started freaking out on me.) "No problem! No problem!" So they stood nice and proud dressed in their tiny full length light blue robes crowned by colorful dapper little caps. I snapped a picture and then their brother and sister peeked their heads out the front door of the house and smiled at me as they noticed the camera in my hand and could clearly see that I was a visitor to their friendly town. "Take our picture too!" they crowed. As per request, I lifted my camera and snapped yet again. Then the older brother, about age 13, grabbed his two little brothers and stood beside the hedge and commanded that I take another picture. *CLICK*! After that, I said to them, "Hey, come here. This is a digital camera." "What's a digital camera?" they inquired. "Come look. You can see the pictures I've just taken of you on the tiny little screen on the back!" We went over toward a shadow near the house where the sun wasn't so bright and I turned the camera around revealing the small LCD monitor on the back and flipped it into "Review Images" mode and as soon as their faces splashed across the tiny computer display they all gasped and let out a giant "OOOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!!" It was really cute. "Show me! Show me! Show me!" they proclaimed as each one of them reached for the camera to get a better view. "This is a pricy piece of electronic machinery here kids, let's not get wild with it, OK?!" I thought as I aimed the view finder to each child to provide them with their image. "Print! Print! We want a copy!" the little boys blurted out. "I'm sorry, this isn't a Polaroid. It doesn't make paper copies. Well, not here on the spot at least. I have to print them from my computer," I explained. I'm not so sure they believed me, or understood though. ;) Then yet another older brother poked out of the house and introduced himself, welcomed me to Nakhal, and I showed him the pictures that I had taken and we had a nice conversation. He was about 16 or 17, told me that he had lived his life there in Nakhal and often sees tourists come to look at the fortress. I told him that I was from America and was interested in learning about Oman and thought the fortress was really beautiful and that people in Oman have been quite friendly to me on my trip and I was very grateful. He asked about the camera and I explained to him as well that it was a digital camera, and I think perhaps it was the first digital one he had ever seen before. I told him that I use it to post pictures on the internet and that if he had access to the Internet that I could send him copies of the pictures. Alas, the Internet hasn't yet reached Nakhal, he informed me, so we'd just have to wait till later for that. Then he spotted my Macintosh iPod MP3 music player attached to my belt and was really fascinated by that as well. "What's that? A mobile phone?" "No, it's an MP3 player." "???" "It's like CD player, or a cassette player, except that you put your CD into your computer and then take the music from the computer and put it into this little computer. About 140 music CDs can fit inside." The little boys then grabbed it from my hands and looked at it, totally enthralled by it yet not really knowing what it actually did. Then the old boy asked, "How much are the camera and the little music computer?" I chuckled a little bit to myself at the question and the whole situation because it was typically Arab, as I have found that Arabs in general don't seem to understand the need of being delicate with electronic devices, they often just grab things without *EVER* asking permission, and they *ALWAYS* ask how much things cost. I wasn't offended by it, especially since I was the visitor in their country and not the other way around, so I let them look at the devices as I told the older brother exactly how much each item set me back. "That's really quite expensive!" the oldest brother exclaimed. "Well, yeah. But I'm not married, I have no children, and I have a decent job, so it's not so hard to afford. But once I get a wife, I won't be able to afford all this!" He chuckled and knew exactly what I was referring to - namely the high price of a dowry that Muslim men have to give their wives upon tying the knot. Now, I'm not a Muslim and don't have to worry about paying for a dowry, but married life ain't cheap anywhere! :-) The young man then invited me up to the top of the steps of his home and introduced me to his family who were sitting inside in a circle and chatting back and forth with one another on this relaxed holiday afternoon. We exchanged smiles and greetings briefly and they welcomed me to their town. After this I thanked everyone for their pictures and then decided to head off toward the fortress, which unlike most other tourist attractions in the country that week, was open to the public.

I just love the above picture. It looks like something from a totally different era. Battlements and crenels lining the fort's walls and towers punctured by the narrow slits of loopholes to protect the inhabitants from invading forces outside. A lush oasis of date trees stretches out toward the base of the mountains in the distance with tiny plumes of smoke rising up here and there. What must life have been like back when all that people knew about the world and universe around them was what they could see with their own eyes from atop a tiny hill in the center of town?

Above: while meandering around one of the rooms of the fort, I noticed the English language being screamed outside in heavy Arab and Indian accents. "This all seems a little strange," I thought to myself as I walked over to a window and peered outside. As it turned out, there was an Omani TV/film director shooting some sort of travel piece with the leading star being this outlandishly flamboyant African-British woman sitting upon a set of nearby steps with big hair and a raspy voice belting out the millions of reasons to visit Oman over and over again as the director repetitively screamed, "ACTION! CUT! ACTION! CUT! 3, 2, 1, ACTION! ACTION! ACTION! CUT! CUT! 3, 2, 1, CUT! CUT!" There was no rhyme or reason to any of his orders, but the Indian camera crew did whatever their Omani director told them to do and followed the lead as their boss jumped into the roll of camera man as well. But it was all entertaining. . . for about two minutes. . .

