First Long Train in Russia: 24 Hours from Vladimir to Yekaterinburgby Randi / July 6, 2017
After the 24 hours on the train that you read about in the previous post, we had crossed the Europe-Asia border and landed in Yekaterinburg, capital of the Urals. The Urals are the mountains that effectively make up the border between the continents, though it’s rough considering it’s all still Russia and kind of nebulous. But it counts! We’re officially in Asia! That means, we’ve crossed into Asia by air (when we flew to Thailand and Cambodia, which I promise I will finally write about after this trip…so…November?), by water (when we took a ferry in Istanbul to the Asian side of the city (which I promise I will finally write about after this trip and after I write about Thailand…so…December?), and now we’ve crossed into Asia by land. So fun! I was so ready to get off that train that my expectations for what kind of city to expect were super low, and I didn’t care. So I was surprised by how much I liked Yekaterinburg, at what a nice place it seemed like, with beautiful vistas and open spaces, good food, and a nice vibe. But, of course, it could just be because of the hotel.
I love you Hotel Renomme
Because we had just gotten off a 24-hour train journey with questionable hygiene, and because after 24 hours in Yekaterinburg we would be getting on a THREE DAY train to Irkutsk that would change my preconceived notions of how disgusting I myself could be, we booked one night in a fancy hotel instead of a hostel for the first time this whole trip. Treat yo self! The Hotel Renomme was a very charming, clean, lovely little boutique hotel right outside a metro station and a mall. We checked in, apologizing for how disgusting we were in their clean, beautiful space – we were literally Bert’s chimney sweepers when they break into Mr. & Mrs. Banks’s house. Then we were shown to a room that actually made me cry. It was so cute. Nothing out of the ordinary, but mine eyes have seen some shit lately. It was a lovely room, with a big clean oh how clean bed, a little sitting area with adorable chairs and a cute table, a dresser, a closet with a safe and a minibar (I forgot such things could exist!), and a little balcony with French doors that opened onto the loudest street noise you could ever imagine (a bar below played loud music all day and night) but it was still a dream. It was about 10pm, and despite how badly we wanted to shower in that gorgeous, clean, oh so clean bathroom with its actual living breathing shower (no showers on the trains….hell there’s barely sink water) and oh I was gonna wash my haaaaair — that had to wait because it was super late and we were really hungry so had to find food first before things closed.
Hilarious fashion mag menu |
weird matrioshka guy on our table |
ADORABLE matrioshka the bill came in |
The mall looked promising, open still, so we walked around trying to find something and looked at a few menus before finding literally my new favorite restaurant, Schastye, a Georgian restaurant on the top floor with an incredibly vegan-friendly menu, you can’t even believe. The menu had so many vegetables and interesting preparations too that I wanted to cry for the second time in one hour. We ordered several dishes, including a Georgian specialty green called jonjoli that was a little pickly and sharp and was really good. The menu extolled its nutrient dense properties. Oh the menu itself was hysterical – fashioned like a huge magazine with ‘articles’ on the cover highlighting different Georgian dishes. So fun and so big. The table also had the super weird matrioshka (above) on it, which we were like what.
DELICIOUS cheeseless dilla kinda thing 
cucumber-tomato salad with walnut cream |
the slightly pickly jonjoli 
eggplant rolls |
We also had an eggplant rollup dish, with the eggplant filled with a walnut paste. It was really good, and came sprinkled with pomegranate seeds which I love. I had a salad, because I needed fresh vegetables too, and even though it was mostly cucumbers and tomatoes and that’s the only veg we can consistently find and I’m pretty sick of them, I didn’t even care, it was good and fresh and in some kind of great walnut-based dressing I don’t even know. Then, after working out with the waiter which of the fun breads could be veganized, (he was WONDERFUL with the veganness) I got my favorite thing, this roti-like flatbread baked with spinach and other greens inside. It was soo goooood why am I writing this I want that now!
While Husband got a traditional dessert that he said was really good, I got a ginger lemonade over crushed ice that was perfectly gingery and burned my throat in that good gingery way. I really liked it even though I had forgotten that we’re not supposed to be drinking the water and the ice may have been made from tap water. It seemed like a nice enough restaurant that they wouldn’t voluntarily poison the customers though.
