Musandam is a corner of Oman that looks like it was cut from the coast of Norway, yet no glacier ever touched it. This mountainous peninsula — an Omani exclave severed from the rest of the country by the United Arab Emirates — juts into the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil. Its steep inlets, called khors, are not true fjords at all but drowned river valleys: the entire Arabian plate is bending downward where it meets Eurasia, sinking a few millimetres a year, and the sea has poured into the old ravines. What remains is a coastline of bone-pale limestone walls that rise as much as 800 metres straight from water so clear it turns near-black in their shadow.
Most visitors meet the khors the way Omanis always have — from the deck of a wooden dhow gliding out of Khasab, the peninsula's small capital, into Khor ash Sham, the longest inlet at some sixteen kilometres. Spinner and bottlenose dolphins ride the bow wave, fishing hamlets with no road appear in improbable coves, and the boat usually anchors off Telegraph Island, a bare rock where the British ran a cable relay station in the 1860s to speed messages between London and India. The heat and isolation were so punishing that homebound sailors were said to have gone 'round the bend' — the long turn back through the strait toward home. The water shifts from turquoise over the shallows to gold as the sun drops behind the Hajar peaks, and by late afternoon the whole channel glows before the dhow turns back toward Khasab.