A desert adventure of dunes bashing, camel ride, sunset and star gazing. To top it all, experience spending the night in a tent, Bedouin style. So, get ready to travel back in time with us and get a taste of being in the Arabian wild for a day.
Wahiba Sands is the Arabian desert as you’ve always imagined it: a huge, virtually uninhabited swathe of sand, with towering dunes, sculpted by the wind into delicately molded crests and hollows. It appears like an ‘ocean of waves’, which is why it is best described as a perfect specimen of sand sea.
Bedouins still live here in somewhat ramshackle encampments and our guests will get the opportunity to visit them and be a part of their lifestyle and immerse in their traditions including taking some pictures with them and their camels.
Your trip will be incomplete without partaking in dune bashing in the souped up 4WDs and relish the thrill of tearing around the sands. As a general rule of thumb, the further into the sands you penetrate, the more dramatic and untouched the landscape becomes.
Things to Know:
- Pick up & meeting point: 4pm from a nearby city called Bidiyah (2 Hours far from Muscat).
| Tour Inclusions |
|
||||||
| NOT INCLUDED |
|
Dunes Bashing Adventure
Sunset Watching from top of Dunes
Desert Camp night stay over
Bedouins House visit
Camel Ride
Tour Reviews
The day at Wahiba Sands was very pleasant.
The camp, comfortable, with large tents and shared bathroom for two units. Very good dinner and breakfast.
And the staff very friendly and helpful.
However, I did not find it interesting to ride a camel 5 minutes and visit a Berber tent, because it was not really a house.
The dunes and the sunset are splendid, but I found the tour through the desert very brief.
We had a wonderful experience visiting Wahiba Sands with Mustafa. The desert camp was well-appointed, with comfortable sleeping tents and beds. Surrounding the camp it was open desert as far as the eye could see. Two tents shared one bathroom, which was very adequate, with a toilet, washbasin and shower. We were presented with dates and coffee, and we enjoyed our very tasty evening meal and breakfast in a communal dining area furnished with cushions and low tables. A firepit provided a pleasant spot to chat after dinner.
Soon after our arrival we went out with a driver in a 4WD pick-up truck. We had a great dune bashing experience, driving up and down seemingly impossible gradients! We also saw wandering camels and goats. After about 30 – 45 minutes we parked on a high dune from where we could see the camp in the distance. We settled ourselves on the sand to watch the sun set. As we waited, the winds increased until they were whipping sand from the peaks of the dunes, reminding us of our vulnerability in this environment. The sunset itself was breathtaking.
In the morning, after the opportunity to go out into the dunes on foot and watch the sunrise, we were driven to a separate area of the sands. This contained many more campsites, which appeared crowded together after the solitude and silence of “our” site. This made us value Mustafa’s selection of campsite even more!
We were able to watch the procedure of tacking up the camels and then to experience a 15 minute ride. We were then invited to the home of the camels’ owner. We were invited to ask questions about the Bedouin lifestyle, and we met his wife and several of his children. An interesting man, he had led a commemorative camel train on a 1500 km journey across the empty quarter to Qatar over a period of 49 days. They had no vehicular support, carrying all their food and water, and camping en route in traditional manner.
All in all this was a unique, almost spiritual experience which we would strongly recommend!
Leave a Review