Where in the world is John Henzell?

Does anything exemplify the unorthodox nature of summer in the Gulf quite like the phenomenon of rain tourism?

While the rest of the peninsula bakes in 50deg heat and relentless sun and with the next rain not forecast until NEXT YEAR, one tiny alcove of southern Oman with a favourable ring of mountains gets the Khareef, as they call the monsoon in Arabic.

Even just over a year ago, the thought of actively going somewhere solely with the intention of encountering rain would have seemed bizarre beyond words. But bizarre beyond words pretty much sums up life in the Gulf and in my second summer here, I jumped at the chance to go to Salalah as a rain tourist.

The photo above was taken by a previous rain tourist and as I boarded the Oman Air flight, it was with the almost visceral expectation of feeling rain on my face and seeing greenery that didn’t have a black polyethylene pipe leading to it.

But guess what? The khareef is late this year, so when the plane descended through a hopeful-looking cloud bank, instead of seeing verdant green, I was greeted with a view as brown and desolate as anything in the Dhabs.

You know that saying about it being darkest before the dawn? That never made sense to me, because it should be darkest in the middle of the night, but I can say that the brownest part of the Dhofar summer is just before it rains.

It wasn’t entirely barren. Thanks to abundant groundwater, there is a verdant farm strip just along the coast, and the coconut palms make a change from the date variety with which I’m now so familiar.

They even swayed in that Blue Lagoon way, in the languid tropic winds coming off the Indian Ocean.

And I was put up in a nice enough hotel, although eight months of living in a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi cured me of ever liking that blandly corporate five-star decorating style.

And, yes, this was the view from my actual window at the Hilton Salalah… (I should stop whining, eh?)

And Oman Tourism not only flew me business class from the Dhabs but also hooked me up with Ahmed, a fine guide who lived in Salalah and who drove me around for the days I was there.

There are two tourist seasons in the Dhofar, Ahmed explained to me. In the winter, there’s the “European season” when people escape from wet cool and grey places to experience heat, sand and sun. In the summer, there’s the “Arab season” when people escape to escape from hot, sandy and sunny places to experience wet, cool and grey weather.

And even if the khareef hasn’t arrived yet, the winds and surf have. Which means the blow holes at Mughsayl beach were cranking.

I’ve seen plenty of these before but this was undoubtedly the best. There was one that seemed to have purely air coming out of it, which was good for doing Marilyn Monroe shots in your dishdash or abaya.

But this rock star of the Mughsayl blowholes would spew out little bits of water… Or lots of high-powered mist…

And even just foam on occasion, but the really spectacular expulsions sent water a good 10m or more into the air. So, I did get a soaking, just not from rain.

Away from the narrow greenery of the coastal strip, this was what it looked like.

But there were these hardy trees dotted throughout the wadi, which turned out to be Frankincense trees. Lubban, in Arabic, but taken back as incense by the Frankish Crusaders, hence the name.

This was once one of the richest places in the world for the Frankincence, which sold for the same price per weight as gold.

It’s definitely not the same price as gold now (about $10/kg) But you can’t pull drops of gold off trees beside the road either.

This was the collected dried form, for sale at the lubban souq, or frankincense market in English.

They were sited directly on top of burning charcoal in these specially made receptacles.

They also had Myrrh, another form of incense derived from tree sap. And, as Ahmed said to me: “You’ve got frankincense and myrrh. All you need is gold and you’ll be a wise man.” If only it was that easy!

You can also eat the better quality bits of frankincense. Don’t. It sucks!

In my hotel in Sana’a in Yemen back in March, the owner could come through with one of these things at dusk and leave it in each bedroom for a couple of minutes to perfume the room.

It was one of my favourite memories. I asked Ahmed about Yemeni frankincense and he scoffed, saying it was much lower quality than Omani frankincence…

The souq had stalls selling frankincense and all the accoutrements, including special incense burners that ranged from merely something that ought to go “straight into the pool room” (for fans of the great Australian movie, The Castle) to objects that Darryl Kerrigan would have said to his wife: “You could sell that!” (ibid)

After an afternoon siesta, Ahmed brought me back out to Ittin Road, where every Dhofari and his dog meets in the cool of the evening, eats the local speciality (a really nice fried honey bread), drinks tea and just generally watches the world go by while talking rubbish.

