Being Friday, I had to arrange my visits today around the reality that almost everywhere that has doors and is not a mosque would be closed. That meant I focussed on what many people call “scenery”, but which I call “geomorphology”.
Having said that, my first stop was cultural rather than physical. Located about 35 kilometres to the north-west from Salalah, Job’s Tomb is open 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. Surprisingly humble in scale and plain to the point of being almost austere, it is the burial place of Job, the central figure in the Book of Job in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. In Islam he is regarded as a prophet under the name Ayyub. There is an interesting discussion comparing the Jewish, Christian and Muslim views of Job at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_(biblical_figure).
The drive to Job’s Tomb required a steep climb up a winding (but sealed) road, dodging more animals per kilometre than I have encountered on roads anywhere else in the world as far as I can recall. I lost count of the number of camels on the road that cars had to dodge, and there were also substantial numbers of cows. It was almost like driving through an extensive farm on some occasions.
My visit to the tomb took only a few minutes – about 90 seconds to walk to the tomb from the car park, 90 seconds inside the small tomb (photos permitted but supervised), and 90 seconds walk back to the car.
Having seen what is generally regarded as the most significant religious site in southern Oman, I successfully descended the steep hill while avoiding the livestock (mainly camels) and then headed to the west of Salalah. My main destination was a “two-in-one” location, the long expanse of Mughsail Beach and Cave Marneef, which joined Mughsail at its south-western end.
Mughsail Beach was impressive for its sheer scale; the beach is a wide, unbroken arc of white sand about six kilometres long between two headlands (so, a bayhead beach), set spectacularly against the bright turquoise waters of the Arabian Sea. There was a fairly impressive welded bar clearly visible at its southern end (well, I found it exciting).
Impressive though Mughsail Beach was, I felt that the Cave Marneef area was more interesting. Rising sharply from the southern end of the beach, a heavily eroded rocky promontory marked the boundary between the relatively low-energy beach and the quite high energy coastline which continued for much of the 200 kilometres further west to the border with Yemen. The danger imposed by the area’s high energy was emphasised in some highly salutary warning signs lining the shoreline
Within the rocky platforms below the promontory there are several blowholes, although with today’s calm seas they were not performing. Nonetheless, the coastal scenery was quite spectacular, and it was obvious that the other visitors there today were highly impressed. Some of the online reviews describe the coastal area of Marneef as the number one sight for visitors around Salalah, and it is easy to see why this might be so.
Although Mughsail Beach and Cave Marneef were my main destinations for the day, I wanted to continue a little further to the south-west to a point known as the Aqhislan Viewpoint, which was said to offer outstanding views back towards Mughsail and Marneef. Although I was a bit underwhelmed by the so-called great view, I did enjoy the drive to get there as the road twisted and turned up and down mountainsides, across wadis, through canyons, past some slopes where young seemingly self-sown frankincense trees were growing, over ridges and between roaming camels.
I had heard that there was a grove of frankincense trees growing eight kilometres further on from the Aqhislan Viewpoint, so I resolved to make that the south-westerly limit of my drive. I never found the frankincense trees, but I did see the Army roadblock checking the papers of all cars proceeding closer to Yemen, and several more road-loving herds of camels.
It was now mid-afternoon, so I returned to my hotel in Salalah and decided to do a walk in the area around the hotel, partly for exercise, and partly to soak up the flavour of what seems to be a hotel zone lining the beach.
Overall, my Friday was a really enjoyable day of rest.
