Being Omani in the 21st Century
Peter Ochs II
Geologist and Author of Maverick Guide to Oman
Thursday, July 6, 2006
What it means to be an Omani in the 21st century pretty much has to do with the entire history of Oman and how the people are influenced by their environment, and this pretty much goes back to the beginning of geological time. So, in a nutshell, to use a card-playing metaphor, I'm going to show the hand that was dealt by nature, and how the Omanis played that hand, as it were. We're going to divide the talk into three segments. The first segment will be a very brief description of the geological history. Then we'll get into the recorded history, and that will be divided into two segments: the traditional/historical aspect, and the contemporary segment with emphasis on the last 35 years with the coming of Sultan Qaboos and the economic renaissance started in 1970.
So, the first thing to do is just to have a look at the country here (shows map). Oman is situated all the way out at the end of the Arabian Peninsula. It's about the size of New Mexico in terms of square miles. It has 1000 miles of coastline, and it has, acre for acre, desert more than anything else, but the real defining element of Oman is mountains. Just to give you an idea, there's an exaggerated relief map of Oman (shows map). The mountainous areas are here along the northern coast and down in the southern region of Dhofar. In the middle is low-lying wasteland or desert, different kinds of desert: sandy desert, sabkha, which is a kind of quick sand. And just empty plains of rubble. So these three elements, the mountains, the deserts, and the coastline, are what figure into Oman and the environment.
Now, to start with, 300 million years ago Oman was part of this plate, which was a section of what geologists refer to as Gondwana, and Africa and India, and these are all separate plates that are floating around on the surface of the earth. Not necessarily above the surface, because a lot of Oman's geology is from the oceanic sediments: sandstones, limestones, etc. But anyway, 300 million years ago, Oman is part of this plate, and if you know about plate tectonics, plates move, they shift around, they bump up against each other, and they also migrate. This diagram here gives an idea of where Oman has been over the past 300 million years. They figured out it started somewhere around the Tropic of Capricorn, moved down somewhere close to the Antarctic Circle not once but twice, up to the Equator, then eventually up here to where it is today on the Tropic of Cancer. We do know this because some of the mountains in the northern regions particularly in Wadi Mistal you can find glacial scars. There's a lot of examples of ice ages from very early times. So, we have these plates shifting around, bumping into one another. Here's a close-up of the Arabian Plate bumping up against an oceanic plate. There's two kinds of connections here. When two plates come together, obviously one has to go up and one has to go under, and this is responsible for one of the features of Oman, that you don't see too many places on the earth, this is a crust plate being shifted under the continental crust, which is usually what happens, but in Oman's case the oceanic crust has been pushed up to the surface, and as a result it brings with it mantle rock, and that mantle rock can be seen in large tracts all over Oman. This mantle rock is what we refer to as ophiolite, and the ophiolite tracts in Oman are some of the largest in the world. The ophiolites consist of olivine, serpentine, and chromium, chromium of course can be mined and has uses in metals and other things. You know ophiolites by their chocolate-brown color and amorphous shape, and you can see the walls surrounding Muscat and when you go into the interior of the Batinah Coast toward Ar-Rustaq. You can also find them down in Ibra, just north of the Wahaiba Sands. Oman is unique in its concentration of ophiolites. If you stand on an ophiolite there's a good chance you're standing on a former contact point of the Moho (short for the Mohoravacic Discontinuity), this continuity that separates the crust from the mantle that has subsequently been shoved to the surface. Anyway, this is where Oman is today. Muscat is around the Tropic of Cancer, and as you probably know, most of the deserts of the world form along the tropics. The Sahara here, the Arabian Desert, in China the Gobi Desert, the American Deserts of the southwest, and this is all due to climate more than anything else.