The next morning we headed out again. This was the gun souq, located outside a bank!! The Omanis are obviously familiar with theories of vertically-integrated marketing.

We headed up into the hills just above Salalah to Job’s Tomb, the holiest site in the Dhofar.

On the way up and down the escarpment, we hit the very tiniest hint of precipitation, a kind of pre-mizzle that suggested the khareef coldn’t be that far way. It never reached the point of needing the wipers so it did SFO to greening the Dhofar.

Job’s considered a prophet in all three Abrahamic religions, featuring in the old testament and, as Nabi Ayub, in the Qu’ran. The tomb is about 4m long, and Ahmed explained that Ayub lived to the age of about 190… But he’s also supposedly buried in Lebanon and Turkey too, so I took it with a grain of salt. (Or was that Lot instead of Job?)

And this was his footprint, inscribed into the rock by The Will Of God.

Although I have to say it looked a lot like readimix to my heathen (but DIY-trained) eyes! And the foot was a good 18inches long. (For SITC fans, I don’t know how long his nose was supposed to be)

I must admit I found the nesting birds outside more interesting.

We then drove east.

Camels, heat and sand might score points in the European season, but the law of diminishing returns affected my interest in seeing them.

Except they seemed to have this appealingly imperious road sense, so they’d wander straight across the main road.

You ever seen a camel with a “What?” expression before?

Some of the Dhofari heritage had been saved and restored, such as here at Taqah Qasr, or castle.

But mostly the old buildings, like this one in the fishing village of Mirbat, had been abandoned in favour of the Stalinist (but probably more comfortable) reinforced concrete monstrosities.

This door was on an abandoned building. It was a shame when across the Yemen border in the Hadhramaut, these same building styles remained in fashion and old buildings were valued. The Omanis are richer than the Yemenis, which probably explains it.

Most of the Dhofar felt like Yemen-lite to me, being safer but more developed and less interesting.

Just outside Mirbat was a massive old-style graveyard. Ahmed said Muslims here are buried lying on their right side, with their right hand under their head, facing Mecca.

It was also the site of the tomb of Bin Ali, a famous Yemeni who helped foster Islam here. His double-domed tomb dated from the Madonna Vogue-tour school of sepulchral architecture…

Another 4m casket.

In the UAE or Yemen, us infidel — impure — ones would not be allowed in. The Dhofaris seemed far more relaxed. Green is the colour of Islam, which explains why Hamas and Hezbollar are always in green.

The obelisk in front of the tomb was intricately inscribed.

I could pick out a few words and letters, but not enough to make any sense of it.

Nearby at the 4th Century BC port of Khor Rori was the fortified village of Sumhuram, once fabulously wealthy from the frankincense trade but now just an archaeological site run by the University of Pisa.

We drove on, past more camels and more parched countryside…

Then we found GREEN. And not just green, but green in a form that didn’t have a black polyethylene pipe at its base.

(Anyone who lives in the Gulf will know what I mean!)

This was Ain Razat, the spring of Razat. It flows year-round and what the Salalah basis is supposed to look like in years when the khareef monsoon isn’t late…

The locals were swimming…

Ahmed had to go show around a Bahraini family so he left me with his son, and we spent the final hour in a Yemeni coffee house on the beach where he kicked my ass in chess. Twice.

But in my defence, I last played it in 1989 and had to ask him which order the pieces were placed in and which way they moved on the board…

Then it was back to business class on Oman Air. It was probably too short (one 1h20m flight to Muscat and then a 45-minute one to the Dhabs) to really make an impact.

You know you’re in the Middle East when the in-flight locator on the plane’s screen tells you which direction Mecca is…

And with one final look at real mountains, it was back to the flatness of the Dhabs, where today I have to write 1800 words on rain tourism after not seeing rain…

“This is better than the air conditioning in my office,” Jenny said, as we were halfway through the second canyon.

