The Easter holidays of Lina and Michael’s international school were coming to an end. Today was the last day for any shenanigans as they needed the last day to prepare. Yes, school starts on Sunday. Which makes Friday and Saturday the weekend days. Now that I know, it seems very logical but really, I haven’t thought about it so it took me by surprise.

Another lovely long breakfast was had and then we decided to have a pot luck of sight-seeing. School colleagues had given Lina and Michael their GPS with many, many points of interest in the area on it. Not knowing what a lot of them were, we decided to check them out anyway.

The first one led us to old graves which lay very close to the road. A sign gave us at least the information of “old graves” and the information that violators will be persecuted. Apart from that, we were left to make sense of the scene ourselves. Slightly unsure, we looked out for stone heaps which we thought might mark the graves and pottery shards. Michael had been at an archaeological site with his class. Once you know what to look for, he said, you’ll find shards everywhere. So we kept an eye out for them, looked at them and then carefully placed them back. We pretty much did the same with interesting rocks we found.

From here, we went off road as the next point of interest was only 8km away. Maybe these tracks would lead there? Also Michael was keen to drive more off roads tracks. The scenery, again, was beautiful. When the tracks turned into a washed out riverbed, we stopped and hiked up to the ridge of the hill to have better views. Up there, many ruins of walls and houses could be seen. Also, the whole area was littered with pottery shards so we were especially careful. Here, we saw shards with patterns and even some with glaze or colour. I’m not an archaeologist by trade so my knowledge is not better than anyone else’s but as an art historian, this was amazing. Even just to look at without knowing much about it. Once back at home, Michael compared our photos with an archaeological guide book and the ones we saw were about 2000 years old.

Oman seems to be full of ancient relics. So many in fact, that some just won’t be worked on for decades to come. Not, if there isn’t an amazing new fund that sparks more interest in that particular site. However, the government is interested in preserving the past so that archaeologists check the areas that have been green-lit for building.

After this hike, we tried another point but couldn’t really find the off road tracks that would lead there. The one after that turned out to be an industrial mine (at least we think that’s what it meant as we ended up in one) so we stopped for the day. Instead, we had a lovely evening coffee at the mall.

Dinner was a homey affair. Lina and Michael shared their tradition of comfy burgers with us. To accommodate Nina, a vegetarian burger patty recipe was tried out. It was delicious and just the right finisher for an all around great day out.