It was such a great dinner. I love this restaurant! Who has ever found great Georgian vegan food in a random mall? After dinner, we went to the big supermarket in the basement and stocked up on water for the night. And I saw this glorious vision:
(i was so glad to see my old friend Alpro non-dairy milks, and in flavors I can’t find even in london! unfortunately, without a fridge on the train and no small sizes, it didn’t make sense to get a whole carton sad face)
After dinner, we dropped all our laundry at the front desk while begging them to do it by the next evening (they were so nice) and then took the longest showers in human history. My hair was so clean. I know this is boring and no one wants to hear about when we showered but we play by my rules here and also this hotel room and the bed and this shower and clean laundry were like the strongest argument I’ve ever known for that whole cleanliness is next to godliness business.
Yekat main square
The next day, because we only had the one day in Ye old Katerinburg before catching the 3-day train that night, we booked a private tour guide. I knowww I know but we had things we wanted to see and that was the most effective way to do it. And it wasn’t super expensive either, and we both felt afterwards that it was 100% worth it. We booked through UralTerra and our guide Evgenia was excellent. She spoke the best English so far of anyone we’ve met, I think. She arrived with a car and driver and taught us so much about Yekaterinburg. We started by going to a central plaza that commemorates when the town was built, in 1723, and is right near the big city dam that was the most important thing leading to the city’s success.
Let’s find a rock…I mean a big ass rock
damn
When the dam was constructed, it could generate water-powered, um, power and so Yekaterinburg quickly became an industrial center, with factories all over its jawn. And its success and booming population generally lasted, with it now being one of the four biggest cities in Russia.
another church on more blood
Next, we drove a few minutes to the Church on the Blood (if a Russian church isn’t about depositing a robe, it’s because it’s on blood), the site where the Romanovs were executed. We saw their tombs in St. Petersburg, and now we saw where they were betrayed and executed. Heart don’t fail me now am I right. They were being hidden on the site for a long time, before Sverdlov, whom the city was named after for a short time because of this, ordered their execution. Apparently, the whole family was taken down to the basement and told it was for their safety, and then lined up in their family order and told it was because they wanted to take a photograph, but then Sverdlov and his team just shot them all, including the children. People are monsters. It gets worse. The girls had jewelry lining their corsets so that if they ever got out they would be able to pawn it to survive, but it meant that the bullets didn’t penetrate and they didn’t die right away so the worthless monsters used bayonets. It’s such a grim history, and later that day we’d learn even more horrific details. What’s really strange, though, is that the entire family was canonized as saints, in an attempt for the country to maybe to try to seek forgiveness for this very dark history. So in this cathedral, where all this terrible evil happened, everyone is praying to the Romanov saints. It is very strange, to make them saints because they suffered a horrible death, and a whole lot stranger for people to base their entire religious fervor on praying to them for the same reason. It just felt very odd.
Ganina Yama monastery
After visiting the cathedral (no pictures allowed inside), we drove back to Europe (hi Europe!) to Ganina Yama (not to be confused with Goitery Yana (or Baba Yagga)), an absolutely stunning monastery with the most peaceful atmosphere and the freshest air I’ve breathed in weeks (no smoking! actually taken seriously!). This land was like a small piece of heaven in a forest, with beautiful wooden cathedrals and smaller churches and lovely pathways and everything so in tune with nature. I felt so calmed and so relaxed, which is a very rare thing.
The vast monastery land had tons of beautiful buildings, some of which were churches and some of which were just cafeterias
And then I was told why we were at this monastery, and I no longer felt so peaceful. That and because I had to wear a headscarf borrowed from the site’s bag of public I-doubt-ever-washed headscarves and I thought I was getting lice. Um, so this is where, after the Romanovs were executed at the place we just left, their bodies were carted for a mass burial in an abandoned mine shaft (which we saw, pictured below). They were cut up and burned in this mine:
the pit of despair
Some people were tried and executed for the deaths, but by the time it came to light that Sverdlov was the ringleader, politics had changed and instead of punishing him or ruining his name (he was already dead after all), they changed the name of Yekaterinburg to Sverdlovsk. Like…that’s not how you punish murderers, guys. Luckily the name is now back to being for Catherine and not some psycho child murderer.
