Roadtrip to Oman

This weekend we hired a car for a road trip to Oman. 'Road trip' also being code for Visa Run. Our 30 day visitors visa's are about to expire and Naz and Piper will not receive their residency papers for another week.

The closest point of Oman is a 2 hour drive from Dubai. Rather than just drive 2 hours get our stamps and u-turn back over the border we decided to do some exploring and make an adventure out of the trip.

The UAE-Oman border is on a mountain line and is an amazing region. It was a beautiful change of landscape to the constant sand desert surrounding Dubai. We had planned on advice from friends to drive into the mountains to finds some wadi's (natural spring rock pools) for an afternoon of swimming. However as we had hired a sedan and not a 4WD we changed our minds on seeing the area and will leave that for another trip.
Instead we explored a beautiful town called Hatta and visited Hatta Fort and the Heritage Village.
The landscape and mountains were breathtaking and the locals extremely friendly. Perhaps too friendly as we naively followed a super friendly gentleman's instruction on where to go for a walk to a natural spring and gardens only to have him pop up on us and insist we go with him to his shanty for a drink of water..... very awkward moments followed once we got there as we didn't want to offend his kindness but there was no way we were going inside that building.
Below are some photograph's from our little'road trip'. We can't wait to drive the 5 hours to the capital of Oman, Muscat sometime in the next few months.

Never ending sand. We couldn't get a photo as we were driving but we saw literally 100's of camels during our drive roaming the sand dunes on the side of the road.

Ummm show your passports?