Monday, March 8, 2010

Dibbah Trip

Here are some of the stills that you will see in the video that I made of the trip I took with my villa mate, Doug. We went up to Musandam once again but this time on the East coast just North of Dibbah. The border crossing was free, the border guards just looked at our passports and opened our trunk for a couple of seconds and we were on our way. I loved the colors of the fruits at the Friday Market just outside of Masafi. Color was noticeably absent for most of the trip since it was very hazy weather, so I appreciated the displays of fruit.
We saw a lot of forts and watchtowers on this trip. I was impressed by what looked like mud brick hovels in the town nearby where we camped. One thinks of Arab houses as always having flat roofs, but as you can see from the mountain houses and the hovels that this is not always the case. They were pitched and palm branches were used on them a lot like the thatched roofs one sees in England, or in my case on the historical Dutch houses in Holland, Michigan.
I have always loved Dhows. I enjoyed looking at the derelict dhows up close to see the construction. One thing we noticed on one of the dhows was the toilet that sits on the back. I gather modesty is not a virtue among sailors. In fact when we got to Sharjah, I was about to take a video of one of the wooden cargo ships on the docks there, but I happened to notice a fellow smiling sheepishly from one of those very seats. I decided it would be in bad taste to film him.





The donkeys roamed the beach as they liked, just like the cows and the goats we saw up in Ras Al Kaimah. This was taken just after sunset.





























Coral walls in Sharjah