But this is something that has greatly influenced the society. How do you adapt to that, how do they live in what is generally considered by most people to be a very very harsh environment? This diagram shows the prevailing winds coming from the northwest, the Shammal , from the south you have the Indian Ocean monsoon. This chart only has it affecting Salalah, but it does generally affect all the way up the coast. The monsoon rains down in Salalah turn Oman into a veritable garden. It's as green as Ireland down there for several months of the year. But nevertheless, the rest of the country is very hot. With these west winds you get a lot of isolated rains, and believe me, when it rains, it really rains, mostly up in the mountains. Which is a good thing in one sense, because it is where the Omanis have traditionally gotten all of their water supplies to support their trade, their farming and agriculture. Now, the first thing you see when you come to Oman are the mountains, they are just absolutely spectacular, it's a geologist's paradise, mainly because all the mountains are exposed. There's little or no groundcover, there's certainly no snow, and everywhere you go in Oman, you can read the mountains like a book. And when the geologists first went to Oman in the 1950s, sent by oil companies to study the land for oil -- I love this picture because the erosion up there kind of makes the rock look like Arabic calligraphy -- but, when the scientists first came to Oman looking for oil they realized there was a lot more to Oman than what meets the eye. Here's a beautiful example of metamorphosis on some marine sediments. This is Oman's version of the grand canyon -- not quite as big as ours, but certainly impressive as holes in the ground go. You can trace just about every level of geological time down to the bottom, and when you go up to the top here, all the little kids from the villages coming out, not only are they selling you all their rugs and little trinkets, but they say “Fossil, fossil!” And they have these beautiful shells; they know what the westerners like.
The arable land in Oman, which is not much, is mainly up in the northern section up here which is known as the Batinah Coast, interspersed oases in the mountains, and the extreme south in Dhofar, which as I said is influenced by the Indian Ocean monsoon.
In early civilized time, people began migrating to Oman, around 3000 BC and after, coming up from Yemen, from the northern Arabian peninsula. Some linguists have suggested that the Arabic root for Oman means “a place to settle.” And this is where the people came, and they settled along the coast because they knew they had fresh supplies of water coming down from the mountains, there was fish, and of course 3000 years ago we know that this part of the world was a lot more verdant than it is today. They developed farming, they developed fishing, they developed mining, and of course they developed trading. Oman is at a very crucial point of what is now known historically as the Silk Route. The Omanis historically were the best traders of their time. They dealt with Syria, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the African Coast. They knew who had what, and who needed what. And they turned their shipbuilding industry into a mainstay, so much so that even the ships became commodities. Their earliest traces of civilization where up here in what today is known as Sohar. This is also where they have been doing sizable copper mining for about 3000 years. But the climate's changed over the millennia, and they've had to adapt. As things got drier, the Omani people had to be more resourceful in how to use their farms, how to use their water, how to keep their animals and so forth. This is a typical oasis up in the mountains, this is Misfah al-Abreen, in the Jabal Akhdar region. It's a veritable little paradise, you can see all around it is very barren, but once you get inside there, they've got it down to a science. It's kind of like a communal farm, everybody has his own plots. There's a water network which I'll describe very briefly which is called the aflaj system. It's very self-contained, they have everything here, they have their water, their food, their livestock, they grow their dates. Dates are the mainstay. They do very well. Here's a date farmer about to harvest the dates from the trees. They start in early January. The date is a sexual tree, they have a male and a female, and they take the pollen from the male and they go up and hand pollinate every female tree to maximize output, and by May and June, the trees are just bursting with dates and they have quite an output. They also manage to sell bananas, coconuts, mangoes, and limes. This is a typical grocery store down in the Salalah region. These are young mango dealers in Hayl al Ghaf outside Mazarah where the largest group of mango trees can be found. And of course they also keep their animals, mainly goats, cattle, and sheep. This is a typical market. I want to make a point here: obviously these are all contemporary photographs, but they are photographs of traditional ways of working the land the way they've been doing for thousands of years. Every Friday out in Nizwa, you go to the goat market, everybody sits in the circular market, and the farmers parade around the circle with their goats and cattle and so forth, and you pick out which one you want to take home for dinner.
