Saturday, February 21st - Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain)

A Jebel is a Mountain, however Jebel Akhdar is not a mountain in itself but a region forming a plateau on top of the mountain. We left early morning (7:30 - that's early for a Saturday morning!!) and drove for about 1½ hours to Birkat al-Mawz (on the way to Nizwa where we had gone in the fall). Once there, we met our guide as we can only go up the mountain in a 4X4 - no cars allowed as there were too many accidents while coming down the hills; you have to use low gear because just brakes wouldn't do it. Yes, it is that steep in many places. He took us up to the top (over 2200 m) with a few stops along the way. The scenery was amazing. It was Grand Canyonesque! You stand way up on the cliff and see the wadis (the old river beds) at the bottom, and then you start walking down to old villages built in the cliffs, that were populated a few hundreds years ago, and then work your way back to the Range Rover by walking through the wadi at the bottom; it was amazing! The plateau is where most of the Omani fruits are grown (pomegranite, avocado, olive trees, fig trees - but nothing was in bloom as we were end of February). They produce enough to supply the country and export some to neighbouring countries.

We got back to Muscat by late afternoon, pretty much in a wind storm. We were lucky that the road we travelled on was bordered by mountains with very little sand on them, but as soon as you had an opening with a sandy place, it was like driving in a snow storm at home. Sand is blowing all over the place and visibility is greatly reduced, not to mention that it can accumulate on the highway just like snow does. It's not a great feeling at all, since you cannot melt it, but our journey back was fine, for the most part.

I must warn you now that the pictures below probably won't do justice to what our eyes were seeing, as it is hard to capture a 3D image in a 2D picture. But still, hopefully it will give you an idea of what we saw.
The rest of the pictures will follow next week!

"Rocky Mountain High, Colorado" -eh oops, Oman!

River down in the valley; town on the left hand side - talk about the middle of nowhere!

This water is blocked by a dam

Town on top of the cliff, pretty much on top of the plateau. On the right hand side, you can see the "layers" that are used for agriculture - all the greenery is fruit trees

Wadi way down at the bottom

A village/town down the mountain

Very old village (+250 years) basically in the cliff of the mountain

The neighbouring village. Not sure how long it took to walk there!

The village next door - the neighbours

The "village" as we get closer