“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.

Understanding the Coastal Landscape

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. 

I started my visit on the northeastern coast, in the capital city of Muscat. The historic center, where the palace and government buildings lie between massive castles built by the Portuguese, hugs an immaculate harbor ringed by buildings that look like a set from a fantasy film. Meanwhile the pearly-white Shatti Al Qurum district, with its broad highways, could be an extremely elegant creation in a SimCity video game.

From offshore, the Hajar Mountains that rise behind the city’s low-slung skyline look like waves about to come crashing down—or so it seemed to me as I bounced along in a speedboat bound for the rugged Daimaniyat Islands, some 10 miles off the coast. The massive dome of the Grand Mosque, and the city’s brilliant whites and blues and glittering golden crescents, blinked at me as the battering swell soaked me and my gear. Once we reached the islands, I hung my clothes from the deck to dry and swam in turquoise waters with dozens of green turtles. 

The next day, I traveled with Ghassan Almaashari—a guide arranged by my hotel, the new St. Regis Al Mouj Muscat Resort—south from Muscat down the coastal road to the beloved Wadi Shab, a river gorge deep in the mountains. Here, as in so many canyons and crevices in that part of the country, waterfalls form some of the most beautiful swimming holes I’ve ever seen. At Wadi Shab, and the little caves nearby, I saw the bulk of the other tourists I was to encounter on my trip—about two dozen people, even though it was high season. 

The following day, Almaashari drove me west of Muscat to the ancient mountain capital of Nizwa, where there is still a grand souk and, every Friday, a well-attended goat market. The great travel writer Jan Morris, on a visit in 1955, described Bedouin women wearing traditional battoulah face coverings, made of brilliantly colored fabrics and sometimes adorned with metallic beads and coins. The men, she wrote, wore dishdashas, or long shirts, and carried curved silver daggers in their belts. While I saw similar outfits during my visit, there were also SUVs and buses to remind me that more than half a century had gone by since Morris’s visit. 

The 17th-century Nizwa Fort, long the seat of power in the region, has undergone massive renovations and become a tourist attraction. While much of the work aimed to preserve the structure’s antique character—the arched crenelations along the edges have all been restored, for example—there were tableaux throughout the fort, with dummies, replicas, and cheap plastic props. Almaashari could tell that I was a bit horrified by what looked to me like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. 

Cell reception kicked in on our way back down from the mountains, and Almaashari and I received the news that the Biden administration had released 11 Yemeni prisoners into the care of Oman. They were among the last detainees to be held in Guantánamo, rounded up during the so-called “War on Terror”; some had been held for decades without being tried or even charged. Prohibited from returning them to Yemen, Biden turned to Oman—underscoring the role of global diplomat the country has assumed over the past half-century. This standing is clearly a point of national pride, and Almaashari went on to tell me about the many times Oman’s positioning in the world has allowed it to function as a mediator, because it has chosen not to align itself with one particular power, doctrine, or faith. 

Hotels and Restaurants To Know

Benefiting as it does from thousands of years as a major stop for the spice trade, and incorporating influences and ingredients from China, India, and East Africa, Oman’s food is also a point of enormous pride. The meals I ate combined all of my favorite flavors: seafood in rich, gingery curries; the famous lamb shuwa, wrapped in banana leaves with cloves and chiles and cooked underground on hot coals for 24 hours; and the chai-like karak tea, heavy with cardamom. I loved all the food I had in Muscat, but I must have returned to Karibu, the Swahili Coast–style restaurant at the St. Regis, five times, for its sublime octopus curry. I still think about it almost every day. 

The St. Regis, which is part of a new development that includes a golf course and residences, is a swooping, futuristic, serpentine structure wrapped around a pool and facing a pristine private beach. A little way along the coast sits another recently opened property: the Mandarin Oriental, Muscat, perched on the gorgeous (and surprisingly empty) Shatti Al Qurum Beach. The grass promenade along the sand, shaded by coconut palms, is a favorite for locals. So too is the hotel, which has become a gathering place for Omani royals and dignitaries, diplomats who work in the nearby embassies, and those who just like to see and be seen. 

Privacy, by contrast, is paramount at Six Senses Zighy Bay, a hotel I visited way up in the north of the country, on the Musandam Peninsula. The property has a reputation among hotel enthusiasts for being a wonderfully remote hideaway. I may have forgotten to mention to the team there that I am deathly afraid of heights—and so they arranged for me to arrive at the property by paraglider, from the top of a mountain range behind the cove where the hotel is located. (I survived without incident.) I could see why people love the resort: there is a timelessness to its cobblestone and wood-beam architecture that makes it feel as if it has been there forever. 

How the Past is Shaping Oman’s Future

But then, everywhere I went in Oman, I felt a funny flattening of time as I wandered into places that have existed for millennia, while reflecting the legacy of colonialism. (Even the designation sultan for Oman’s monarch is a holdover from Ottoman days.) 

Before oil was discovered, my guides told me, there were less than 10 miles of paved road in the whole country. Just two schools. A single hospital. Then, almost overnight, the nation was dripping in wealth, which Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who ruled from 1970 to 2020, used to build up infrastructure and expand social services, education, and health care. Unlike the United Arab Emirates, its neighbors to the north, Oman didn’t build vertically (the tallest structure in the country is just 16 stories) or coax foreign companies to move their headquarters there in the hopes of stimulating investment. Rather, throughout the 50 years of Sultan Qaboos’s reign, there was an effort to keep Omani culture intact, while modernizing to have the best of things (including, in Muscat, a dazzling opera house, a passion project for the music-loving sultan). 