Now, the thing that makes all of this work is the system called the aflaj. The aflaj was originally introduced by the Persians about 2500 years ago, and you see evidence of the aflaj as far west as Morocco and as far east as China, and it's basically a capillary network that draws groundwater down from the mountains and disperses it down to all the arable lands. These farms could not exist without the aflaj network. It's quite an ingenious system. All the scientific principles of the aflaj were in place 2500 years ago. It works on simple principles of gravity, water flowing from high points to low. From this they have determined an entire hierarchy by which a village can receive its water. Water is apportioned for drinking and cooking, for bathing, for feeding the animals, and of course for feeding the crops. These are some examples of falaj throughout Oman. They've been running these things for 2000 years. This is part of the falaj network that runs underground. You see all these mounds here these successive mounds all run back to the mountains. They all have shafts which run down to the falaj, which could be anywhere from 20-100 feet below the surface. Aflaj building is considered pretty dangerous work, when you have to tunnel into the ground, find the water table, then tunnel downwards so you get the flow of gravity to where you want it to flow on the surface, and bring it to your fields. They've done it, and they've got it down to a science, and they've been doing it for thousands of years.
As I mentioned before, shipbuilding is a very important part of Oman's history and culture. They still make the old-fashioned dhows the way they did a couple thousand years ago, although today they do use modern materials, electric saws, and drills, and so forth. But even old habits proceeded up until the 1950s. Until the 1950s, they would not use iron nails, it was a superstition of the shipwrights not to use nails because in 1001 Nights there's a story about a ship that was nailed together and it sailed over some undersea magnetic mountain and the mountain pulled out all the nails and reduced the ship to flotsam. In that case, all the ships were stitched together with coconut fiber. And if you go to Oman today, to the Al-Bustan Hotel, you can see a ship built by Tim Sevren in 1980, a ship built with period technology. All the pieces were stitched together, not nailed, and he finished it and proceeded to sail to China to prove that such a Sinbad voyage could have been done. Anyway, that's an example of traditional shipbuilding. There are some dhows in Sur harbor, a very picturesque spot. This is all the way out in the eastern extremity of the peninsula. Another contact with the sea of course is fishing. With 1000 miles of coastline you better believe there's an abundance of fishing. This guy, this was down in Wadi Sharbitat which is in southern Oman. This is during a monsoon, you see the winding stirring up the water, and you've got 6-10 foot waves. And we were on the beach, and this guy comes down, and he's got a big toothy grin and he's got his net slung over his shoulder, and he just walks right out into the water out into those waves and throws his net out like that, dives into the water, then 30 seconds later he comes back with a pile of fish. This is one way of doing it. Of course, the Omanis use dhows and nets and other ways of getting fish and bringing them to market. This is a traditional fish market up in Muscat. But things have changed. Now we get into the modern period, the last 35 years.
Up until 1970, Oman had gone through a particularly long period of economic chaos and drought. By 1970, there were only 10 miles of paved roads in the country, there were only 300 customers for electricity in Muscat, there were no schools, no hospitals, no telecommunications to speak of. It was only after the discovery of oil and the ascension of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos put oil revenues into building up the infrastructure of the country that Oman became the thriving middle-state economy that it is today. This shows modern irrigation methods up the Batinah Coast. They not only get water from the mountains, they also get it from desalination plants. They grew so fast and so quickly. When I got to the Ministry of Water Resources in 1991 there was a very serious problem and it was known as saline intrusion. They were drawing the water out of their wells at such a pace that it was creating a vacuum in the water table and it was sucking seawater into the ground and that seawater eventually came up and was pumped out and was being fed to all the trees. It started killing of the vegetables, then it started killing of the citrus, and finally it started killing the dates, and the dates are very hardy trees so if they can't survive, nothing can survive. So they realized that they had to stop, and in 1991 they created the National Well Inventory. There was an immediate moratorium on any future drilling of wells or pumping of wells. You had to go to the government to get permission to pump water for your farms, because there's only one way that you can cure the saline intrusion problem, and that's to let it stabilize naturally. And it's a process that takes years, so now they're beginning to see that the water's being replenished by freshwater from the mountains. Another element that they have done to improve the usage of water is to construct, in critical areas, things called recharge dams. A recharge dam is a dam strategically placed where water coming down from a flood in the mountains is stopped by the dam long enough to sink into the ground and recharge the aquifers, because once it goes off to the sea, that water is gone. This isn't the greatest picture in the world, but here's the recharge dam right over here, and this is kind of a holding area that allows the water to sit on the ground and sink into it. So, aflaj has pretty much been replaced by modern irrigation techniques and building recharge dams.
