From Ras Al Jinz we toured around the South East and where saw a different side of the country.  We spent the night camping in the desert and riding camels, even elise managed to pick up an Arabic admirer that put her general wife-ing value at about 20 camels ,two sheep two cows and a goat. We were not sure what the going rate for selling off your friends was, plus we didn’t have enough rice to feed 20 camels let alone a goat so we just laughed it off (although we could have used a goat-they make great watch dogs we hear) We spent a wonderful morning swimming up the crystal blue waters of one of the wadis a great way to cool off in the sometimes oppressive heat here in Oman. What we weren’t planning on was getting flooded out by a massive thunderstorm that developed as we were driving up back along the coast. We saw the dark rolling monster of a cloud looming over the horizon as we chugged along the highway  we passed large sections of villagers with local children running into puddles and waving umbrellas from the first round of the storm a few minutes before. Houses were flooded and everyone was milling about in the streets and stopping on the side of the highway to take photographs. All at once a massive sheet of rain just bucketed down onto us, pitching and rolling the car so badly that we had to pull over to the side of the road and try and sit it out, some drivers in a blind panic were driving back in the direction they had come from down the wrong side of the highway. At first we though this was crazy, but when we thought about it, these guys see on average about a weeks worth of rain a year, and now this monster of a storm was rocketing along, complete with hails stones with a distinct typhoon type feel to it- I guess I would have panicked as well. The amazing thing is that countries that see very little rain in the year, as we have discovered first hand, have very poor if non-existent drainage to cope with the odd down pour. In Dubai for instance we were told by friends of ours working there that they had to shut their offices for over 28 days one year, simply because they could not get to work because of the water logging in every direction.

Once the rain cleared we watched as the giant waterfalls careering down the mountainsides turned the usually bright blue sea a milky brown color. There went our free diving we had planned for the next two days, we had nothing for it but to creep back to Muscat- where all the main bulk of our work was anyway.