Outside it was the all-too-familiar baking heat of an Arabian summer but here in the depths of the canyon which never saw the sun, the temperature remained at a level that was not just comfortable but even a little cool.

This had seemed to be an impossible prospect even as we pulled up at Hatta Pools, just over the Oman border from Hatta township, and looked out on a dry wadi bed shimmering in the relentless Gulf sun.

I suspect many of the seven of us had decided to come on this excursion as a break from the seemingly inescapable aircon of this time of year rather than because of my assertion that this was the one activity in the outdoors it was still feasible to do in summer.

But as the dry wadi bed approached a bluff, a trickle of water could be seen emerging from the gravel and despite an attempt to hijack it for a falaj irrigation channel, the stream continued to flow. As it approached a band of bedrock across the floor of the wadi, the stream channeled into a groove and we followed suit.

At first the canyon was a cruisy metre or two wide and with knee-deep water of perfect tepid temperature. And after about 70m, it broadened out again, prompting a half-joking: “Is that it?”

But faith was repaid when the channel narrowed again to something not much more than shoulder width and we had to start helping each other through some of the slipperier drop-offs while the walls began soaring above us and preventing an easy escape.

I had little information about the route other than the upper gorge is easy and that we were likely to be wet. Then after rounding a corner, we were confronted with a deep pool of green-tinged water which headed off between the vertical canyon walls further than we could see.

With a shrug of the shoulders, we turned from walking to swimming. Georg declared the water was “like nothing” because it was so close to being like a tepid bath.

For the first time, there was a bit of rubbish floating in the water but nothing like as bad as it could be, with some previous aquanauts encountering disposable nappies. We set off with our mouths firmly closed and despite paddling off without knowing how far we were going to paddle for, it turned out fine.

I’m not sure who was more surprised to see the other — us emerging from the canyon or the troupe of Omani boys taking turns to dive bomb into the water using methods that ranged from merely daring to attempts to snare a Darwin Award.

A minute or so later, we’d emerged back onto dry land on the wide wadi floor. Just beyond an upturned date palm trunk marked the start of the second half of the canyon, which we’ll get to after a break in the shade of a rock overhang.

The Omani boys proved to be very friendly, although Andrew’s ability to bluff in what he called “the international language of football” proved to be a better lingua franca than my own efforts at Arabi Khaleeji.

Most of the information I’d been given about the gorge had been about this far lesser-used second part, which I’d been told was cleaner and nicer, but with a slightly technical part at the very beginning.

The slightly more technical bit came right away but I’d brought a 30m handline, which we secured via a skanky thread just back from where the creek disappeared into a 6m-deep canyon.

As I’d been told, the handline wasn’t really needed but proved helpful as we made the jump from the lowest section of the cacade and into the pool below. It was a little committing because we didn’t know what happened next with the gorge, even though I’d been told the rest was easy.

So we left the rope in place, even though it was clear that reversing the move might have been a little tricky. Still, it gave Georg the chance to enjoy a warm shower.

The pool directly below the jump was about belly deep but soon the canyon narrowed and the depth increased to about 2m through an easy constriction. Then it became progressively shallower and finally dry as the water began flowing underground.

Once in the dry section, the rock walls began towering over us until they completed an arch, creating a high-roofed cave through which we walked. This was where Jenny discovered that the natural aircon of the canyon was better than at her office. (To be at Abu Dhabi Media Company temperatures, we’d have seen icicles forming, so I was happy to go by Jenny’s company’s standard)

An ancient landslide provided some scrambling and then we emerged through a narrow inverted-V section of cave to a final pool.

This provided the final chance for a swim but this time there was no rubbish and we could see the end before we began.

The canyon effectively ended there, in terms of interest, because there was effectively no challenges ahead.

Except of course, the midday temperatures, to which we were now exposed. It was baking hot, in a way that we’d been insulated from for the last two and a half hours or so but now felt all the hotter as we walked back to the cars, about 1.5km back up the wadi.

By the time we arrived, my shirt and shorts were dry. And in case there was any corroboration required, when we fired up the car and looked at the thermometer, it was reading 50degC, or 122degF.

It was time for a lunch and a cleansing ale in the aircon of the Hatta Fort Hotel…