Turtle Beach & The Road to Nizwa

Sur to Nizwa, Oman

Before leaving the region of Sur, I paid a visit to Ras al-Jinz, a tiny beach which belies its immense importance to several endangered turtle species; loggerhead, green, Olive Ridley and Hawksbill. On a small stretch of sand under honey-colored cliffs, female turtles come up on to the beach at night to lay upwards of 100 eggs deep in the sand.

The beach at Ras al-Jinz

After about 50 days the eggs hatch all at once, and guided instinctively by the moonlight the tiny black creatures, about two inches long, set off determinedly for the sea. Only a few meters separate their birthplace from the ocean but they are treacherous – birds, crabs and foxes catch them on the sand, and if they reach the ocean alive, fish and sea birds await them. For this reason they swim far out to sea for hours after hitting the water. It is not surprising that only about 1 of every 50 survives.

The government of Oman is arguably the most proactive in the Arab world with regard to conservation in general, and the turtles are no exception. Many have had little satellites attached to their shells so their movements can be tracked to enable us to learn more about them. The day of my visit a dead turtle lay on the beach – a female who for whatever reason had not made it back to sea, (males do not leave the sea). It seemed symbolic both of the struggle the little hatchlings face at the very start of their lives, to the ongoing pressures turtles face as adults sharing their habitat with increasing human encroachment and the attendant detritus that 21st century man in the form of 6 billion people brings to the earth.

Of cyclones and dhows and the Spangled Emperor

Sur, Oman

“We continued our voyage for a day and a night and came to the roadstead of a large village on the seashore called Sur, from which we saw the city of Qalhut on the slope of a hill, and seeming to us to be close by. “

Sur is no longer a village but a small and delightful town, I immediately liked its laid-back charm and its lovely old port. Sur is not on the itinerary of most tourists which is both a bit of a blessing and a curse for the town. In Ibn Battuta’s day Qalhat, a few miles up the coast, was clearly the more important city of the two, so he devotes few words to Sur.

View of Sur towards the Gulf of Oman

Sur means ‘fortified wall’ in Arabic so it comes as no surprise to see lots of crenellated walls even on modest, modern houses, having become something of a leitmotif of the city. I decided to visit two of the city’s forts despite the fact that neither of them had been built in Ibn Battuta’s day. In the 18th century, having seen off 200 years of Portuguese rule, Bilad castle was built to defend Sur from land attack from discontented tribes further inland, and Sunaysilah fort was built overlooking the sea to defend from sea-borne attack from everyone else. The former was closed, and I was the only visitor at the latter. A classic square-built fort with a round tower with arrow slits and cannon holes at each corner, it has been extensively renovated and the only complaint is that you cannot get on to the upper levels where the views out over the sea must be delightful.

The renovated upper courtyard interior of the fort.

The Island of Birds; a mystery not solved

Arabian Sea coast, Oman

“We continued our journey from the roadstead of Hasik for four days, and came to the Hill of Lum’an, in the midst of the sea. On top of it is a hermitage built of stone, with a roofing of fish bones, and with a pool of collected rainwater outside it.”

The accepted opinion about this – nobody has ever identified the Hill of Lum’an - is that it is Hallaniya, one of the Kuria Muria islands. The only major drawback about this explanation is that Ibn B said he had taken 4 days to get there and it is only 20 miles from Hasik. But after speaking with Salem who explained that his parents had once undertaken a boat journey to Sur when the wind dropped and they did not move an inch for days, it became a possible explanation for the puzzle, although I still did not like it – when Ibn B got stuck in the doldrums in the Sea of China he mentioned it, so if it had taken him 4 days to travel to an island 20 miles away, why had he not explained why?

In any event Ibn B’s words proved to be an insurmountable problem for me as I could not get to Hallaniya. I could have rented a basic dhow from Mirbat, and I went to its little harbor to inspect the possibilities. I was not encouraged, the idea of being the only woman on such a boat did not appeal to me for various reasons. The trip might last for 12 hours or if the weather turned nasty for any number of days. I abandoned the idea of even beginning negotiations on the price and looked for another way.

The Land of Frankincense

Dhofar Province, Oman

One cannot speak about Dhofar without mentioning frankincense. Along with gold and myrrh, it was one of the gifts given by the magi at the birth of Christ. Frankincense is the milky-white resin of the boswellia sacra tree, an unprepossessing scarred and gnarly old thing which nonetheless was the source of the vast wealth of various South Arabian kingdoms for millennia. There are several species of boswellia, but boswellia sacra gives the best resin and it is grown in very few places. Dhofar produces the finest resin of all.

“…they possess incense trees; these have thin leaves, and when a leaf is slashed there drips from it a sap like milk, which then turns into a gum. This gum is the incense, and it is very plentiful there.”

So wrote Ibn Batutta about Hasik whence some consider the best frankincense to come, but it is the trunk which is ‘slashed’ to extract the resin, not the leaves. Clearly he did not see the trees or the harvesting of the incense, but the procedure would have been explained to him and he may have thought it like a euphorbia whose leaves do extrude a kind of sticky, milky substance when cut.

The strange-looking frankincense tree with its divine-smelling resin of medicinal, preservative and, some say, aphrodisiac qualities.