Oman road trip: sweet times among the sugar dunes

We knew that as part of our Omani road trip we wanted to drive into and camp in the desert. There are a few different ways to do this. The kids rejected an organised desert camp experience, and camping in the Wahiba desert involves having to travel in 4×4 convoy with other adventurers, limiting our independence. And so we decided on a trip to the Sugar Dunes, a third of the way down Oman on the coast of the Arabian sea. A fantastic location where white sand dunes stretch out in one direction as far as the eye can see and down to a wide open beach in the other. The name comes from the fine grained white sand like grains of sugar. The sort of sand which gets everywhere. It was surprisingly not too hot in the desert, the white sand has a high albedo number (meaning it reflects a larger amount of radiation back into space- you’ll remember this from GCSE geography) and also because it’s really windy, with a cooling, yet abrasive breeze.

Getting there was a little eventful. There was one moment when Google Maps thought we’d like to save 20km on the highway route by driving 70km through actual desert. We took the ‘road’ for a few km before rejecting it as a terrible idea. There were plenty of camels in the road, some in the back of trucks, and a very long very straight road for some 300km from Sinaw to parallel with Filim. “This is like driving to Norfolk” quipped Jim, “just with more sand and camels”. After arriving in the fishing town of Al Khaluf, we drove out of town on the only road south, onto the beach and into the sand. We followed advice from this excellent blog with coordinates indicating exactly where to go. We parked up near the beach (at this location) and set about having a swim and watching the crabs and molluscs in the sand. Later on, we headed up the first sand dune and were confronted with miles of pristine white dunes ready for running and rolling in. At dusk, we decided to move the truck a little inland with some protection from the wind to find a spot to camp, luckily located close to some good climbing rocks where we set up camp and cooked rice and beans for dinner.