Off a beaten tourist track, we felt like explorers in the Omani hinterland

About 20 minutes into the drive from Muscat to Nizwa, you start to think that human habitation must be impossible in this landscape, and travelling across it seems unimaginable before cars.  It is an austere environment of jagged rock and no vegetation, alien as a moonscape.

In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to the interior of Iceland, though it's completely opposite in temperature.  Beyond the air-conditioned security of our 4-wheel drive, we could see the heat shimmer and the dust swirl.  The geological similarities are no surprise, as the landscape to the east of the highway is indeed volcanic, though long inactive.  To the west, however, the Hajar mountains tower, the striations in their rocks telling a tale of ancient geological shifts.  Under the blazing sun the landscape initially bleaches out, but let your eyes slip slightly out of focus and the mountains take on the pattern of Italian marbled paper, with golds, yellows, browns and reds shifting and swirling together.

The emptiness is as deceptive as the colour.  There are people here.  They're simply gathered around the oases created by reliable sources of fresh water.  Within these green spots agriculture flourishes; date palms, apricots, pomegranates and roses all see commercial production, with the former providing the fruit you're likely to bring home a tasty souvenir.

Nizwa started as one such oasis and grew into today's city of 700,000.  Rich with history, it was once the capital of a religious state run by imams and, up until as recently as the 1950s, in conflict with the sultans and their governments.  (Reading between the lines, it seems Oman is a peaceful and moderate place now because the Sultan and his predecessors won that church v. state battle.)  Today the imams, their forts and palaces are just history, architecture restored by Sultan Qaboos' direction to its 17th century peak.

Bastion of imams
At the heart of old Nizwa is a massive round defensive tower and the domestic buildings behind it, now turned into a museum.  There's a mosque next door and, spreading around both, a souk with different buildings for different kinds of goods: dates, goats, spices, etc.  It's all encircled by dun-coloured, crenellated adobe walls punctuated by the occasional round tower or arched gate.  Add the occupants in their traditional clothing and I felt that we'd stumbled onto the set of some French Foreign Legion film of the 1940s.  Exacerbated by the fact that there seemed to be only about 15 tourists in the whole town.

The souk here offers less for the souvenir shopper than the one in Muscat, unless you're after a ceremonial silver khanjar.  These curved daggers are critical to Omani men's formal dress, worn front and centre as a Scot would his sporran.  Local pottery was also abundant, but … much as an Ali Baba jar would look fine in my garden, and cost far less than the £250+ you'll pay at Whichford Pottery in the UK … it's not the kind of thing you can fit into your luggage.  We wandered happily through the fruit and veg market, particularly intrigued by the freshly-harvested dates and their byproducts.  Date juice, date sugar, date syrup.  Our guide Yousuf was dismissive of the prices in the spice souk, which he proclaimed to be far too high.  But in comparison with UK prices, whole nutmeg and white pepper was so ridiculously cheap that we set about bargaining and brought some home.

The fort is as interesting for its views as its defensive architecture.  (Though we did learn that, rather than boiling oil, defenders used boiling date syrup in their murder holes.)  Up top, you get a fabulous idea of the spread of the city, and clearly grasp the oasis concept.  All those picturesque adobe walls are ringed with palms, making the city from above a carpet of green.  You'll also see how quickly the city is growing.  It's ringed by highways under construction, there's a new grand mosque going up and new buildings are sprouting all over the outskirts.  The national police college is here, and there's a big university.  Again, we were reading between the lines a bit, but our guess is that the Sultan wisely invested state resources up here so that the munificence of the government could replace the memory of the historic religious hardliners.

The small museum here is well worth a wander.  It's mostly information boards offering snippets of history with a few artefacts on display.  Topics go well beyond the fort itself, however, including social life, culture and agriculture.  I was particularly intrigued by displays on the production of how indigo goes from being a plant to a wad of blue dye, and on the many uses of the date palm beyond the obvious fruit.

Elegant country retreat
Back in the car, we continued up the highway … threading plenty of construction … to the next oasis town of Bahla.  There's another big fort here, plus another of the big highway-spanning gates that they're building across the country to mark borders between different administrative districts.  Yousuf drove us to a hilltop for a panoramic view of the palm-dotted town ringed by golden mountains, before continuing on to the architectural blockbuster of the day.

Unlike the forts of Nizwa and Bahla, Jabrin Castle stands on its own in the middle of a dusty plain dotted with rows of date palms.  It was the country retreat of the imams of Nizwa, a place of privacy and exclusive entertainment which also held courtrooms and a school.  What you see today has been, like Nizwa, heavily restored, and gives a sense of the good life enjoyed here in the 17th century.

To the right of the entry courtyard is the administrative part of the castle.  Storerooms, offices, court rooms and council rooms rise in three stories around another courtyard, this one enhanced by balconies and decoratively-arched doors half way up.  Follow steps to the roof and you'll find more rooms for the scholars to conduct lessons with a view.

But it's the part of the castle to the left of the main door that really beguiles.  This was the private space for entertainment and living, a series of high-ceilinged rooms pierced by tall, arched windows.  Despite the blazing heat outside, the construction and breeze here keeps things cool.  Rooms are simply furnished with Persian rugs and pillows to give you a sense of the flexible use of each.  The stars throughout, however, are the ceilings.  Most are beamed and highly decorated with paint, some to mimic the rugs below.  Other ceilings are made from plaster embellished with geometric patterns or incised with verses from the Koran.  In some rooms, more incising and painting adorns window frames and doorways.  While there aren't many blooms to be seen outside, indoors it's a veritable garden of flowers and vines swirling in ornate arabesques.

One of the imams is buried in a tomb in the basement, under an arched ceiling inscribed with a spidery, calligraphically magnificent spread of Koranic text.  While the labels don't make it clear, I assumed his premium position and the decor of his tomb meant he was primarily responsible for the lush taste upstairs.

The large car park outside suggests this is a popular site, but we were alone in most of our wandering, occasionally crossing paths with two other sets of Europeans.  Yousuf assured us that on weekends, this place is packed with Omanis.  But, like Nizwa, it had the feeling of going well off the beaten track for Europeans, and discovering something really new.  And that's the sense I get about the rest of Oman.  It is an undiscovered country for tourism, keen to attract visitors, filled with fascinating history and architecture, and with locals eager to show you around.  Though you can wander on your own, local guides open doors and give context you won't get any other way … especially since the tourist trade is so new that there's not a lot about many of these places on the internet.

If you want an experience that feels like you're an explorer, discovering something new, but you're completely safe and well looked after, then Oman's the place for you.

We arranged our trip with Turquoise Holidays in the UK; our local coordinators and guides in Oman were Gulf Ventures.