The Romanov children
It’s too bad this site is so beautiful, because knowing why it’s consecrated and revered is, again, very strange.
Aside from all this horror, our guided tour of the area included what’s probably the highlight – the Asia-Europe border! So fun and silly!
“I’m on the EAST side, I’m on the WEST side! I’m on the one side, I’m on the other side!”
It was so cool to have one foot in Asia and one in Europe! Even if the border line isn’t actually exact, it counts.
Over 4000 km to London! (faded one near the top)
kind of weird right
The last stop on our tour, after we were briefly shown the new modern Boris Yeltsin Center and strongly urged to visit later for a much longer time (we would have if we had the time), was the Military Museum. It’s a small museum that doesn’t have much to it, but we wanted to go because it has a section about Gary Powers, the American pilot who was shot down in Yekaterinburg in 1960 — you know, the guy causing the trouble in “Bridge of Spies”! The guy traded for Mark Rylance, Greatest Actor of our Generation and Probably Most Others! So the movie/Mark/Hanks connection made me eager to see this. As it stands, it’s just a few pieces of his aircraft that they have displayed, plus some photos and a weird life-size mannequin of Gary in a uniform, sitting in a pilot’s seat. Errmkay! At first, the two people running the museum (no one else was there) told us that the Gary Powers stuff upstairs was ‘closed for renovation’, so we were like okay then peace out, that’s literally all we want in your museum, so then because we weren’t going to buy tickets they changed their minds and let us upstairs. So weird. Apparently most of the remnants of the crash are in Moscow, which we didn’t know, but I guess we saw enough. Made me want to watch a movie though. Three weeks without television so far! Ahh!
pieces of Powers’ aircraft in the Military Museum
Another light and audio diorama presentation!! Russians love these! This was in Russian so did our best to just follow the flashing lights
After our tour, we wandered around the city, brought provisions for the 3-day train and bought food and chocolate. We went into this famous candy shop called Alyonka and found some accidentally vegan bars! Yum!
We went into another giant grocery store in another giant mall to get canned beans and produce for the train (they love their big malls and fancy grociers in Yekat!), and I know I already shared a picture of the Alpro nondairy milks from the first store, but I have to share this store’s stock too, BECAUSE WTF IS SOYA FOR PROFESSIONALS???
anyone?
If anyone knows what they mean by that, please tell me in the comments.
We also stopped in the famous Uralskiye Pelmeni, a restaurant with a cafeteria style vibe (very common all over Russia) that has amazing pelmeni, or meat dumplings, for husband. Little did I know I’d find some of my favorite food of the whole trip – this stewed (or braised) cabbage dish. Oh my goodness, this was so simple and more delicious than it had any right to be (and incredibly cheap). We fought over the last bites when we should have just gotten more. SO GOOD. I also had a little raw cabbage salad that was merely perfunctory for its rawness and vegness but tasted better than I needed it to.
best cabbage dish of all time OF ALL TIME
So, we had a grand day in Yekaterinburg. Maybe I was just so happy to be clean, short though it lasted. Maybe it was because the hotel was beautiful and they did our laundry for super cheap to apologize for an unrelated mixup. But I think the city itself just exceeded my (admittedly basement-level) expectations. It’s cosmopolitan, it has beautiful open spaces and paths along the river. There are at least two restaurants I would be happy eating at 100 times each. It seems like a nice place to live, at least compared to a lot of what we’ve seen east of the Urals. I think we saw all the things we had to see, in just one day, but it wouldn’t be terrible to spend more time there.
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Almaty, Kazakhstan: Surprisingly Cosmopolitan City in the Middle of Whoknowswhere
Chinqui! After the nonstop action of our previous few weeks in Kyrgyzstan, a few days in Almaty provided the easy, relaxing tourism we needed for recovery and rejuvenation. I know what you’re thinking because it’s what I thought too: “No way you’re talking about Kazakhstan being the easygoing part of this trip.” I know! Mah wife! Against our (unfounded) expectations, Almaty was nice and perfectly boring. For the first time in a long time, it felt just like your average cosmopolitan city, with nice cafes, restaurants, buildings, and even recognizable brands. It was clean and modern and was the first place to remind us of London since Shanghai. Yep, Kazakhstan is just like London.