Left: virtually every Arab dwelling includes at a minimum one men's sitting room which generally resembles the room above. You walk up to the room strewn with throw rugs, remove your shoes then enter. If there were a social function going on here, you would greet your guests, who'd be sitting on the floor with their backs against the cushions lining the walls, starting first with the the men on the right. As you approached, each man would stand up and you shake his right hand, lean in and kiss his left cheek, then his right, twice, say "al-salaam alay-kum" (peace be upon you) to which the greetee would respond, "wa alay-kum al-salaam" (and upon you be peace) then you'd ask a couple questions about the wellbeing of his family memebers, then you'd move on to the next man on his right and do it all over again until you circled your way around the room and had greeted and been greeted everyone in attendance. Once finished with that, you'd be seated at the head of the room if you were the guest of honor, and everyone would be served tiny cups of Arabic tea and coffee accompanied by an endless supply of date fruits all handed out by the youngest pubescent male in the group.

After lurking around Nakhal Fort for my fair share of time, I decided that I'd jump back into my little Honda and motor myself out to the neighoring spring town. According to my Lonely Planet book, "a few kilometers beyond Nakhal lies the lush spring known as A'Thowarah. The spring emerges into a wadi [river ravine/valley] here to form a stream and a small oasis. It is a perfect place for a stroll or picnic." So why not, I thought!

After driving through the oasis for nearly 3 kilometers and loving every bit of the zigzaggy road that lead me under a canopy of date trees and through a world and a way of life seemingly centuries and millennia old, I entered an opening of the trees and saw a large parking lot crammed full of cars with visitors celebrating Day 2 of Eid. After driving around for quite some time I finally snagged a spot to park where I then got out of my car and decided to go for a little gander around the area. As I approached the creek, I could see that it led further up into another area cloaked in date trees which I presumed would reveal the source of this desert water. Packed with people, I figured I'd make that area my last stop. First I'd check out the group of some 15 young men in their 20s sitting atop a series of rocks and playing their drums and singing songs, which you can hear below:

Interesting audio clip of a group of men singing and playing their drums along side the spring. It starts out with me crossing the little creek and getting nearer and nearer to the group of men. I must have looked like a total freak to everyone though as I took this audio clip because I sort of walked by them once, then by them again, and kind of just stood there with my camera (and audio recorder!) just dangling down by my waist trying to be somewhat sly about recording their performance without looking too obvious. I'm so used to Saudis being hostile whenever I pull out my camera, that I tried to remain a little low key here, even though the Omanis never really gave me any troubles at all and were quite welcoming to me.

Above: I was quite shocked to see men and women socializing in each other's space, and that most women didn't even cloak their faces. Truly a scene that one would never see in central Saudi Arabia where I live! I tell ya, some women are just brazen!

I ended up walking around the creek and criss crossed over the water to the source of the spring which was a hole in a rockside gushing out water into an artifical stone pool that then poured its liquid contents into the into the waterway commencing at its mouth. In this artifical pool, measuring perhaps 12 feet long by 9 feet wide / 4 meters long by 3 meters wide, was a horde of children bobbing up in their underwear swimming around in it. Next to the spring was a covered picnic area with a group of Indians sitting on two rows of park benches and feasting on totally yummy looking red tikka sauce chicken. I would have asked for a bite, but I thought that might be tacky! I noticed that quite a few people in the group had cameras with them and were snapping pictures without people freaking out, so I summoned the courage to do the same myself, and wouldn't you just know it, only one of my shots turned out! (As seen above, one being a zoom-up of the other.) I would have stuck around and snapped more images, but I just couldn't shake the Saudi-intilled fear that someone was going to jump out from behind a tree somewhere and confront me with a kunjar dagger and demand that I turn over my camera. And yes, that has actually happened to me in Saudi Arabia! So I tried to appear sly with my photo taking endeavor. Besides, I was an unaccompanied tall white male and wasn't exactly blending into the crowd if you know what I mean, so I didn't wanna get too gutsy with my camera. As it was, everyone was staring at me like I was some famous movie star wherever I walked and I figured the best thing for me NOT to do would be to jam a camera in their faces and scream, "SMILE!"

Once I had had my fix of tree laden oasis picnic creek life, I wandered back to my little white personal transport device (a.k.a. car) and set my sights on fort number two located in the township of Rustaq 52km to the southwest.

