Musandam (Part Two)

After the ordeal with immigration on Tuesday, I was glad to be relaxing on a beach with our tent set up. To be perfectly honest, I didn't really want to camp in the mountains, but after you spend three hours getting to know someone in line to get into a country, you trust them when they say a spot is good. The next day, I was planning on moving on to the next place but was glad when our new friends said that they were in no mood to pack up the tents and suggested that we stay in the same place for the next day.

At their suggestion, we made plans to go on a dhow cruise through the fjords of Musandam, something we were advised to do by friends. Unfortunately, we were unable to book a tour for that day so we made plans to go the following day. Instead, we went to visit Khasab Castle, a renovated fort. I was quite impressed with the set-up on a few levels. It was a maze of interesting information, there wasn't much that kids could hurt themselves on or break so whether or not it was meant to be, it was interactive. There was also plenty of space for the kids to run around in and it was well-maintained. Oh, and they had really nice bathrooms.

After we finished with the fort, we decided to head into the mountains for lunch. We stopped at a restaurant for some take-away then to a gas station for our friends to fill up. Once we realized that all the gas stations in town were out of gas, our friends told us that they didn't have enough gas to go up the mountain and had to head back to a station near the border. We decided to move on and were glad that we did. Eating our lunch on some rocky ground with goat poop everywhere wasn't anything that great, but the drive up was spectacular. The roads were curvy gravel roads with a drop off on one side. Some points were a bit sketchy, but it was exiting to drive up and down with beautiful scenery.
We got back to our tents in mid-afternoon, our friends had found a gas station that was selling gas and had filled their truck. We were able to spend the rest of the daylight relaxing on the beach playing baseball, flying a kite and splashing around in the water. We had a good evening anticipating the boat ride into the fjords of Musandam the next day.