Click image to view larger version

Dhofar's much flogged sloping anti-gravity point might be a bit of mumbo-jumbo, but drive up the road and you will find the real treasure some very steep bends further. There, tucked away on the side of the jebel, you will find Wadi Hannah, a valley so lush it owes nothing to the khareef. And indeed, what it holds makes the passing flurry of monsoon-fed green on its lower slopes wither in comparison. Because Wadi Hannah has baobabs, and they are the only such trees in the entire Middle East Ð the rest of the world population is restricted to Africa, Mozambique and Australia.

Well, almost. Apart from the population in Hannah numbering between 30 and 50 trees you might find a few strays. These include a huge specimen at Dalkut and, strangest of all, one grown on a farm off the Barka highway 45 minutes from Muscat.

why hannah
The leftovers of another age
So why are there baobabs in Wadi Hanna and nowhere else? One possibility is that someone planted them a long while ago, but this seems unlikely. The baobab, while often deeply ingrained in tribal culture in its native countries, is quite useless, unlike the heroes in other parts of the world such as the mango, coconut and date palm. And why would anyone want to unload 50 seeds in Hanna? The other possibility Ð and this is something that is brought up in more intelligent conversation Ð is that they are the last remaining survivors of another age, when the baobab did extend over the entire region.

Baobabs do tend to stick out of the landscape. While the Dhofari group seems positively tame in comparison, the ones in Africa naturally inspire legends. They are gigantic, and their bulbous trunks can supposedly store up to 120,000 litres of water to survive drought. A cross-section of their trunk will produce no rings so it is difficult to estimate their age, though few botanists give credence to stories that say baobabs can live 5,000 years.

legends of the mbuyu
From Barka to Africa
At least one baobab in Oman was introduced by man, and you will find it in Suleiman Mohammed Gharib al Aufy's farm at Barka. It was planted in 1973, which would make it 34 years old a teeniest of babies for a baobab, although it towers over the house. It gives no crop,says Suleiman. Someone told me that if I hammer a nail into the bark it might start flowering, but I haven't tried that yet. The last bit comes with a faint hint of a smile over the platter of Zanzibari sweets. There were people who would use it to fight in Tanganyika because of the vantage point it offered. The boys would just cut their names into the bark, even me. We call it mbuyu in Swahili. Wed cut the hard shell of the fruit and eat the seeds. These seeds might be coated in different colouring and flavours for the children, while the shell of the fruit would be crafted into different shapes and sold as souvenirs. We used to put the halves into water and pretend they were boats. The grown-ups used to use the shell to collect toddy in Africa it is the only way you will ever be able to collect it! Fishermen would use it to bail water out of the boat. But we never really planted the mbuyu, because it doesn't produce anything for cash.

Since the baobabs looks so other-worldly, grow far apart and tend to be in the middle of nowhere, they've inspired a lot of legends. We have a curse that translates into we will meet under the baobab. That's supposed to be a bad thing. In Swahili, we say chini ya mbuyu kuna shetani, which means that there is a devil under the baobab tree. But if you are interested in the trees you should come to Kenya especially Mombassa, to its Avenue of Baobabs, and Nyali beach in the port area, which is a place for love-sick
romantics and criminals.

ground reality
When the water turns salty
The baobab I have doesn't look like the ones pictured in books on Africa, the massive creatures rising out of the savannah grass. That's because it is still young, but it might also be because the ground water here has turned too salty. The water was sweet when the government allotted me this land in 1972 but that changed one day, sometime around 1985 perhaps, when it turned brackish. In the old days, the land was full of lemon, oranges, potatoes, maize, berries, guavas and bananas 23 acres of lush green that you could only approach by 4WD. That was a true agricultural era. Now the water is so bad you can't even use it to wash. We now use transported water to keep the trees around the farmhouse alive including my little baobab.

The government came over and did many tests, but nothing could be done. This was just the way it would have to be. They uprooted all our eucalyptus trees because they tend to suck too much water and they did away with the lemon because they
suspected they carried a disease. What you see now is a shadow of of the original.

Twenty-three acres seems big, but this is nothing compared to what we had in Zanzibar. We'd measure our plantations in kilometres there, and each farm would encompass 20-30km of cloves and coconut trees. You needed days to walk from one end to the other.