Wotae: 25.11.2023
In the morning we still bathe and pack, on the beach we meet a local diver who offers us a huge shell as big as a plate, he fished it from a depth of 10 meters and looked for pearls in it, he didn't find any, so at least he eats it. He offers us that we can grill it directly in the shell, but we leave, we don't have a fridge or the courage. She puts a baby crawfish on David's hand, it's about 2 cm big and it was hiding from the fish in that shell. Then he pulls out the just-caught cuttlefish, so we learn about harmless suckers (unlike those that octopuses have) and other interesting facts about marine life.
We leave around noon and head south to the mountains, fill up with water and stop at the LuLu hypermarket in Barka to replenish supplies. We don't have a local offer yet, so the purchase takes us a lot of time, but at least we buy gas even with a simple cooker, we give up trying to buy a 2kg bomb for our cooker, on the one hand, we still don't know if they have the same threads here, and the second is the shop where they have them on the outskirts of Muscat (so far) and the following 2 days closed. And last but not least, this will be cheaper. In the shop, we also discover a wide range of ready-made meals at the counter (cooked on the spot), which solves the fact that it is already late in the afternoon again.
We finally continue to the mountains, but the sun sets uncompromisingly around six o'clock, which is too early for us, we are once again looking for a place to stay in the dark. This time in a wadi, so we will complete our first offroad kilometers and first fords in the dark. Fortunately, we have (as the French would say yesterday) a true-offroad car, so it's no problem for him. With a bit of luck, we find a sandy spot under the trees in the stone field, there are still hot coals in the fireplace. The perfection is only spoiled by the fact that Omanis leave behind a terrible mess everywhere, and there is a lot of garbage here. There were cleaners on the beach in the morning, who comes to collect it here...? We set up our tents, put them on the fire and bathe in the clear water of a modest stream. Stars appear in the sky, here we will be disturbed by the croaking of frogs, which en masse jump in front of our steps.