We breathed a sigh of relief (but not too deeply; the car exhaust/pollution problems in this region are big in this city) at getting a leisurely day to sightsee at our own pace. We decided to follow a walking tour around the city from the website Caravanistan, which was very helpful but took us literally six hours to get through. Granted we did stop a lot (at every single good looking grocery store; more on that later), but still, damn, what a town! We started at Republic Square, which was about 40 minutes from our hostel when you factor in how incorrect all my advance food-findings were (HappyCow is only as good as we make it, people!). At Republic Square we found the very very tall Independence Monument, which features a pretty f-ing badass man riding a flying snow leopard. HELL YEAH you fly that magical snow leopard into the SKY, Golden Man!
Great success!
Look at that stupid kid statue in front of you riding a regular old horse! HAHA LAME CHILD.
The Independence Monument stands in a big official looking square, with government buildings and the former Presidential Palace. Also nearby is the monument to the 1986 December Uprising, which is said to have been mostly students protesting decisions of Gorbachev. But there’s so much misinformation, as with everything out of the Soviet Union, that no one can agree on whether it was a protest for independence or just against his latest decision, whether it was planned or spontaneous, whether 200 people participated in the uprising or 40,000 (get your shit together USSR), or whether only a handful of people died or whether the death toll exceeded 1,000. FFS the Soviet Union really didn’t like facts. The statue below, honoring the uprising, is called Dawn of Liberty, because a few years after the uprising, Kazakhstan won its independence from the Soviets – even though they didn’t seem to want it. Apparently in 1991, 94% of voters voted to stay in the Soviet system? but then just months later they were granted their independence? What the crap was going on over there! Kazakhstan was the last country to gain their independence from the Sovs whether they wanted it or not.
Gypsy! Give me your tears!
We turned to walk down Dostyk avenue, which previously was called Lenin avenue. Still in the land of Lenin avenues and statues! Never leaving! There we saw the Arman Cinema with this amazing relief on the outside, facing the street. And yes, it’s connected to a Burger King. I know, it’s confusing to hate the sight of gross fast fooderies while also being excited to be in a place with names you know.
this suit is NOT black
In this area we found the statue of Tulebaev, a composer. Now that we’re outside of Republic Square and its municipal buildings and its concrete, you’ll notice how so much of Almaty is green and tree-lined. It feels like the whole city center is a park sometimes! There are bike paths and foot paths, so many fountains, and so many trees. A-nice!
Wave good bye to your clock radio, asshole!
I really liked the below monument to Zhambyl Zhabayev, the Kazakh folksinger. He played the dombura, which is not a Japanese food, and only sang in the Kazakh language. He lived to be just a week shy of 100 years old, which is pretty amazing for anyone but especially for someone born next to a river by Mount Zhambyl (which he was named after) while his mother was fleeing an attack on her village. I don’t think anyone seeing a baby born at the most inconvenient time in the most inconvenient place in the middle of such horror and tragedy stopped and said hey I bet that baby lives to be 100, or past 4. The internet has no reports of fun nicknames but dammit if he was never called Zhambalaya I will be so mad.
I had not come to Hollywood to fight with a man dressed as Hitler.
I was also a fan of the statue to Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian artist and writer. I like that his name is in the plural. I write many Taras! I like that he was Ukrainian and I found nothing relating him to Kazakhstan anywhere on the internet. But most of all I like that his statue is so f-ing weird. Why did they just make his face come out of an amorphous blob? Is it because he isn’t Kazakh? They being prankers?
I like!
Okay I’m mostly joking about the statues though. My real top sight in Almaty is, I think, the actual top sight in Almaty – the fountain based on the Chinese zodiac but bastardized by Soviet symbolism so it became just a wet circle of confusion.
King in the Castle, King in the Castle
It’s a great fountain, but at first glance you might just think the animal statues are of your standard choices. Especially if you know it’s supposed to represent the zodiac, you might recognize that oh there’s the lion, there’s a ram, there’s the…snail? Instead of cool things like dragons, the use of Soviet symbolism means we get things like the snail.
mah wife
The symbols used are thus kind of funny, kind of cute, and it makes the fountain even more interesting to know why there are such random animals featured.
