From Al Mahra to Salalah (Oman)

al mahra

Surprisingly on the border area near the coast between Yemen and Oman a large mountain forest consisting mainly of francinsence trees apeared and convinced me of making a small trekking tour on the yemeni side.

The next day, when I went to the border post nearby, I was surprised again by the silence there, and had to wait 5 hours (!) untill finally a car arrived to take me to the next big town, Salalah.

Salalah is quite a strange city. Most inhabitants have their origin in India and Pakistan, and some of them don't speak arabic at all. The city center consists only of one mainroad and looks very new and modern, neither arabic nor indian. Just behind the main road one can find some old houses in the same style like those in hadramaut, but they are all abandoned and ruinous. The people seem to be very rich, for example public transport is something unknown here, because (almost) everybody has his own car, which makes it quite expensive to move around.

The Dhofar mountains around Salalah are said to become very green during the rainy season, which will start in the next few weeks. Now it's already very foggy up there. In planning my trip, I made the mistake to arrive in every country in the wrong season, when the soil is in it's driest stage.

Wadi Hadramaut & Al Mahra

hadramaut

My way continued to Ghail Ba Wazeer, a town lacking any attractions, but in an area nearby, the soil has the strange habit to collapse and create craters of depths of about 30 meters. In one of those craters there's also a small, clear lake, and due to the lack of hotels I've spent the night there.

Then I continued to Wadi Dowan, an arm of Wadi Hadramaut. The scenery there is always the same: A flat, wide Wadi, cultivated and full of palaces in the remarkable hadrami style, bordered by vertical cliffs that end up in an empty stone desert. I also visited Shibam, maybe the most famous Yemeni city after Sanaa and Aden because of it's ancient skyscrapers, but somehow I liked the cities of Wadi Dowan more. Tarim is the islamic center of Wadi Hadramaut and it attracts a lot of young islamic students from south east asia.

In february this year, 2 tourist were shot dead by infiltrators of the problem-governorate of Shabwa, so the local police was worried about me and provided me with free transport services throughout the region. However, while visiting places I could move freely.

Now, the last region I'm visiting before I enter to Oman is Al Mahra in the far east of the country. Most of it's inhabitants either live in the hardly attractive capital Al Ghaidah or on the coast. Unlike in the north, the mountains are very empty, concerning both vegetation and population. There is the same rocky soil like on Socotra, that creates countless caves, and near to Damqut, some mountain dwellers also live in these caves. They survive there through raising goats, collecting francinsence and hunting birds (couldn't find out, what kind of birds, due to the language barrier).

The Mahris speak a languages related to socotri, and also their faces look like the people from the island.

Now I returned again from a day-trip to Hawf to Ghaidah, in order to be sure not to miss the most important football game for Austria since at least 10 years.

Al Mukalla

al mukalla

In the Tihama it was still ok, but since Aden the heat became really unbearable. In order to survive the 7-hours-drive to Al Mukalla I took a modern bus with air conditioning to go there. There was also not much else to see on the way: Very few settlements, mainly sand dunes and black lava desert along the coast. I was also warned about tribal conflicts in that area, so I really didn't have the feeling to miss anything.

Al Mukalla is situated on a small strip between the coast and rocky cliffs. It is the capital of Hadramaut governorate, which is special because of it's historical trading relations with south-east asia, mainly Malaysia, that still hold on. That's also the region where the "mawas" once came from. In the shops, about half of the offered mawases are indonesian products (I've also bought one of them), the rest are yemeni. Also the architecture has some asian influences.

In the daytime the streets here are entirely empty. The sideroads of the old town closer to the rocks are populated by quite a lot of goats, while the people are defeated by the heat into their homes.

Odd monuments are usually a speciality of ex-soviet countries, but here I found one that honored one of my most important companions: the GPS! (even the same model)