Good bye, camping spot! Back onto the road

I underestimated how cold it would get up in the mountains. After a hot night in the desert, I now had to put on an extra layer of clothing every time I woke up in the night. It made for some much interrupted sleep. Given that we had quite a bit of extra time, since our plans with Jebel Akhdar fell through, we took it slowly, slept in and generally enjoyed a cool morning in the tent opposed to trying to pack everything before the sun is up.

Even the most relaxed morning has to come to an end so we got back on the road to drive the last 60 km up to Jebel Shams, our camping spot for this night. A short day of riding indeed.

Picturesque abandoned village in the bend of Wadi Ghul

Before starting on the incline of Jebel Shams, you come through Wadi Ghul, a large wadi that still had some water left. We followed its path for a while and found an abandoned mud-brick village on a bend with picturesque gardens in front of it. The new village is on the opposite side of the wadi but the old one just looks nicer.

The road up to Jebel Shams is about 20 km long with 12 km of gravel road. Pretty close to the start of the incline, we passed a truck that was lying in the ditch so we took a bit of extra care. Further up, just before the gravel part started, we stopped at a tiny coffee shop which had run out of coffee. They also didn’t have any non-meat food so we both enjoyed a Chai tea and some hands-and-feet conversation with the staff.

Fritz drove from Kenya to Oman and was looking to get to Asia from here

The Lonely Planet recommends the “Sunrise camp” if you want to camp but it is on the flank of a nearby mountain instead of on Jebel Shams itself. So the first thing to do was get up on Jebel Shams and check out the view there and the so-called Grand Canyon. The gravel road turned out to be in quite a good shape except for one part which must have had a landslide and thus was now bumpy. Shortly after, we passed a big truck which could only be an overlander. Both parties stopped simultaneously and we had a nice roadside chat with Fritz from Austria who had driven here from Kenya. Fritz also told us about a wild camping spot up on Jebel Shams which would mean that we didn’t have to pay 10 rial (about NZ$40) to pitch our own tent in the Sunrise Camp.

Vertigo much? Good that there is a fence for once

We stopped one more time on the way up as there was a viewing platform for the canyon. Again, it is so vast that pictures cannot reflect it adequately. 300 meters further away we came to the Jebel Shams Resort right on the top of the mountain. We had no ambition to stay there as it clearly was out of our budget (a pool on top of a mountain, huh?) but while we had food for dinner and breakfast with us, we still needed to find a roadside lunch. The coffee shop here was pricey but chances of finding any other eatery up here were pretty much zero so we both had omelette on toast.

While in the process of ordering and sitting down, a Dutch couple returned to the resort and recognized our motorcycle as one they had seen around Sur. So we started talking over lunch and ended up spending the next couple of hours with Heike and Robin who were camping in the resort. We relocated to their “living room” in the shade under a pagoda, had tea and cookies together and enjoyed meeting other travelers once more. We haven’t had that since Chiang Mai.

The most awesome camping spot

Around 4 pm to 4.30 pm we actually made it to “the” view of Jebel Shams. By this time, the SD card of the camera was full and we had to make room for more pictures by deleting a couple of old ones. Then, we rode around a bit in search of the best camping spot; in the end we decided to stay right at the edge as there was a bit of a sandy patch to pitch the tent.

Dinner was another round of the horrible spaghetti. It started getting windy and cold so we put on more layers to watch the sunset with a hot cup of tea before hiding in the tent until next morning.