Very nice, very nice! How much?
An important artwork for us to find was this mural (above) on the wall of a hotel (or office building) that was under significant construction. I hope they don’t hurt the murals! We wanted to find this painting because it represents us on our Silk Road journey! Okay maybe they were thinking more ‘actual explorers and adventurers from thousands of years ago’ and not two little whiteys but hey we felt pretty cool seeing it.
Everybody know it for girls!
We next moved into the war portion of our monument viewing. Above is the monument to two female heroes of World War II, Manshuk Mametova and Aliya Moldagulova. Manshuk was a machine gunner and the first Soviet Asian woman to receive the Hero of Soviet Union medal for bravery. She had been studying at the Almaty Medical Institute when the war began, and schools in various cities are named after her. Aliya was also awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal, for her work during the war as a sniper. Apparently she trained at an all female sniping school, which sounds incredibly badass. Does the US have anything like that or do they still not like having girlies in the military?
Below is requisite Eternal Flame, which we saw in every single place in the former Soviet Union. After that is the Glory Monument in Panfilov Park. It is dedicated to the 28 guardsmen of Panfilov. The 28 were a group of Red Army soldiers who fought in the defense of Moscow in 1941, and they all died in action. Most of them were recruits from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz regions.
sleeve of wizard
Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium
On one main boulevard was the lovely opera house, which was also under construction and it took several visits to get a picture without a truck on its front stoop. A poster on the facade informed us that the opening performance of the season was occurring the night we left. Cool guys.
all other countries have inferior potassium
Thought we saw literally all the sights, we mostly enjoyed strolling amid all the greenery and taking pictures of buildings we liked even if we had no idea what they were. I’m guessing the below is a government building though. I know you’re impressed by my deductive skills.
Although Kazakhstan a glorious country, it have a problem, too: economic, social, and Jew.
We spent more than a few hours in the A. Kasteyev State Museum of Arts, a really interesting and neverending mix of good art, bad art, weird art, blue art. I recall that it was a maze that I couldn’t get out of fast enough to find a bathroom (horrible set up!). I also recall that there was a scary weird robot sculpture out front, and a CREEPY AF painting of Baby Trump inside.
this is the future nobody wants
IMPEACH! IMPEACH THIS BABY!
Next up is this church, the Ascension Cathedral, I am pretty sure, and look! It’s also under construction! It’s made of wood (anyone else just hear Uncle Joey’s puppet?) and claims to be the second tallest wooden building in the world but it lies. It’s a wooden building of lies. Just kidding buildings can’t tell truths or lies. They don’t speak! But I bet this was the second tallest at one time but other things kept happening and this one stopped growing.
The church was built in the 19th century when the region was called Turkestan which is the cutest lil word. It’s had other serious reconstruction works throughout past 50 years so I guess wood doesn’t hold up so good.
You know what also doesn’t hold up to the test of time? Random things named after deceased royals.
It’s weird, guys. As is this:
Not really sure what’s going on with this building but the people behind it REALLY don’t know what ‘disco’ music is because it sure as hell ain’t Vanilla Ice or Shaggy. No idea what this building actually was because we didn’t dare return at night but man I’m still really curious. What designer got away with this?
Shall we move on to food? That’s always my favorite part! The agenda item I was most eager for was the Green Market (or Zelenyi Bazar), the big produce market where locals buy their goods and where tourists like me can find Kazakhstan’s famous apples. Yep, I didn’t know before this trip, but Kazakhstan is famous for apples! We bought lots of their most precious varieties and had apples for daaays. Spoiler: They don’t hold a candle to my fave, the Fuji apple, which I can’t find ANYWHERE anymore. Kazakh varieties (varietals? when do you use varietals without sounding like a dick) are a little grainier than I’m used to, and a little sour, making my eyes go phrmmmph.
I will look upon your treasures, gypsy!
We bought apples and pears and plums and oranges and more apples. So fun. Pro tip: Oranges outside the UK are super expensive. I remember in China I bought an orange once (a mandarin one!) and it was like 4x as much as the rest of the grocery haul. Ridic!
