We came to Khasab from the south, crossing into the Musandam peninsula on a road that the Omani government cut through rock so recently the limestone faces still look surprised by the intrusion. The peninsula belongs to Oman but is geographically separated from the rest of the country by a strip of UAE — an enclave of craggy verticality that juts into the Strait of Hormuz and belongs, temperamentally, to no other place on earth. The name for these sea inlets is khwar. Everyone else calls them fjords. Both words feel too small for what the Musandam actually is.
On the Water
The only honest way to see the Khasab fjords is from a dhow. These wooden boats — broad-hulled, sun-bleached, painted in faded blues and ochres — run daily trips from the small harbour near the old Portuguese fort at the edge of town. Lia and I boarded one before seven in the morning, when the light came low and amber off the water and the cliffs above Telegraph Island glowed the colour of raw iron. The fjord here is called Khor ash-Sham, the deepest of the inlets, and it pushed inland for kilometres between walls of stone that offered no foothold, no vegetation, no mercy. Just limestone and salt air and, below the surface, water so clear I could watch the shadow of the dhow moving across coral thirty metres down.
Dolphins appeared without announcement — bottlenose, in a pod of maybe fifteen, riding the bow wake within arm’s reach. I have seen dolphins from boats before. I have never seen them quite so indifferent to human presence, quite so absorbed in their own geometry.
What Nobody Told Me About Telegraph Island
The captain steered us toward a small rocky outcrop about two hours up the inlet — Jazirat al-Mughsayl on maps, Telegraph Island in every guidebook. It served as a British cable relay station in the 1860s, and the isolation was so complete that operators stationed here coined the phrase “going around the bend,” referring to the inlet’s curve and to their own deteriorating mental state. I expected a ruin. What I found was a partially intact stone building sitting alone on a flat of rock, the sea on all sides, the cliffs towering above, and a silence so total that Lia grabbed my arm without saying why. There was no explanation for why standing on this specific rock, in this specific place, felt so irreversible.
The Town Itself
Khasab is not a destination that gives itself up easily. The souq near Al Qalaa Street sells dried limes and silver jewellery and frankincense resin in rough chunks. The fort — a Portuguese construction from the early seventeenth century, later rebuilt by the Omanis — holds a small museum of dhow-building tools and traditional fishing gear that is worth an hour in the cool interior. In the evenings, the town moves slowly, and the smell coming off the harbour is fish and diesel and something faintly mineral, like wet stone after rain.
When to go: October through April, when temperatures sit between 20 and 30 degrees and the sea is calm enough for dhow trips without question. July and August bring brutal heat and humidity from the Strait; the fjords do not cool things down. The monsoon shoulder months — September and May — can produce dramatic cloud formations over the cliffs that make for spectacular photography if you can tolerate the warmth.