Oman and Job's Tomb

We came off the high seas into the port city of Shalalah, Oman. As the Grass Roots said, "Let's Live for Today." That's been my motto all along on this trip.  Oman: what an unexpected delight of a country.  It is like West Texas except with camels and the desert runs right up to the sea.

After all the more well known places I've visited so far, I was not expecting too much. This is beautiful country, nice people and it felt like home in Texas: dry, hot and a scarcity of green. I could almost imagine the camels, that were everywhere, as longhorns roaming the range. This especially when you had to avoid stepping into the warm piles of gifts they leave behind.

It is still Ramadan so there weren't too many people out: a herder, a bus driver and a few tourist shop owners. It was a Texas pleasant 35c with a cool ocean breeze. Still, the air-conditioning of the bus was always welcome.

Apparently Oman is the frankinccense center of the world. The trees where in orcards and around older homes. I still didn't buy any. I did buy a kufi hat and a scarf each for my sister and daughter. A kufi is like a squared-off baseball cap without the bill. It seems the shading of your face by a bill would be a nice feature of a hat in the desert.  Tradition, I guess.

Oman is oil rich so the government gives every Omani a plot of land. They can, and do, build on it.  There is also free housing, which isn't bad at all but, most them opt for the land and build. Their custom is to live in large houses with multible generations of family all under the same roof, even as the younger ones marry.  I didn't see many small homes. 

New house and one under construction.

There were post-Katrina-like portable building housing complexes for foriegn workers, of which there were many. For instance there is a giant earthquake-proof oil pipeline being built into the port to load tankers.

The dersert mountains rise quickly from the sea, a thousand feet at least. The bus I was in was struggling up the hills and made some pretty severe cut-backs up and down range.  

On the beach road going toward Yeman the road and a bridge over a tidal pool were washed out from the recent cyclone.  We had to take a short detour through some mountains on sandy dirt roads.  With each sway I thought about how top-heavy our bus was and the air-conditioning probably didn't work when the bus was on its side.

On our dirt detour road.

On a hill name Jabal Al Qar some 30 miles up in the hills above Shalalah is the Tomb of Job.  It is inornate and only big enough to contain the tomb in the ground of Job. There was also a concret wall, that looked like a well, to supposedly contained a footprint in the original level of the ground that Job made walking barefoot in the area.

Putting shoes back on.

Little gifts everywhere.

Job's footprint

Job's Tomb

Some women on tour refused, on priciple, to cover their heads.

This where I bought the scarves and kufi.

This is not a place I would want to live but, it is diffilately a place I'd like to come to visit with some time to absorb more of the culture and the scenery.