Above: as I drove through the desert from Nakhal out to Rustaq I stopped several times to look around and take pictures, one of which you can see above with me standing there in the middle of nowhere. This is one reason why it takes me forever to get anywhere when I'm traveling because I just keep seeing all this interesting stuff that I want to photograph. I really love mountainous deserts and so my eyes were everywhere but on the roadway as I drove. It's just that in a desert you can see all the colors and true shapes of the geology since they're not covered in greenery. I always like to wonder if this is what the entire surface of the planet used to look like before life evolved in the depths of the seas and crawled out to invade it.

Above: water level markers along the highway which probably come in handy during the few times it rains since the highway just so happens to be built along the bottom of a usually-dry river bed. Below: mountains and shrubs

Above and below: A road, a river valley, and a man named Dan

Above: I arrived in Rustaq sometime around 3 p.m. and impressed to see that this little city was a little more developed than Nakhal as there were many more markets lining the streets and much more pedestrian traffic mulling about. I ended up parking about 3 blocks away from the fort since I thought it'd be nice to go for a little walk along my way, as well as to be able to get a picture of the complex from afar. Rustaq Fort is certainly a lot less picturesque than what I had found in Nakhal, but this building appeared to be much more rugged and made-for-war than the other one. A thick wall lining the perimeter of an even thicker walled fort. As I got out of my car and started heading toward the fort and began taking picutres, a small group of children turned the corner and headed my direction and the two boys in the group began waving at me - the foreigner - from afar. "Picture! Picture!" they yelled. The two girls behind them saw that I had taken one picture already and bolted before I could snap a second. Apparently the camera friendliness in Oman resides only with males for the most part. Once the girls jammed out of the camera's field of view, the two boys stood and posed on the street corner and voila.   I then walked down toward an opening in the fort's wall and was happy to see that this attraction was open for to the public as well, despite the Eid holiday, whereas most other points of interest - museums, cultural centers, etc. - were closed for the 10-day period. I paid my .5 riyal entrance fee ($1.50), took the Arabic language info booklet they gave me, and entered the compound. Below: the worn exterior of the fort's perimeter wall   Above: renovated exterior of Rustaq Fort with the Omani flag atop Above: the tiny door-within-a-door entrance to the fort. Above: lines, arches, and light. Above: afternoon slowly gives way Above and below: battlements (the spikes) and crenels (the gaps) lining the tower roof of the fort with an endless number of date trees stretching off into the distance. As an aside: the Arabs have a near-spiritual connection to the date.

Above and below: the kitchen Imagine how dark these rooms would have all been before the invention of the electric light.

As I walked around the inside of the fort, I entered one room filled with a group of teenage Omani boys surprised at the sight of a tall white foreigner wandering around. "Hello! Welcome to Rustaq!" one of them said. "Where are you from?" I explained that I was from America and that I was here on vacation, enjoying my time off from work and was having a very nice time in their country. We had a nice little conversation in Arabic for several minutes and then one of the boys asked if he could take a picture with his camera of me standing with his friends, which I certainly agreed to, and once he snapped his shot I told them to stand together and that I would set my camera up on a ledge and put it on auto-timer and get a group shot of all of us. (Needless to say, the explanation didn't come out quite so eloquently as I possess only a rudimentary cave-man ability with the Arabic language!) So I ran over to the far wall, set up the camera, then ran back into the shot just before the camera clicked its shutter open. What a great picture, eh! The exchange between us was really friendly and it was good to see that the Omanis were actually quite inquisitive toward outsiders versus being hostile which is the feeling you get from many people elsewhere in the Gulf. The Omanis are much more colorful and individualist in their style of dress than anyone else in the Gulf, and it seemed that they actually tried to be different from one another choosing different colors in their robes and styles in their caps. Three cheers for individuality! As with the young man in Nakhal, I offered to send them a copy of the picture via email, but they informed me that the Internet had not yet reached their town, and that it would have to wait for another day.

Above and below: descending to the basement of the fort which apparently serves as a well and water storage area. With every step downwards, the air grew warmer and muggier.

As the sun began to sink below the mountainous horizon to the west, I decided that it would be good for me to start contemplating heading back to the hotel several hours away yet. But first, I would take a quick stroll through the downtown area of Rustaq to see what was going on since large groups of people were now walking through the streets to and fro, most likely in celebration of Eid. The above picture is of a row of homes lining the exterior of the fort wall as I made my way toward downtown. Below: line of stone homes beside the fort along a different street with cars driving in toward downtown.

After circling around the center of town, I walked into a huge gathering of Rustaqians gathered for a large Islamic Eid holiday celebration complete with music, dance, food, and Pepsi Cola! And that, my friends, was end of my trip to Oman. I returned to the hotel later that evening, relaxed one more day along the beach and beside the pool, feasted at the nightly buffet, then packed my bags and returned to Saudi Arabia in order to earn some more $$$ for my next trip! Until then! Daniel Schereck - 31 January 2003

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