Oman

Oman

The silence in Wadi Shab is the first thing you notice, broken only by water trickling between canyon walls so narrow your elbows graze the rock. Oman sits between the Gulf's excess and Yemen's instability and has somehow become neither. Frankincense smoke drifts through Muscat's old souq, the desert at Wahiba Sands swallows sound whole, and the mountain road to Jebel Akhdar is not the place to test your faith in guardrails.