LIke all the amazing markets we discovered on our travels, the Green Market had so many wonderful looking goods that we just couldn’t buy and carry for weeks longer in our packs, like these spices. The vendors are always like ‘hey girl over here buy my goods!’ and I try to say ‘I’m so sorry I would love to they look amazing but I’m backpacking rn and I don’t have the room or the ability to keep them from exploding everywhere and also customs??’ but just with an apologetic look.
Across from the Green Market was the Rakhat chocolate factory, which I was suuuper excited about, but which was a big letdown. It was mainly a little shop overflowing with people pointing to bins of candy in bulk and saying how many grams they wanted. And there was no list of ingredients visible for any of the candies, all hidden behind glass. I asked a clerk about one and she said there was no milk but like how could I believe you if you aren’t checking the ingredients yourself, clerk?! And I’d have to ask about each one? Blergh. I would happily read endless lists of Russian ingredients but I don’t want to make a clerk in an overflowingly busy little shop do that for me. I found my goodies elsewhere. ALSO, all the guides I read beforehand said that this factory made the whole neighborhood smell like chocolate so I was beyond pumped for that but it didn’t even smell like chocolate in the shoppe! J’ACCUSE!
Okay so the ‘I have no room’ excuse might not be entirely accurate regarding the spices…they can be simply little packets, after all. And I definitely made room for less practical goodies I found at my favorite posh grocery store in Almaty, called Interfood. Oh MAN did we score some amazing accidentally vegan totally unnecessary treats.
DA RISO ITALIANOOO! Ok i think i’m out of Borat quotes
The Ritter Sport Marzipan is RG, and you can find it all over the world. I don’t think I like marzipan in other forms (probably because of Gilmore Girls) but it’s great in this. But the real exciting part of this crop of goodies is that box of Speculoos Creme cookies! oh MAN I picked up that box as yet another futile exercise in self-punishment, expecting it to be laden with milk products, but it was accidentally vegan! I wish I bought more of those but I could barely fit one box crushed in my pack. The Rakhat chocolate bar was decent and satisfied my chocolate craving. The other one (the gold) is a gift for someone, haven’t decided yet! Who wants it?
Manner are my favorite treats in the world so I was excited to find some milk-free wafer cookies of similar ilk. These weren’t very good (kind of tangy) but still, wafer cookies on any day are better than non wafers or something like that.
hehe they’re called Sultan waffles
But the best find in Interfood was this bag o’ Cat Tongues! Omg little cinnamon discs of pure magic. I would LOVE to find these again!
We found some great food in Almaty, although nothing matched our amazing Georgian dinner on our first night. My favorite was the little falafel joint a few minutes from our hostel, called Falafel Forever. It was GREAT! And so cheap! I love falafel platters. It’s my perfect set up – hummus, pita, falafel, and tons of fun roasted veggies and salads.
Across the opera house ( I think) was a Brooklyn-style burger place that Husband needed to go in, and luckily they had a really good cabbage slaw that I enjoyed. Of course I also had some of the great potato wedges and a fresh grapefruit soda.
For dinner one night, we decided to tourist it up and have our first Italian food in months instead of having more Soviet-era potato and cabbage dishes. We went into a trattoria called Del Papa right on the main square of a main boulevard (I wanna say near the opera house again) and got the best familiar dishes, including vegetable soup, a great panzanella salad, and a roasted veggie dish in amazing sauce.
Yum! So many good meals, so many apples, so many statues and stories! And SO much junk food in my bags! Shall we cap off our nice stay in Almaty with a shot of the sign hanging in the shared bathroom at Sky Hostel? Ok!
This is why I’m done with hostels.
Okay bye Almaty! Great success!
This is my country of Kazakhstan. It locate between Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and assholes Uzbekistan.
Wadi Shab is Gorges: My Favorite Place in Oman (+ Bimmah Sinkhole!)
I can’t even begin to explain how nervous I was to trek into Wadi Shab. Before our Oman trip, we’d found a very detailed blog post from another travel blogger about how the hiking route through the cliffs to get to the wadi is completely unmarked and so they went the wrong way, and ended up at the top of super steep sheer cliff face that they had to, terrifyingly, scale down as people yelled at them to ‘go back!’ but there was no way back. I mean. I was pretty sure I was going to die, and all because of idiot other travel bloggers. (What have I BEEN SAYING about the quality of other travel bloggers. I am throwing so much shade right now my head hurts. SHAAAADE.) Seriously, this was one of the easiest hikes, and for the G-D LIFE of us, neither Z nor I could figure out how you could possibly take a wrong turn. These other travelers almost scared me away from my very favorite experience for no good reason. LE. SIGH.
