The Chains

After a meal of Lebanese food eaten outside in the perfect Omani evening weather, we awoke the feeling fairly well rested. Today was a new adventure for all three of us, as even Thierry had never been into Wadi Hawasinah and The Chains.

Actually we struggled to find the correct road to reach these mythical chains, which were first constructed by the British forces as a training tool in traversing the mountainous wadis of the Arabian Peninsula. Road is probably the wrong term, since really we were looking for the track that lead up the Wadi ad Dil. You see, in Oman there are now a lot of paved roads, especially in the more heavily populated Muscat and Batinah Plain regions. However, once you get out into the countryside, the paved roads only are the main arteries and even then there are troubles, see tomorrow’s entry.

So, we actually completed the last fifteen kilometres by driving up the wadi bed, which was of course dry, as it is most of the year.

This is the wadi we drove up to get to the Chains which are in the gorge in the distance.

We passed a couple of ‘villages’, again, huts, goats (even some in trees) and a few living soles stuck wily nilly into the wadi walls.

The track ended next to a palm plantation fed by a falaj, with the gorge leading into the mountains behind. A falaj is an irrigation system in Oman, which brings clean water from a natural source down into the villages, fields and palm plantations much as aqueducts do/did.

Pictures of the falaj system in later blogs, but for now we thought we'd share the Omani version of a scarecrow which uses the traditional white Omani dishdasha which men wear, perched on a terrace of crops just on the side of the wadi.

We walked, scrambled over boulders, waded through a couple of waist deep pools and then reached The Chains leading up a particularly large rock face. From a distance all three of us felt this was going to be easy, only once Cora got about two thirds of the way up did we realise our mistake.
You see, it is a series of metal stirrups set along a length of chain and secured around the above rocks. At first, climbing the vertical rock face it is easy to get your feet into the stirrups and allow them to support your weight. However, the rock levels off a bit towards the top and this leads to problems, especially for the shorter legged members of the group. Regardless, Cora clamoured her way up, while Thierry found potentially an even more challenging way around to meet Cora at the top and CW followed up the Chains shortly thereafter.

From there it was more scrambling, small rock climbs and wading until we reached a virtual dead end. Thierry often had very unique ways of making his way over the rocks, needless to say we were quite often in stitches laughing over what we had to do with our bodies to get ourselves over these massive boulders.

Once as far as we could go, we took our time relaxing in and around the pool which was extremely refreshing and then turned and headed back to the car.

The way down was a lot more fun, since it included several jumps into the aforementioned pools, yes they were deep enough, and even one ‘slide’ (we had some great pictures of some of our jumps and slides but unfortunately they were on Thierry's camera and didn't make it on to our CD so we'll post at a later date, so for now we'll just give you a picture of part of the gorge).

The Chains were still a bit of a pain to go down, but we were rewarded with a couple of extra plunges and then a very welcome lunch under the trees before heading back up the wadi and to Muscat, with gorgeous views of mountains and the sun setting all around us.

For our first foray into wadi exploring it was a great introduction and left us quite invigorated.