Discover Oman 2006

Assallam alaykim! And Greetings from the Vast and Beautiful Desert! Things are great with the Riddle Family; Kai is riding a bicycle without training wheels and Emma is a chatterbox! Here's are a few gratuitous shots of them :







There, now that we've satisfied the "kid-fix" for all of you, I'll move on to briefly tell and share in visual depth an incredible experience we had the week of February 4-8--Discover Oman. This is an experiential education program offered by the school as part of the curriculum. The secondary school (middle and high school) basically shuts down for a week and the students and teachers venture out into the country to literally "Discover Oman". The adventures include: In and Around Muscat (which Shawna chaperoned), the Ocean trip, the Sea Adventure, the Mountain trip, the Oasis trip, and the Desert trip (which I chaperoned). We saw many new places we have not seen and learned a great deal more about the country in which we now reside.
I tried to prepare for the adventure by reading Arabian Sands, by Wilifred Thesiger, a British expeditioner who mapped Oman and Yemen in ther late 1940's; he prepared me alright:

In Response to W. T.

Oh! Thesiger, how you are right!
the Sands are spiritual freedom;
the wildness! the inexplicable, the blood-burning wildness!
the desert! the people!
The harsh beauty of the land! The rugged embrace of the land!
The caring warmth of a cruelly treated people!

This morning, I look North and West and South
to dune after rising dune,
into the monotonous rolling of a dry and brutal interior—
small steps of life are recorded in the sand;
the wind whispers secrets only Bedu understand;

and to the East, the morning sun brings about another day,
welcomed in chorus by gulls and rhythmic crash of waves.

The simple harmony is in the softness
you sought and found and loved and kept
so deeply within your soul, it became your marrow
feeding your bones
fueling your heart
firing, with the intensity of the Arabian Sun,
your adventurous and liberated thoughts.

How more people should follow you!

Unrestricted vision opens the mind
to the simple notion that everyone is just a grain of sand,
in the Grand Scheme:
there is only a glimpsed second of Life
in the eternity of existence,
and in that fraction of Time, the most cruel element of all,
you must keep your eyes open

or the pristine faces of majestic, windswept dunes,
and the strata of stars giving dimension to the night sky,
and the gentle prints of desert fox and hare and scuttling beetle,
and the sweeping sky from horizon to ground-kissing horizon,
and the ancient songs about stars and moon and love
sung by ancient people around a warming campfire,

will only ever be in the black and white pages
of a book.


Here is the Beautiful Desert of Oman:

Aoleonite sculptures at Ras al Ruways



(aoleonite is a type of petrified sandstone shaped by wind and moisture and compression and shifting from dunes--the last picture was taken from about 80 ft up on top of a dune; some of the sculptures were 6-8 ft. tall!)

And here's Ras al Ruways--a magnificient area created by one of the 32 north/south running dunes dropping dramatically 100-150 ft. into the Indian Ocean; the community on the dune is our camp! This spot is about 35-40 kilometers east of the Masirah Ferry landing if you are referencing a map:















Here is an attempt to give you an idea of the size of the dunes; and remember, 32 of them transect the Sharqiya Sands!















The desert trip involved meeting and visiting with desert Bedu, traditional nomadic peoples of the Southern Arabian Sands. Here's a woman we met and the place where she has lived by herself for over ten years:















Mounting the Eastern Hajjar Mountains, we ventured to Majlis al Jinns, the third largest cavern system on earth, and the Umm an Nar Period (2500-2000 BC) tombs.
Majlis al Jinns
The second shot is of the descent entrance (180 mtrs deep!!)










The Bee hive Tombs












This adventure was, by far the most educational and most rewarding trip in Oman yet! 19 kids, 2 chaperones, and 3 Bedouin guides in 4 days and 970 kilometers of desert--like a cheesy credit card commercial! I just hope you spend some time on this entry and click some of the images to enlarge them; the discovery is worthwhile!

Ma salaama!