Last Friday I took a couple of friends, who were visiting us, on a trip to Taab, a magnificent abandoned village in Al Sharqiyah Governorate. It was not my first visit to this small hamlet but this time I wanted to reach a cave upstream from the village under a huge tufa formation. It was Pierre and Aude’s first time in the Sultanate. We left our house in Al Mawaleh at 6 am as I was planning to take them to two exceptional sites in Selma plateau above Fins before visiting Taab the next day.
We reached the first place at around 9 am. It is situated on a flat area, overseeing the majestic entrance of Al Tahri cave on the other side of the canyon.
The view is breath taking with the wadi bed around 500m below us.
After this short break we headed to Selma plateau to the seventh hole, sinkhole that I’d visited many times with my family and friends.
Pierre and Aude were impressed with the size of the chasm.
We abseiled two drops of approximately 40 metres into the cavity to visit the bottom of that gigantic “cathedral”
We did not stay for long before climbing out of the seventh hole and decided to find a camping spot close to the starting point of our trip to Taab the next day.
We had a pleasant evening and Pierre took some funny pictures of me preparing an omelette for dinner!
We woke up early in the morning, and after breakfast we packed our backpacks for our trip to Taab.
The sky was quite cloudy and we were hoping that it wouldn’t rain.
The trail to Taab is in pretty good condition as people are still planting in their terrace gardens there.
It took us around an hour to reach the hamlet in the wadi bed. The houses were built on the right bank of the canyon in the cliff.
We started walking upstream following a trail traversing the magnificent green gardens.
The water of the falaj comes from a spring above the cave we were planning to visit.
After around 45 minutes we reached the source of life of the gardens. The water of the spring was captured at its source into the falaj.
We finished taking pictures of that superb place and headed to the hidden cave under the tufa.
The descent was a little bit exposed and we had to be very careful because a small mistake could lead to a fall of more than 15 metres.
We reached the cave safely and took pictures before we hit the road back to the village walking in the wadi bed.
We got back to our car after an hour of hike and drove back to Muscat. The next day I was planning to take my friends to Jabal Shams aka “The Grand Canyon of Oman”.
— kamkam@omantel.net.om