During our visit in Oman we didn’t just stick to Muscat. We decided to venture out into the “wild”. The wild being only a couple of kilometres away from Muscat. If you’re only going for a weekend trip, it’s good enough.
Wadi Mayh
A wadi is a valley that is usually dry unless it’s rainy season, which hardly happens in this part of the world. Wadi Mayh is not necessarily signposted, so we followed the map in the Lonely Planet to get to the right area. This involved driving over quite a few dirt tracks.
To this day I don’t know whether we found Wadi Mayh, but we did see some small Omani villages surrounded by palm trees (date palm?) and beautiful limestone cliffs. This was enough to satiate us and the little body of water we saw constituted in our mind as Wadi Mayh; so we drove back north towards Yitti Beach.
Yitti Beach
The reason we visited Yitti Beach was to see the alleged jinn cave. In Arabian mythology a jinn is a spirit who can appear in human and animal forms to possess humans. Apparently, the jinn has left this particular cave for greener pastures and is now living somewhere else.
Apart from the small cave, you can also kind of see the relatively famous (it’s all relative because the country itself is not very famous) sea arches which are near the beach (no pictures, sorry). The beach itself is not very crowded so it seems like a perfect beach to relax or to have a picnic on.
Bandar Al Jissah
In order to drive from Yitti Beach to Muscat, you have to drive past the snaking road of Bandar Jissah by the sea. Every now and then an entrance to a small beach appears in the mountains. There will be a few boats with sailors waiting for tourists. We decided to take them up for a little boat tour, which was beautiful because it took us through the valley of mountains. We were slightly disappointed by the brevity of the trip (15 minutes) and the fact that he didn’t take us out into the sea to see the aforementioned sea arches from up close. However, the surroundings were gorgeous and Oman landscapes are well worth exploring – it’s just hard to shake the feeling when you think you’ve been ripped off.
Conclusion
Like I said before and like I’ll say many times: Oman is really worth exploring. I would definitely fly all the way from Europe for the sole purpose to explore Oman. It’s a gorgeous country, the people are nice, and travelling through it is easy (by car). What more could you want from a country? You could even bridge the hot sweltering summers by going to Salalah where it’s rainy season. There are so many exciting things I would like to check out in Oman that I can say with confidence that Oman has not seen the last of me!