One of the things I forgot to mention, and it's kind of important -- when I first got to Oman in 1991 I was very fortunate. About a month after I got there I was able to meet Wilfred Thesiger at a book signing. Wilfred Thesiger was a British explorer who had spent many years with the Bedouins in Oman and the southern Arabian peninsula, and has written extensively. There's a popular book called Arabian Sands, and he talks about the life of the Bedouin. And, while Thesiger was at this book signing he was rather distraught, rather distressed, because in 1990 Oman was beginning to come to the forefront of modern nations with all the economic renaissance, and there were changes going on in the Bedouin society that hadn't happened in 1000 years. Bedouins were no longer riding camels, they were riding pick-up trucks with camels in the back of their pick-up trucks. They were carrying pagers and cellphones and had satellite dishes on their houses. They were becoming settled people, and a lot of their traditions of a cultural society were going by the wayside. Thesiger was rather upset at this and had a few untoward words for His Majesty and the government, and he immediately found himself persona non grata. I mean, there is an argument from a pure sake of retaining cultural values, but when you have an economic renaissance like you have in Oman, it's bound to change things. Life is constant change, it's growth, society moving from one level to the next. And Thesiger's side thinks it's important to keep some elements of the society, but at what expense? You don't want to impoverish the people just so you can hang on to some traditions.
So, the point I'm making here, a lot of this, the same effect goes to the Omani people in general. They're seeing things in a very short span of time with the coming of the economic renaissance: highways, cars, schools, hospitals. Hospitals are getting so good now that they've shifted from treatment to prevention. Every Omani can have a free education and also has free medical care. Along with this comes a certain amount of culture-shock which they are still coping with, because some of the older generation know what it was like 30 years ago, they lived in mud-brick houses and didn't have any electricity, running water, telephones. And so these are indeed crucial times, and this was all brought about by the discovery of oil. Oman was the last country in the Gulf to discover oil. They sent oil teams out in the mid-1950s. By 1964 they came back and sad, ‘yup, there's enough oil in the ground there for you to start pulling it up.' So, now we have oil production and oil refining. Oman produces a sizable amount of oil. They don't have as much as the Emirates or Saudi Arabia, but they do have enough reserves for about 50-75 years. Sultan Qaboos, realizing this, knows that he's got problems on his hands if oil runs out any time soon, especially with a burgeoning population where 52% are under the age of 17. You have to educate these people, you have build schools, you have to give them trades, you have to find them jobs. So Oman is spreading out into other areas such as small-items manufacturing, electronics, and one of the best way that they can improve themselves is through the tourism industry, because tourism is labor-intensive. Anywhere from restaurants, to hotels, to tour guides, to drivers. It's a fabulous country to go visit.
So, anyway, we've got oil and oil refining. As I mentioned before, we have copper, which has been mined for the last 3000 years. Geologists also have found coal in reserve -- substantial tracts of coal in the mountains close to Sur in the eastern part of the country. Along with technology, you need to build buildings, and boy, you have all the limestone you would need to make concrete and all the gravel you need to build roads. So, we see 20th century technology coming in and changing the Omani lifestyle very very fast indeed; my brain spins every time I go back there because I've only been there for 15 years, and it's different now than it was in '91.
There's one other aspect of the geology that the Omanis are looking to, and that's something called fossil water. They know how from the tracts of the desert in the central and southern expanses of the desert that they have huge, huge underground oceans of water that was deposited millions of years ago. Now, this is not a renewable resource, it's like oil. It's used once and it's gone. But, the Omanis, when I left the Ministry of Water Resources in 1993, they were investigating ways of tapping into this fossil water. They know it's down there, and if they ever run out of other ways of getting water or if the country gets drier, then they know they have something to fall back on. This picture here doesn't really explain fossil water, but it does show a tree that's thriving quite well, thank you very much, in the middle of a very desolate region.
