How I Spent Black Friday

For those of you not familiar with "Black Friday", it is the day after Thanksgiving in America when retailers have so many shoppers purchasing goods and services that the storekeepers finally show a profit for their business for the year. It is a bookkeeping term indicating that they are out of the "red" ink and into the "black" ink, hence Black Friday!

Since I really can't go shopping, and don't need to go shopping, Don and I headed south down the coast to take in some beach scenery. We've been this way before, but made some different detours this time, creating new adventures as well as a misadventure!

We saw this wild donkey on the beach--he wasn't too sure of us!

However, I started clicking my tongue, and he got closer, stopped and gave me a nice pose!

Remnants of rock and tile gathered by Omanis for making a fire on the beach.

This view needs no explanation! Isn't the water beautiful? 

Don and I beachcombing

Some young Omanis having a picnic on the beach and were eager to pose!

They agreed to pose with me--but remember, you don't get to close to women!

After we started to walk away, all 3 of them were eager to give us gifts of
seashells that they had collected on their own. Isn't he adorable? I felt very
honored that they shared their seashells with me.

At this point we were just south of Sur, so we continued our journey, following the coastline. We stopped at this small village southeast of Sur.

Two old watchtowers with modern housing in between

The day is so hazy you can barely see the mountains in the background. They come practically right down to the ocean.

A modern Omani light house!

A typical Omani roadside restaurant--only this is on the sea, looking across to the light house.

A shipbuilding enterprise on the inlet, only this one makes dhows. Here are a few of the older ones.

Part of the frame around which they build/repair dhows.

It's hard to tell, but that is actually a new dhow being built on a frame.

Yet another dhow

A newer dhow on the right with a bridge over the inlet on the left

A better view of the bridge, which we crossed

After we crossed the bridge, we saw a sign indicating the al-Aygh historic castle. The exterior has been restored as you can tell, and now looks quite nice. Some goats were lazing in the shade in front of the castle.

This guy sat and watched us go by, looking very bored with our presence.

As we were driving around the castle, there were some more goats in
front of the houses, looking for anything to eat! Literally, anything!

We scared this baby goat as we were driving by.

Going on around the back of the castle, we saw this rooster and hen enjoying the shade of a pick-up truck.

Then, to our surprise, as we rounded the corner of the castle, we saw this flock of sheep! So many animals in the town!

They took off at a trot as they got near our car. It's as if they could sense I had my camera lens trained on them!

Back on the main road once again, we followed the coast line until we reached the tip of Oman southeast of Muscat--see the map below.

This tip is the area where the turtle preserves are located. We wended our way to the Ras al Hadd resort and beach area, a public area where you can still see turtle nests and activity. It's past peak season, but we found lots of empty turtle egg shells on the beach.

As well as footprints of other wildlife.

Don and I beachcombing. We are standing right on the tip of the country,
where the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea "collide", causing a stiff wind!

A sampling of shells we gathered--there will be more on that in a later post.

One of the shells Don picked up had a surprise as the creature came
out of its shell and started unfurling and rippling like a flag.

After walking on the beach, collecting shells and taking pictures, we made our way back to the car.  Some of the sand was so deep it was liking walking through snow drifts as we climbed back up the sand bank. There were packed sand "roads" that people drove on, but most of the sand was very loose and not packed at all. We found out what happens when you drive on sand that is not packed--you get stuck! And we did, boy did we ever! We were very fortunate that a car full of four young and friendly Omanis showed up and offered to help.

In pretty deep!

They couldn't push us out, nor did the traction items we scrounged for nor did jacking up the car. The young men flagged down another young Omani who had some rope in his car. They attached the rope to both his car and ours through use of a big bolt that comes in the tire kit in the trunk and screws in on the front of the car. Then between the pushing of the young men and the pulling of the car, we finally got out. Whew!

I think Don is definitely a believer in 4 wheel drive vehicles!

Now that we could move on, we thanked all the young men involved--who were really very nice and refused our effort at payment!--and we headed home. We passed the rock shaped like a tiger, and someone had painted it to look like a tiger--

It is so popular to photograph there are warning sides on the highway to watch for stopped traffic.

 I couldn't resist these pictures of some young Omani bedouin women colorfully dressed and walking along the beach! They were happy and having a good time and I loved that they were wearing beautiful, bright colors typical of the bedouin people!

And so we ended our day with lots of photos and stories to tell. I wonder how I'll use those seashells....