Maybe it is the crystal-cut quality of the desert air and the powdery light of the Arabian Peninsula where it meets the Indian Ocean. Or is it, in fact, because of the immaculate, low-slung architecture of the towns? Perhaps it is the surrealist landscapes—from the Empty Quarter sand dunes in the south to the wavelike Hajar Mountains that appear to crash down onto the coast. Whatever the reason, the intense vividness of Oman cannot be denied. The effect is almost stereoscopic. The tactility and sense of place feel both dramatic and novel, as if you have stepped into a simulation where the minarets gather energy around them in a way that seems to defy physics. And this is before we even begin to talk about the food, the smells, the sounds, and the people.
The intense vividness of Oman cannot be denied. The tactility and sense of place feel both dramatic and novel.
The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat, the capital city of Oman.
I began my visit in the capital city of Muscat’s old town, nestled on a protected cove. The former harbor stronghold there, dating back some two millennia and bookended by a pair of 16th-century Portuguese citadels, appeared to me as a tapestry of Omani architectural styles and eras. Al Alam Palace, built in the early 1800s, looked like a pavilion on Asgard—or an improbably futuristic United Nations building. The now mostly ceremonial palace, at the center of the old town, sitting beside the brilliant, stained-glass-walled Al Khor Mosque, and beneath the old Portuguese fort on the cliff above, made me feel as though I had wandered into a kind of waking fantasy, a fairy-tale kingdom overseen by a benevolent monarch.
To listen to many of the Omanis with whom I spoke during my visit, the country’s leap forward in the era of oil has been largely driven by one such leader: Sultan Qaboos, who presided over the country from before the discovery of oil in the mid-1960s—when Oman had only a few miles of paved roads, one school, and no hospitals—through the early 2000s, is credited with much of the nation’s transformation, as well as preserving traditional Omani architecture and ways of life along the way.
That pairing of old and new often plays out in a curiously fascinating dichotomy, as I discovered during my visit to Nizwa, the former capital of the interior province, high in the Hajar Mountains. There, I noticed many men had forgone the customary dishdasha—a pristine, ankle-length caftan—and the curved khanjar dagger worn at the belt, in favor of T-shirts and jeans. The atmosphere itself, however, couldn’t have felt more historically authentic: Shops sold antique khanjars in gold and silver, inlaid with precious stones. More utilitarian crafts were on offer elsewhere, including handmade papyrus baskets around the goat market, where I sampled traditional Omani halwa (a cardamom-heavy confection of cornstarch and ghee) alongside a cup of karak, the Omani version of chai and a living reminder of the centuries-long spice trade with India.
Oman’s frankincense trees are another bastion of the past, having once made the country one of the wealthiest lands in history. The trees were used for incense that was, in large part, bound for the cathedrals of Christendom, and an example of a good once sold at the Nizwa Fort. The famous stronghold has now been converted into a modest museum, but the grounds still play host to the vital weekly market, which includes live animals like cattle and goats. Not dissimilar to the Muttrah Fish Market in Muscat, these enduring gathering points for commerce and community remain quite a spectacle to experience. The salesmen in Muttrah, all uniformly dressed in immaculate dishdashas, range in temperament from carnival barker to neighborhood gossip, devious comic to hard-nosed negotiator, many of them keeping their cash tucked into their kumas, the round, brimless caps worn throughout the country.
From the Hajar Mountains, I headed south, following in the footsteps of writer and explorer Wilfred Thesiger. I made my way into the endless sea of sand dunes known as the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter, passing the source of the incense I saw at the markets of the north—the frankincense plantations tended with the same reverence that grapevines receive in Bordeaux.
Here, in the desert, I was expecting to find the crushing isolation Thesiger described in Arabian Sands. Instead, I felt incredibly alive. I spent a night in a traditional Bedouin tent, its black canvas interior piled with Arabian rugs, and woke to a sunrise over the dunes, marveling that the desert ran unbroken to Damascus, some 1,400 miles away—a greater distance than from the southern tip of India to the Himalayas.
The following day, returning to the coast, passing through ancient villages and along beaches trafficked only by camels, I reached Dhofar feeling subtly altered—cleansed, even, by what Paul Bowles called “the baptism of solitude” found only in the desert. It was there, confronted again by the crystalline reality of Muscat, that I understood the hyperreality of Oman: the clarity and intactness of its culture in an age of dissolution, its resistance to homogenization, and the specificity of its architecture and visual identity. The country possesses a coherent sense of place, bridged between ancient and new, trade and tradition. That cultural confidence is what ultimately lingers.
