9-Day Oman Journey with Wadi Shab, Ras al Jinz and Jebel Shams

Arrive at Muscat International and transfer into the city, low and white along its bay beneath bare brown mountains. The afternoon is a gentle introduction: the Mutrah Corniche at the hour when the light turns gold on the water, then the souq behind it, one of the oldest in the Arab world and still a working market rather than a display, thick with frankincense, silver, and Kashmiri traders. Dinner overlooks the harbour, where the royal yacht and the dhows share an anchorage.

Head early to the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, which admits non-Muslim visitors only in the morning and is worth being first through the door for: a prayer hall beneath a fifty-metre dome, a Persian carpet that took six hundred women four years to weave, and a chandelier of Swarovski crystal and gold. Continue to the Royal Opera House, then the Bait Al Zubair Museum for silver, khanjar daggers, and household history, and on to Old Muscat itself, where Al Alam Palace stands between two Portuguese forts on the rock. The afternoon is free on the corniche.

Travel south along one of the great coastal drives, with the road running between the Hajar Mountains and the Gulf of Oman. First comes the Bimmah Sinkhole, a limestone collapse filled with startlingly blue water a few hundred metres from the sea. Then comes the day's centrepiece: the boat across the mouth of Wadi Shab, the walk up the canyon past date gardens and falaj channels, and the swim through three pools and a slot in the rock into the cave with the waterfall inside it. Late afternoon brings arrival in Sur, where wooden dhows are still built by eye on the creek, before continuing to the reserve at Ras al Jinz.

Take a pre-dawn walk down to the beach with the rangers for the quietest hour of the trip: green turtles finishing their nests in the half-light and dragging themselves back to the water, and, in season, hatchlings breaking out of the sand and running for the surf. Return for breakfast, then head inland. Stop at Wadi Bani Khalid at midday, a chain of deep emerald pools in a limestone gorge, before driving into the Sharqiya Sands: deflating the tyres at the edge, driving the crests in the late light, and settling into a camp among the dunes with dinner under the stars.

Watch sunrise from the top of a dune as the whole erg turns orange, then spend the morning with a Bedouin family who still herd camels here, drinking coffee with cardamom in a goat-hair tent and hearing how the sands are actually lived in. Leave the dunes by late morning and continue west across the gravel plain to Nizwa, the old capital of the interior, arriving in time to climb the great round tower of the fort for views over the date palms and to walk the souq while the silver and halwa sellers are still open.

Spend the day among the forts of the interior. Begin at Bahla, a UNESCO site where a vast mud-brick citadel stands inside twelve kilometres of oasis wall, and where the restoration took the better part of thirty years. Continue to Jabreen, the elegant one: a fortified palace of painted ceilings, date stores, a Quranic school, and a horse stair, built by an imam who preferred scholarship to sieges. In the afternoon, visit the old quarter of Al Hamra and then Misfat al Abriyeen, a mud-brick village stacked into the mountainside above its own terraces, walked along the falaj channel that still waters them. On a Friday, the day starts instead at the Nizwa livestock market at dawn.

Drive up the mountain road onto the rim of Wadi Ghul, a canyon a kilometre deep that Oman calls its Grand Canyon and that genuinely earns the comparison. The morning follows the W6 Balcony Walk, an old donkey path cut into the cliff at around two thousand metres that traverses the wall for two hours to the abandoned village of As Sab, terraces and all, hanging above the drop. It is not technical, but it is exposed, and the views are relentless. Spend the night on the mountain, where it is properly cold after dark and the stars are the best of the trip.

Cross to the Green Mountain and climb onto the Sayq plateau, two thousand metres above sea level, where terraced villages grow pomegranate, walnut, and the damask roses distilled here every spring. The walk links Al Ayn, Ash Shirayjah, and Al Aqr along the falaj, with the terraces dropping away below and the canyon opening out at Diana's Point. Then descend and drive back to the capital, arriving in time for a last dinner on the Muscat coast.

The final morning is shaped around your flight. If there is time, the fish market on the Mutrah waterfront at seven is the real Muscat and takes an hour, or the National Museum opposite the palace offers the best single account of the Omani maritime empire anywhere. Then transfer to the airport. Oman connects easily onward to the Gulf, East Africa, and South Asia, and Musandam, the Salalah frankincense coast in khareef season, or the Jordan expedition can be added to either end.