Sophy Roberts travelled with Hud Hud in this area and wrote about it for the Financial Times, How to Spend It magazine:
“I have never been able to find the author again, as if he or she were some figment of my imagination, but I still remember the passage clearly: the writer described, without punctuation, a single moment when everything in the city fell silent, a splinter of a millisecond when the traffic lights paused on red at the exact same moment as every human in the vast metropolis stopped talking, when every television was turned off, when there were no planes in the sky, no clapping in the theatre, no brawling, barking, nothing. The sound of silence, the absence of everything in a brilliantly construed fiction, is something I have listened for often. It was only recently that I encountered it, on a trip to a little-visited desert in Oman.
He had a point. The crackle of the campfire had died; the staff slept elsewhere, behind the wall of sculpted sand. The sky was black and clear, with shooting stars making their journeys through the night, the tiny pin-pricks of light casting a luminescence that felt alien to someone used to a diet of street lamps. I could hear no animals, insects or birds. There was no wind, no candle light, just my seven-year-old’s slow and regular breath as he slept in our bed nearby. In that moment the silence filled me with a visceral sense of freedom and of acute vulnerability.
Such is the power of the desert. The desolation puts one on edge, or at least shifts the senses into a state of almost hyper-alertness, with ‘ghost water’, as the bedouin call mirages, one of the better-known examples of this response. Even without the sensorial trickery, the landscapes themselves can be breathtaking.”
We stop at Wadi Dawkah, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Land of Frankincense”. Wadi Dawkah is a major place where the frankincense tree (boswellia sacra) can be found in large numbers and frankincense is harvested to this day. The incense comes from its gum, and it has been harvested and traded by Omanis for millennia.
After a delicious picnic lunch we pass Thumrayt, and make a stop at another site of the Land of Frankincense UNESCO site, the caravan oasis of Shisr, where we visit the remains of what is believed to be the lost city of Ubar.
We then turn into an extremely remote and isolated area, where traffic is almost nonexistent. We leave the main track and weave our way through the grandeur of the russet red sand dunes of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter.
Following dinner take a walk among the dunes to marvel at the night sky or relax by the campfire.
Take a look at our example itinerary in full:
Whilst we are happy to organise two-night trips from Salalah to the Empty Quarter, we would suggest to combine this with a couple of nights in a private beach camp on Mirbat Beach or a few nights at the stunning Al Baleed Resort Salalah by Anantara, if time permits. Here are a few sample itineraries.
Sophy Roberts travelled with Hud Hud in this area and wrote about it for the Financial Times, How to Spend It magazine:
“I have never been able to find the author again, as if he or she were some figment of my imagination, but I still remember the passage clearly: the writer described, without punctuation, a single moment when everything in the city fell silent, a splinter of a millisecond when the traffic lights paused on red at the exact same moment as every human in the vast metropolis stopped talking, when every television was turned off, when there were no planes in the sky, no clapping in the theatre, no brawling, barking, nothing. The sound of silence, the absence of everything in a brilliantly construed fiction, is something I have listened for often. It was only recently that I encountered it, on a trip to a little-visited desert in Oman.
He had a point. The crackle of the campfire had died; the staff slept elsewhere, behind the wall of sculpted sand. The sky was black and clear, with shooting stars making their journeys through the night, the tiny pin-pricks of light casting a luminescence that felt alien to someone used to a diet of street lamps. I could hear no animals, insects or birds. There was no wind, no candle light, just my seven-year-old’s slow and regular breath as he slept in our bed nearby. In that moment the silence filled me with a visceral sense of freedom and of acute vulnerability.
Such is the power of the desert. The desolation puts one on edge, or at least shifts the senses into a state of almost hyper-alertness, with ‘ghost water’, as the bedouin call mirages, one of the better-known examples of this response. Even without the sensorial trickery, the landscapes themselves can be breathtaking.”
We stop at Wadi Dawkah, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Land of Frankincense”. Wadi Dawkah is a major place where the frankincense tree (boswellia sacra) can be found in large numbers and frankincense is harvested to this day. The incense comes from its gum, and it has been harvested and traded by Omanis for millennia.
After a delicious picnic lunch we pass Thumrayt, and make a stop at another site of the Land of Frankincense UNESCO site, the caravan oasis of Shisr, where we visit the remains of what is believed to be the lost city of Ubar.
We then turn into an extremely remote and isolated area, where traffic is almost nonexistent. We leave the main track and weave our way through the grandeur of the russet red sand dunes of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter.
Following dinner take a walk among the dunes to marvel at the night sky or relax by the campfire.
Take a look at our example itinerary in full:
Whilst we are happy to organise two-night trips from Salalah to the Empty Quarter, we would suggest to combine this with a couple of nights in a private beach camp on Mirbat Beach or a few nights at the stunning Al Baleed Resort Salalah by Anantara, if time permits. Here are a few sample itineraries.