The Musandam Fjords are the sea inlets of the Musandam peninsula of Oman, an exclave beyond the United Arab Emirates, where limestone mountains drop in walls up to 800 metres straight into the Strait of Hormuz, and they are sailed into on wooden dhows that leave the town of Khasab in the morning and do not turn back until late afternoon. The khors, the inlets, are drowned valleys where the Hajar mountains are tilting into the sea, and the longest, Khor ash Sham, runs seventeen kilometres inland between bare cliffs with no road along it; the dhow moves slowly up it, with cushions on deck and lunch cooked on board, and dolphins ride the bow in the mornings, and it stops for snorkelling off Seebi island, where the current-swept water shelters healthy coral and reef fish rarely seen in the wider Gulf. Along the walls are stone villages that no road reaches, whose people go out in small aluminium skiffs and where the dhow ties up to buy fish, and in the middle of the inlet lies Telegraph Island, a bare rock where British cable operators baked in the 1860s with no relief but the long looping voyage back through the strait, the origin, it is said, of the phrase going round the bend.
The mountains behind are driven. The track out of Khasab climbs from sea level to about 1,600 metres in an hour and a half, gravel and broken rock most of the way, to Jebel Harim, the mountain of women, where fossils of fish and shells lie in the rock of the summit plateau, and the view from the road drops on both sides to the sea. At the northern tip of the peninsula lies Kumzar, reachable only by boat, whose few thousand residents speak Kumzari, a language found nowhere else on Earth. Khasab has a Portuguese fort, and the smugglers' speedboats to Iran leave from its harbour. Musandam is the Norway of Arabia, and the dhow is the slow way to see it.