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ALA

CLUES AT 1,023 METRES
written and photographed by PINAKI CHAKRAVARTY

“Probably the most remote, unknown area of the
Western Hajar ringed by tourist spots and civilisation”

It is barely ten degrees on the northeastern edge of the Jebel Kawr, and we’re crunching through grass burnt golden under the sun, baked between rains on the surface of a prehistoric lake that spilt out into what is now Wadi Ala.

It is startlingly beautiful here, on the one completely flat patch in a landscape home to Oman’s highest, longest mountain range. But the sediment-plastered ground might have been ironed out, so perfect is it after thousands of years of holding water with each bout of rainfall, and the periods in between when it dried and cracked. But the few kilometres of mountain real estate that occasionally doubled-up as a lake never did break down, even when its surface turned to mush and gave way, even when the ground right in the middle cracked up as much as a couple of feet apart and perhaps
as many feet deep, and splintered into branches that zigzagged away from the centre, as if now leading you somewhere even more exotic, but stop before anything particular happens, teasing you with dead-ends.

That amount of water – imagine enough to carpet an area of about four square kilometres – was the second-most valuable thing to be seen over these wind-slapped, rocky slopes (the most prized possession would have been a perennially-flowing natural spring, like the one bringing life to Shidyt, poised a few hundred metres on the slopes opposite the lake). In this topography you will be lucky to find gnarled stubs of wood rising out of the cracks, but the lake has large trees (gargantuan in relation to their neighbouring fauna) sprouting out of soil. And while the surrounding stubs are grey, the trees have green leaves. The soil still lives.

From the lay-by from where we first saw the lake it just looked like a brown flat area that might, at best, be used to roll out our sleeping bags without having to twist and turn over stones through the night. But we were not men enough to spend a night outside without a tent when it was that cold, so we crawled into the back of the 4WD, looking out through rear windows at the stars. It was enough.

There is more to the new road still being scratched into the mountain than just the remnants of lakes, of course. We had written about this area two months ago, when we had hiked up to Shidyt and its famous limes. The road, up from Sant and its plateau and then down to Wadi Ala and the Ibri–Nizwa highway, was a lot more exciting then, with us urging you to try it in low ratio 4WD. You might still need that to slow yourself on your way down, but the road is now largely smoothened and might even, over the coming months, be poured over with concrete. Things are changing very quickly in a patch no one ever went to.

The lay-by is unmarked, but you will see it on your way up if coming from Sint, barely more than a kilometre from the highest point, to the right as the road curves left and up. If coming from Bahla, it is just 24km from the turnoff to Ala from the single-lane Nizwa–Ibri highway.

LEOPARDS, DUNG, SHELLS

Things alive and dead

One of the first things we were aware of after parking at the end of the short dirt track that winds away from the tarmac were the fossils peering out of the slate grey rock, like stylised bats whose wings rose and fell until they joined at the bottom – someone a bit more romantic suggested they looked like angular hearts. Whatever your preference you will be amazed at this display more than 1,000m above present sea level. They will also lead you downhill on a vague track that keeps to the right of the slope. To your right is a bit of flat ground like the one we found, but continue on the track until it leads you between a larger hill on the left (with a finger of stones on top) and a bit of a rocky outcrop on the right, and down to the leftovers of the lake. You will find more fossils along the way, always the same type.

But the jerky lines of the embedded fossils pale in comparison to what you will find scattered in their tens of thousands through the dry soil of the lake: minute, perfectly preserved white shells, each as long as a human nail. Most occur in patches, as if their occupants fell dead in unison one fateful day; others lie caught in the dried clumps of grass-like vegetation that pepper the surface, where they were caught as the water flowed by.

This is also where you will find goat dung, and, somewhat more interestingly, that of gazelle (tapering delicately to a point).

And just then, wandering over the grass towards the trees, I spotted a lump of dung between clumps of dried tufts. Something about it was amiss. It was much too big to come from a feral cat, or a fox (I did find lots of evidence of foxes or wolves: paw prints and faeces), and was too small to come from a donkey or human. Donkeys generally produce large tablets of dung without much relief, while this one had whorls. What large mammal could produce something like this? I could only think of the leopard.

