Khasab boasts an impressive fort, originally built in the 17th century by Portuguese occupying forces seeking dominion over regional maritime trade, and later modified by Omani forces. Like all the other forts we visited in Oman, this one was fantastically renovated with loads of interactive and interesting ethnographic displays and information. It even had a couple of air conditioned rooms which we spent a fair bit of time in.
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| Khasab Fort before land reclamation |
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| The view now |
Access to the fort was limited to a single point of entry and outer and inner doors were offset to prevent the use of a battering ram. A 'door within a door' also limited entry to one person at a time. Those entering had to simultaneously bend down and step up over a high sill - a weak position from which to mount any kind of attack.
The windows had iron bars and wooden grills. Thick wooden shutters closed against the bars from the inside and were secured by wooden crossbars.
The bait al qufl is a form of architecture unique to the Musandam peninsula. Literally meaning the 'house of locks', they were built well below ground level and evolved as a means of safeguarding vital supplies and household possessions during seasonal migration. The walls of a bait al qufl could exceed one meter in thickness and comprised of individual stone slabs, lifted in to place by 7 or 8 men at a time. The stronghold-like interior was designed to accommodate large earthenware jars in which provisions to the survival of the household were stored.
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| Bait al qufl |
Summer habitation consisted of airy palm frond houses, elevated on pillars of stone to capture cool breezes blowing in from the sea during the sweltering summer months. Patterns of seasonal migration persisted in Musandam through to the 20th century, with many inhabitants occupying remote coastal or mountain settlements in the winter and moving to Khasab to fish and harvest dates during the summer months. Families would return to the same house each year, refurbishing the roof and wall panels with fresh material as needed.
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| 'Arish |
Bread was a mainstay of the traditional Musandam diet. It was baked in a wood-fired clay oven (tannur) in large, flat rounds that could measure as much as half a meter in diameter. The grinding of grain to make the bread flour was a daily household task, for which a rotary quern (raha) was used. The quern consisted of two grindstones. The lower stone was fixed and the upper stone was rotated by means of a wooden handle or peg, held in place by a wooden crossbeam. Grain was fed into a central hole in the upper stone and would emerge from between the two stones as coarsely-ground flour.
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| Tannur and raha |
Vessels of the zaruqah class like the one below, built in Khasab in the mid 1900s, are still a common sight in the bays of Musandam where they are the favoured fishing vessel. They are quiet in the water and easy to manoeuvre, and are suitable for use by a single fisherman or a crew of up to four oarsmen and two to four 'net handlers'. A shoal of fish venturing into one of Musandam's deep bays can be rapidly encircled by nets laid out by a zaruqah. A spotter is often positioned high on the adjacent cliffs to help guide the crew to their catch.
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| Zaruqah |
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| Traditional Omani dhow decorations |
270 million years ago this area was covered by a warm shallow sea. For nearly 200 million years the skeletons of marine life settled on the sea bed creating a 3.3km thick stack of limestone. Between 85 and 15 million years ago the limestone was folded and thrust up to form Musandam's mountains. This was caused by the crustal plate of Arabia (which had broken away from Africa) colliding with Asia. These movements also created fractures in the limestone, many of them aligned North East to South West.
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| An example of fossil oysters from 250 million years old, found on Jebel Harim, the highest mountain in Musandam |
We did think about driving the hour up to Jebel Harim (called the Mountain of Women), which would also have given us the classic picture postcard view of Khor an-Najd and its switchbacks (which you saw here), but it was a hazy day and we still had a 3.5 hour drive home to deal with, and not surprisingly didn't fancy adding an extra 2 hours on to that.
As it happens it ended up being an eventful enough journey home with Tiger throwing up - albeit at the best possible time of the entire journey - right as we were approaching the border check point. We're not sure if it was the windy roads (which usually strikes our Toots), tiredness (which has played a part before in Tiger throwing up), being in the third row or if she was reading in the car, but out of nowhere we had another of these moments. Thankfully we could stop straight away, had bathrooms, cleaning supplies, plenty of water, towels, a mat in the car that could be removed and those hose things they favour here attached to every toilet (one of the best. inventions. ever)... so all in all it was a fairly quick clean up.
Ah the joy of road-trips.
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