So we have today a fusion of the old and the new. This is a traditional souk in Bahla. We have modern malls in Muscat. You can get anything you want. Anything you can get over here (USA), you can get over there. Here we have the traditional mud brick homes built in side of a wadi, and here we have modern villas built in a wadi. Here we have traditional styles of architecture -- this is the Rashid al-Hamoda Mosque outside of Jalaan Bani Bu Ali. This was remarkable for its time, it has 52 domes and it's quite an impressive mosque. But now today we have the new Sultan Qaboos Mosque outside of Muscat, which is now the 5th largest mosque in the world, and the 2nd largest on the Arabian peninsula. And this is an architectural wonder, it's a delight to go see.
And the Omanis are very gracious, they welcome all foreigners to come in and visit the mosque as long as it's not Friday, and you can go in and see the detail in the architectural design. It's absolutely beautiful. Here's the main hall. I love to show this picture. You see that cherry picker down in the left hand corner? That's what they use to change the 1800 lights in the chandelier above. Every once in a while they have to take out that cherry picker and send somebody up to that chandelier, and that thing is massive. The design and decorations are absolutely stunning. Here we have a traditional market selling frankincense. Omani frankincense, of course, goes back to biblical and pre-biblical times. It's an aromatic that was used in religious ceremonies and as a kind of airspray in the house to get rid of noxious odors and even pests. They believed that frankincense had medicinal qualities. This is why frankincense was a gift to the baby Jesus, because every family that had a newborn at the time received frankincense, which at that time was considered more valuable than gold. This is how frankincense is sold in a traditional market, and here we have a bottling plant where frankincense has been turned into a perfume and sold in all the high-end boutiques and stores under the brand name Amouage. It sounds French, but it's an Arabic word that means “waves.” And it was an essence, a perfume from frankincense oil. Here I like to show this picture because it does show a fusion of the old and the new. This is the Al-Bustan Palace Hotel outside of Muscat, one of their chief hotel properties. A very beautiful building, completed in 1986 to host the GCC convention for that year.
Now, the problem was, the village of Bustan was right where the hotel was going to be put up, so what they did was tear down the village and relocate it a couple hundred yards down the beach. They rebuilt the village with nice modern homes, put the people to work in the hotel, and everybody's happy. So you see how the fusion there of the old meeting the new. This is inside the atrium of the Al-Bustan Palace, it's jaw-dropping to go in there. Very luxurious, very elegant, but it's not overdone. This is the main port/container facility in Mutrah. This is the one down in Salalah at Raysut. A third one is now being built at Sohar. Oman is surely growing by leaps and bounds. There are a lot of challenges ahead. What remains to be seen, Sultan Qaboos has to find a way of bringing his people together and using the past traditions and the modern innovative ways. Oman continues to be a thriving and dominating country in the Middle East. We should have more countries like that. Anyway, that's my presentation, and thank you very much. You want to do some questions?
Question: Where else does Oman get a lot of its revenue besides from oil?
Ochs: Oil makes up about 90-95% of its revenue. Dates is a distant second. They're hoping by 2015 that tourism will take 5-10% out of that, but oil for the time being will continue being predominant.
Question: Thank you for your presentation. I had a question concerning fossil water. You being a geologist, how did the water get there?
Ochs: Well, this applies to oil as well as to water. There's two conditions of rock. A common person thinks of rock that it's just a solid material, well, rock has two qualities: one is porosity and one is permeability. Porosity means how many holes are there and how big are they, and permeability is how easy fluids can flow through it. Which is why you have underground lakes of oil, and it's the same for water. It gets there by seepage over the centuries, by deposition and additions to the water table. Does that make it clearer?
Question: What happens when there is a drought? How do farmers get their food, I mean, does the government compensate them?
Ochs: Well, traditionally, that aflaj network that I showed you is so well-stocked and so well-supplied, they have running water 365 days a year. It's very rare that an aflaj will run dry because there is enough water in the water table to keep these farms going. It does need to be replenished, you do need rain. But the main ways of bringing water to the people are through the aflaj, through the recharge dams, through desalination plants, but desalination only makes about 10-15% of water production. It's always going to be a rare commodity, and hard to get to, and the reasons for that are climatological.