At times Oman can seem hidden away from the world, a glittering white kingdom by a sapphire sea, governed by a benevolent monarch. But the future is coming. One of the mandates handed down to the present sultan, Haitham bin Tariq, who succeeded Qaboos in 2020, is to usher the country into a sustainable future. Oman Vision 2040, as the project is called, seeks to incorporate green technology and diversify the economy. It is already expanding the footprint of the capital city, even putting in place a radical new development: a residential and commercial district with buildings of 30 to 40 stories. 

When Thesiger visited southern Oman’s Dhofar region in 1945, he mounted his expeditions into the dunes from the city of Salalah, the region’s historic center. Salalah at that time, he wrote, was “a small Arab village adjoining the sultan’s palace.” Today, at the gleaming Al Baleed Resort Salalah by Anantara, which has been designed to look like a traditional Omani castle, guests can ride horses on the beach, mount their own excursions to shop in town, or see the ruins of the ancient cities nearby. 

Visiting the Dunes

Like Thesiger, I was eager to get out to “the sands,” so I ran off with Ahmed Almahri, a guide arranged by the Anantara, to take in my first sunset in the Empty Quarter. En route, Almahri wanted to do a little “dune-bashing”—driving up and down Dhofar’s massive waves of sand in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Though undeniably fun, this wasn’t exactly the baptism of solitude I’d come in search of. 

That night, in the Bedouin-style camp just outside the dunes where the Anantara had arranged for us to sleep, I asked Almahri about the appropriateness of the word Bedouin; it sounded a bit off to me. But Almahri, who prides himself on knowing the dunes so well he has never used GPS there, said that Bedouin was fine. It comes from the Arabic badawi, which means simply desert-dweller. 

The next day, I decided to venture farther into the dunes. Another guide, Said Tabook, collected me and drove me to the ruins of the ancient port city of Sumhuram, once the heart of the region’s frankincense trade, where I watched from the archaeological site as dozens of camels waded into a lagoon. We found still more camels walking in the freshwater flow at Wadi Darbat, a gorge farther up in the mountains; from there, Tabook brought me to a chain of turquoise waterfalls that ran over a staircase of cliffs. 

All through the region, the long Dhofar Mountains run with the sea on one side and open desert on the other. The desert stretches, as Thesiger wrote, unbroken until Damascus, a distance the same as from the southern tip of India to the Himalayas. In his day, the land around the mountains was thick with frankincense trees, which the sultanate is now trying to protect as both a cultural and commercial resource. At Wadi Dawkah, I visited trees that are being looked after, in part, by the Omani perfume company Amouage, which treats them and their resin the way the Rothschild family treats grapes in Bordeaux. And why not? For centuries the resinous sap—which, when dried and burned, was said to smell of the divine—was one of the most valuable commodities in the world. It made what the ancients called Arabia Felix, or “Happy Arabia,” one of the richest places on earth. 

As we drove southwest toward the Yemeni border, Tabook spoke to our driver in Jibbali, a language full of clicking sounds and lisps made at the back of the teeth. On the car stereo, he played me songs by the Lebanese singer Fairouz. In response, I played him classical Iraqi oud music. As we made our way past baobab trees and tobacco plants, through rocky fields blooming with desert rose and acacia, Said countered with John Denver’s “Country Roads.”

Finally we came through the canyons to Al Fazayah Beach, maybe 40 miles from the border. Here I again gravitated toward a crowd of camels. Wading into the water with them, I noticed just how happy I was, how perfectly unencumbered. When I finally tore myself away, the animals bade me farewell in growling belches, like creatures in a Star Wars movie.

That night, Tabook and I made our way deeper into the dunes, settling in at a Magic Camps outpost, a wide circle of canvas sleeping tents, as well as a communal mess tent, arranged around a firepit. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in a John Ford western. Tabook and I were the only guests that night, and as the Magic Camps team rustled up dinner, we sat by the fire, surrounded by massive hills of sand. 

As we sipped tea and looked into the flames, Tabook asked me if I’d ever heard of an Englishman who traveled to this area long ago and wrote a book called Arabian Sands. Yes, I told him, almost giddy. I was sitting there at that very moment because of that book. In fact, I continued, I believe that book set me on the trajectory of my life and work. 

Arabian Sands was a valuable artifact, he said. There were no contemporaneous accounts written by Omanis, or written in Arabic, that recorded with such specificity the life and times of Omani tribespeople of that time. Thesiger’s book is one of only a few records we have of the behaviors, beliefs, and dress of that generation, who lived much as their forefathers had for centuries. Thesiger managed to capture their incredible strength and humor, as well as how loud and irascible they were. 

Nowadays, Tabook told me, there are people who get themselves up in strange clothes, or act strangely, and claim that they are honoring the old ways, preserving the purity or authenticity of a time gone by. But, he said, they are foolish; because of this book, there is proof of how things actually were in the past. Besides, times were very tough back then. Why would you ever want to go back?

Growing up in the 1970s, Tabook continued, he had spent much of his childhood in the mountains, wearing hand-me-down clothes that were in some cases generations old. He went on to study meteorology, and eventually became a French- and English-speaking guide. In his lifetime, he watched technology arrive—first as a radio powered by a car battery, then television, then the Internet, and now cellular phones. He held his up and shook it in the air, marveling. Surely, he said, your parents and their parents would want you to live a better life than they did? 

“Here, as elsewhere in Arabia,” Thesiger wrote of the period after the discovery of oil, “the changes which occurred in the space of a decade or two were as great as those which occurred in Britain between the early Middle Ages and the present day.”

Now Oman and this entire region are preparing for another new, but more sustainable future. I wonder what the dunes, the country, and the cities will look like in a decade or two. I hope someone is writing a book.  

A version of this story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Shifting Sands.”