Dhofar

Salalah does not behave like a Gulf city. It is low-rise and green, laid out across a coastal plain thick with coconut palms, banana plantations and papaya, with roadside stalls selling the fruit and fresh coconut water straight from the shell. The centre is unglamorous and genuinely local — a produce market, a gold souk, a frankincense souk near the seafront where resin is sorted by grade and burned on charcoal so you can smell the difference before buying. The corniche and the city beaches run for kilometres and are used by families in the evenings rather than by tourists. It is a comfortable, low-pressure base: the airport is close, hotels are spread along the coast west of town, and nothing about the city demands much of you beyond a willingness to drive out of it.

About forty minutes west of Salalah the coastal plain ends against a wall of pale limestone cliffs, and at Mughsayl the sea has worked its way into the rock and up through it. At the right state of tide and swell, water forces through channels in the clifftop and erupts from holes in the ground in vertical jets — sometimes a metre, sometimes many times that, with a boom that arrives a half-second before the spray. It is a genuinely good natural spectacle and it is entirely dependent on conditions: a flat calm day produces gurgling and very little else, while a big swell puts water over the walkway. The beach beside it is a long crescent of pale sand backed by the cliffs, usually near-empty, and worth the stop even when the blowholes are sulking. Beyond Mughsayl the road climbs into the hills in a series of switchbacks with the coast dropping away behind, which is the best driving on this side of the country.

The eastern coast is the softer half. The road runs past a string of beaches and fishing villages to Mirbat, an old trading port whose merchant houses — tall, shuttered, carved-doored and mostly empty — record a period when this coast did serious business with the sea. Inland of it, Wadi Darbat is the region's freshwater surprise: a broad valley behind the escarpment with pools, tufa terraces and, after the monsoon months, waterfalls coming over the lip in volume. Cattle graze the grass, families picnic under the fig trees, and in the green months it looks like nowhere else in Arabia. The turnings off this road are unsignposted as often as not, and the reward for taking them is usually an empty beach with nobody on it — which on a coast this long is less a discovery than a statistical certainty.

Three or four nights is the right length, based in or just west of Salalah, with a day in each direction and unstructured time for the beaches. An ordinary car covers everything described here; four-wheel drive is only needed if you are going up into the mountains off the graded roads or out toward the sand. The season question is the one thing to settle before booking, because this region runs on the opposite calendar to the rest of the country and the months it is famous for are not the months everyone should choose — the Dhofar and the khareef guide sets out the trade-off in full. One practical note that catches people: the region is a long way from anywhere else in Oman, so treat it as its own leg with its own flights rather than as a detour from a northern itinerary.