Question: Are you saying that the waters from the aflaj are pure, I mean, for drinking? But isn't there pollution from modern . . . ?
Ochs: It's pure. It's running water, it's coming from the spring.
Question: You showed a picture of underground aquifers that had a few mounds, that looked like it had a few holes that you were saying were connected to the water supply, what were the purpose of those holes?
Ochs: Yeah, that's the underground fallaj. The holes are for maintenance, because you have to go down there every once in a while and clear out rubble. They have to maintained, you have to clean out the pipes every once in a while.
Question: When do the aflaj date from?
Ochs: 2000 years.
Question: Could you elaborate on the fossil water? Is that just water in aquifers?
Ochs: Yeah, it's basically aquifers that have been in place for several hundred million years.
Question: And right now they're not tapping that?
Ochs: They're not tapping into it right now, no.
Question: You mentioned there are coal reserves in the mountains, and I'm wondering, what are there alternative energy sources, are they using anything besides oil?
Ochs: Right now, on top of the oil, they built two LNG plants down in Sur and they're using resources from LNG, liquid natural gas. At first they thought that there wasn't enough LNG to be worth using, but over the years they kept finding more and more so they produced these refrigeration facilities and they pump all their LNG through Sur and they pump it off to their electrical plant to run dynamos.
Question: What do you think about Oman and other Arab countries using these big wastelands of desert to make solar power with solar panels?
Ochs: Good question. I would think there'd be somebody working on that, but you might want to talk to somebody in the Ministry of Energy. Bring it up. I haven't sent too much of that. That's probably a good thing that they should look into.
Question: (inaudible: something about the difference between rocks in Oman and the southwest US deserts)
Ochs: Pretty much the same. Mixtures of sandstones and limestone and ocean sediments. Oman has rocks from every major geological period.
Question: I'm assuming that the small amount of arable land is not enough to sustain the population, is that correct? So what I'm going at, what percentage of their population is fed by the land and what percentage is fed by imports?
Ochs: They do a lot of importing and exporting. There's a lot of food coming in from Africa, Australia, the Far East. I don't have figures on the breakdown, on how much is produced in home production or what have you, but a lot of their food is brought in from the outside.
Question: I'm curious how you came to work at the Ministry. I know you worked on the desalination, is that what you did consistently when you were in Oman?
Ochs: Well, I had previous Middle East experience. I worked in Saudi Arabia in 1983 for Aramco and my background was in graphic design and book production, specializing in textbooks. And in '83 I worked for Aramco, then I came back and worked for a small company in Boston producing training manuals for oil production, specializing in exploration geology, petroleum engineering, and geophysics. I did that for eight years, then I went through the big D and realized I had to find a way to make some money, so I decided to chart the Middle East waters again, and after a while an opportunity came up so I took it. And I wound up there in the fall of '91. The Omani people are just nothing but bend-over-backwards nice. Forget all the stuff you hear on CNN. There are some beautiful places to go in the Middle East, and Oman is right at the top of the list. It's safe and secure, you don't have to worry about tensions. Traditionally, Oman has always been a hard place to get to because of the foreboding mountains and surrounding desert, and it's a great place.
Question: You mentioned a little about tourism, but have they created national reserves or parks or something?
Ochs: They have set up a couple of areas in the central part of the country and on the eastern seaboard to protect endangered species like marine turtles, the Arabian Oryx, the Nubian Ibix, mountain lions, caracal lynx, several species of antelope like we found running around in the desert. These are protected areas. They've met with varying degrees of success because you'll always get people who want to hunt, to poach. But for the most part, you can travel very freely throughout Oman, up and down the coast, through the mountains. A few years ago, there was one restricted area called Saiq Plateau because there's an army installation up there so they didn't want people snooping around but when one of the ministers of defense opened a hotel up there that kind of changed things. So now you can go up on Saiq Plateau and just see some beautiful areas of country. There are growing tourism companies that do all kinds of off-road adventures, city tours, boating tours, snorkeling, diving. Oman has some of the best diving this side of the Red Sea. People say the water isn't quite as clear but there's more variety of marine wildlife and so forth. I could keep you busy for six months if you had the time and money.
