Oman Part II: Desert Nights Camp

Continuing our way through our Oman trip, I last left off when we arrived at the desert nights camp around 10:30 pm at night, reaching our destination (finally) after having turned down a dark lane and driving over sand for 10 kilometers, after a very, very long day. We were so glad to find the place!

  I had insisted that they set out some food for us for dinner, as I knew that we would miss the official dinner time and their offer of sandwiches didn't sound as palatable as the cooked dinner that I knew they likely served.  The staff at the resort went above and beyond, doling out all of their buffet items into separate, individual bowls for us.  It was a lot of food.  I really only managed to capture the appetizers and grilled meats.

It wasn't gourmet or anything, but we were so hungry and tired that it all tasted great.  After dinner, we retired to our rooms.  We were in tent 6, Katie and Justin were in tent 7 next door.  I was very pleasantly surprised by how nice the surroundings were. I use the phrase tent loosely because the tops were tented, but the structures had solid walls (which was probably better, for soundproofing and heat).

 

 
In the morning, we awoke to very pleasant, sunny day and beautiful blue skies.  We were better able to see the layout of the camp which we couldn't really discern at night.

View from our tent

 After a big breakfast, Michael, Katie and Justin went dune bashing on these ATVs.  I think they had a LOT of fun.

 We then took our Land Cruiser out onto the dunes for more dune bashing, but of a slightly different variety.  We followed one of the guides from the camp, who kindly showed us the way and also took us through some massive turns.

 The desert is pretty amazing.

 The guide also kindly took a bunch of pictures of us as we frolicked on the silkiest, softest sand.

 Completely sandy after our exploits, we got back into the car flushed and happy and proceeded to drive over some of these intense things...

Going over a particularly big one

 It was so much fun.  After that, we rolled out around noon, heading toward our next hotel, the Anantara, located in the Al Jabal mountain range in the interior of Oman.

Farewell, Desert Nights Camp, you were really fun!  We saw some goats on our way out.

I'll post our Anantara pictures in the next post because I took a lot of pictures while we were there, and this one is getting quite long!

If you ever want to get here, please refer to the website and also pre-print out some google satellite map images, just in case.  It's not the easiest place to find!

Desert Nights Camp
Al Wasil, Sur, Al Wasil 115, Oman
location and website