But leopards are so rare they even deserved their own story in National Geographic a few months ago. And expeditions to Oman usually only triumph to the extent of finding scat or footprints in the nether regions of Dhofar and Musandam. I would be the laughing stock of the community if I suggested that I had found evidence of the Arabian leopard on the east slope of the Jebel Kawr, surrounded by roads, expatriate construction crews, lime plantations and the biggest names on the tourist map. Yet there it was.

The other option, one I tried unsuccessfully to bury deep into the recesses of my sun-baked mind, was that it was of human origin, even if its creator had a peculiar bowel condition. I dispelled such risks in the larger self-interests of discovery, got out a bag and scooped it up. For one glorious moment I was sure I was on to something.

ENDS

A canyon and a dam

When you walk onto the flat bed of sediment you have a grove of trees straight ahead from where the massive cracks in the ground, really channels, spread out. When you get to this central spot, turn right and climb over the edge of sediment and on to the rocks, towards the canyon just up ahead.

In a few minutes you’ll be at the edge, looking into the gaping yawn of the gorge, so deep you can practically see its premolars, with the Jebel Kawr rising up to its peak on the other side, and the settlement of Shidyt hidden somewhere among the folds. Each cut, starting just under the top of the mountain, deepens and widens as it reaches down, sprouting its own canyon and wadi. Far below us we could see large trees at the base of the gorge, a pool of water and, from somewhere over the rocks, the call of goats. There might be a goat track leading down, but we turned away from the edge and headed across the lake bed, past the central patch of trees and over to the rocky little island beyond them, where a couple of old stone watchtowers stood guard over what had obviously always been a special place. The one in better condition was just a shell of stones put roughly together about four feet high, without an indication of age or the remnants of the last people who actually used it.

From this vantage point we saw a goat track head to the side opposite the canyon to the other edge. We followed it till the end, where an obviously old and man-made ridge of stones lay across the edge of the sediment, before rocks took over, and before the entire plateau fell down into a valley. And this low wall was peppered with thousands of tablets of goat dung on the side of the lake. What could it be? It was barely half a foot high so it wasn’t kept there to contain the goats, or keep people out. And why had they defecated along one side of the ridge? Were the goats content enough with a mild ridge, happy to sit along it and relieve themselves? This seemed more stupid the longer one thought of it.

Instead, I’m guessing the ridge, just a few stones high, was laid out to as a sort of dam to keep a bit of water, or, more importantly, the silt before it all got washed away down into the valley just a few feet away. Since the water ran down this way, there was only need to dam about 15m of the lake bed. And as proof that at least some of the lake’s water did go this way, the dung showed where it had been filtered as the water swept between or over the rocks.

And so I stood in the blazing midday sun, under a violently blue winter sky, surrounded by one of the most interesting spots I have seen in five years. It embodies, in many ways, what the landscape of Oman is about: a vast blank canvas that always seems to hint at something more. There is always the anonymous stone room that might be five years old or 500, the goat trail disappearing into the canyon, the scratches in the earth, the cairn where you thought no one had walked before. But maybe it is us who reach out for such signs, desperate for something tangible. I clutched at my plastic supermarket bag with its dung ball and tied it shut, twice.

DIRECTIONS

Start with a dirt track

It is childishly simple to get here, although this spot of the mountainside is probably the most remote, unknown area of the Western Hajar ringed by tourist spots and civilisation. Wadi Ala spills out into the back alleys of al Hamra, to the left, or Bahla on the right, with its back to Kawr, Bat and Ibri. While such names feature on the tip of every tourist guide’s tongue, the areas they hide in between remain largely unexplored. Head out of Muscat towards Nizwa, and then past Bahla and Jabreen. Around 15km from the souq that you pass by on the highway and after you leave the towns behind, turn right towards Wadi Ala. Zero your odometer here.
You will come to Wadi Ala about 16km later. You have to turn left and onto the dirt track that climbs the mountain. With construction work the diversion keeps on shifting, so we don’t have an exact kilometre reading.

You will find the lay-by dirt track on your left 24km from the Nizwa–Ibri highway, after you have climbed the mountain and begun to make your descent.