Question: I've heard a little bit about how overgrazing is having an effect on agriculture and environment, especially in the southern region of Oman (inaudible), have you seen any of that?
Ochs: I haven't been back there in a few years so I'll have to plead ignorance on that. I just don't know.
Question: From Muscat to Musandam, for example, how easy is it to get there?
Ochs: Either by plane, which goes three or four days a week, or by car. A few years ago when the Emiratis opened up their borders by not requiring visas, or basically giving visas on demand, so the Omanis had to change their policies too. So if you go to Oman and happen to go by car, make sure you have a multiple-entry visa, so you can drive up there, it's a four or five hour drive from Muscat. It's fairly easy to get to. Musandam is awfully nice because you get to see a different part of the country. It's a little bit more remote, a little bit more desolate, and the people are really, really hardy. They live on the seacoast right at the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz, where 80% of the world's oil passes through, so it's a very critical spot, but also very beautiful.
Question: I hate to ask, but I have to ask the question since you encouraging tourism. How far does the US dollar go if I were to travel to Oman.
Ochs: Things are still a bit pricey now, that's because they don't have the numbers of mass tourism the way they do in Dubai. As a general gauge, when I was living there, if you wanted to buy a big-ticket item like a computer or a TV, you would drive to Dubai on a weekend and get the same item for about 30% less than you would in Muscat. That rate isn't constant, but that's indicative of the fact that things are a little bit more pricey down in Oman, and it will be until they get the numbers up with tourism.
Question: What about a hotel or transportation?
Ochs: It is a little bit more pricey, but you can get it, you can do a 10-day tour of Oman for maybe $1500 not counting airfare.
Question: In regards to tourism, how do the locals feel about that?
Ochs: They love it.
Question: But in the case of Dubai, Dubai's changing on a daily basis, it's much different from the way it was a month ago. Is anybody apprehensive about that?
Ochs: There have been a couple of unfortunate incidents. One of the villages that I showed with its date plantations, when they first started bringing tourists there, they started carting busloads of tourists up there and the people were just taken aback. Suddenly there were all these people around, foreigners, and so they had to build in a buffer zone, basically a place where they could offload tourists, have picnics, use restrooms, and so forth. They were just running around the villages and the people were a little overwhelmed by it. Basically, you know, these are real nice, fine little country folk. They're not too well-versed with the outside world, so when people start coming around like they did a few years ago, it can create problems. But, by and large -- I take groups out into the mountains and I get invited in the homes of total strangers, and the next thing you know you're sitting down having coffee and tea, and then they're asking if you'd like dinner. They're very genial folk, they'd like to know who you are, where you're from, a few things about you, and so it's always been an eye-opening experience for the groups I've brought over. I don't do mass tours or bus tours, my groups are small, anywhere from 4-12 so you're not overwhelming a community when you drive in. So, if they keep it like that, they shouldn't have any problems, because the Omanis are very genial people.
Question (from Mubarak): Thank you very much for the presentation. I had a question about the mountain chains, (inaudible) I remember there being two chains of mountains, the eastern side, the Hajjar Mountains, and that's the way Oman is (inaudible). Can you elaborate a little on that?
Ochs: I'll bring up the map (shows map on screen). Here the Hajar Mountains all the way up to the Musandam Peninsula and along the northern fringe and they abruptly stop right outside of Sur . And this mountainous region (pointing toward southern part of map) is more of an escarpment, it's the Jebel Samhan Plateau, and as we see, it gradually rises up before it abruptly drops off down to the coast. And this in between here (pointing to center of country) is mostly wasteland. By the way, all the oil reserves are in the interior. There's no offshore oil in Oman, it's all in the interior. These (pointing toward Hajar Mountains) are what geologists would call thrust-fault mountains, when you've got two plates come together like that, and one of them is just pushed up like this. These are just ocean sediments, and when you go up into (inaudible) you can see layers of strata almost going up and down like this, that's what the scientists would call thrust-fault mountains. Whereas the mountains down here are more of an escarpment, a plateau that's been kind of pushed up but has remained flat, not quite the same as the thrust-fault
Page last updated 05/07/2007