SHIFTING SANDS

For decades, the small sultanate of Oman has lured travelers with its deep ties to tradition and its tranquil desert quarter. Now it's ready to face the future.

- Chris Wallace

I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions,” the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote in his 1959 travelogue, Arabian Sands.

It was these words—about Thesiger’s time in Oman from 1945 to 1950, when he crossed the sea of dunes called the Rub’ al-Khali, or the Empty Quarter—that first made me want to visit that part of the world; the photographs he took there were what made me want to pick up a camera.

The way Thesiger described the solitude and inner strength he found in this region, along with his vivid characterizations of the guides with whom he traveled, on foot and on camel, often in disguise, were impossibly intoxicating to me in my adolescence. So too was the way he wrote about the edges of things: where the mountains met the Indian Ocean; where ancient, nomadic ways of life intersected with the modernity that followed the discovery of oil in 1956.

For as long as I can remember, I have been looking for the experience Thesiger described in the Empty Quarter. Like him, I have carried “the belief that tranquility was to be found there.” I went to Oman to find it for myself.

IF THE ARABIAN PENINSULA looks a bit like a giant moon boot wedged between Africa and Asia, Oman makes up the toe and ball of the boot. The country’s coastline extends from the Gulf of Oman in the north, down the eastern shore along the Arabian Sea, all the way to Yemen in the south.