Now that we’ve established that other people are the worst, let’s talk about the magical Wadi Shab, a place so beautiful and so fun that it’s one of the most popular attractions in Oman. It’s about a 90-minute drive from Muscat (which you learned all about yesterday), on really nice modern roads that were never crowded. You’re probably asking right now, “What is a wadi? Also what is a shab? Also what is a wadi shab?” A wadi is a valley, and sometimes it means a dry riverbed that fills with water during the rainy season. A shab, I don’t know, I think it’s simply the name of this wadi. A Wadi Shab is a magic land of gorges and canyons and caverns along a river that culminates in 3 freshwater pools in the middle of the canyon, and the last pool you swim to is inside a cave, and it has a waterfall. It’s magical wonderfulness. A cave of wonders, if you will. I’ll tell you everything you need to know!
Before you leave your hotel/house, pack a small backpack with snacks, water, sunscreen, a hat, sunglasses, and water shoes (which we happily picked up at the Dubai Mall!). Bring enough rial in cash to cover the boat fees (below) but not much more, because you’ll be leaving all your shit out in the open at one point (below too). WEAR A BATHING SUIT under your trekking clothes – there is no place to change – and wear sneakers or trekking shoes too. Leave a dry change of clothes in the car if you can.
NO NOT ME TO THE RIGHT OF ME!
okay I guess it’s technically Wadi al-Shab but everyone and everything calls it Wadi Shab so I am not a bad person
To get to Wadi Shab, you either rent a car (which honestly you should be doing anyway for sightseeing around Muscat or anywhere else in Oman, unless you’re staying the entire time inside a resort which like, why) or you can book a tour with a group, but that means other people and other people’s time frame which sounds terrible. There are road signs for it, and any GPS/google maps should know the way (yes our google maps finally started working the day after we arrived; it just wanted us to have that initial nighttime terror leaving the airport). Once you arrive, you park in the small parking lot along the riverbank.
Guess what they have in the parking lot area: TOILETS! HERCALEES HERCALEES!!!
Leave your change of clothes and any other money and any extra phones and cameras in your car! Bring your day pack with water and snacks and water shoes, your car keys, and one photo-taking device, just in case your shit gets stolen you don’t want to lose all your phones. (It won’t get stolen though; everyone leaves all their stuff by the pools it’s fine.)
Sitting on the bank will be a group of locals. They’re in charge of the river crossing. So, you park on this (left) side of the river, but the attraction part is on the right side of the river, the canyon hike and the magic pools, so they bring you across the river in a quick little boat ride (you can see the quick little boats in the picture). If I recall accurately (lol watch me be wrong and pulling a total Josh’s college girlfriend saying “um I think I recall Hamlet accurately” and BEING WRONG UGH), it was 1 Omani rial per person per way, and that’s all you pay for the whole shibang, there’s no ticket office or anything to go explore nature, so it was 4 rial total for this BEST DAY EVER. This parking side of the river has a food and drink stand with bottled drinks and snacks.
So you pet the dog, you say yo what up to the goat (you gotta read the captions), and you cross the river in the little boat. Oh we’ve got an action shot:
And then you’re on the other side (I’m on the east side, I’m on the west side!) ready to start the hike. It takes about 40 minutes to get to the interior canyon pools (do these phrases sound right), and the first 10 minutes or so are totally flat, just walking along the river and along the base part of the gorges. Then it starts to get freeeeakay! But in a completely doable way, not in a scary or difficult-to-maneuver way like inferior blogs would have you believe.
Despite the high numbers of tourists who also have this on their to-do list, it didn’t feel overly crowded at all. In fact, while all the visitors on the day you go will likely convene at the main swimming part at the same time (as you can spend however much time you want there), the hike to the interior of the valley plus parts of the swimming holes (“I call it my swimming hole” – Mindy St. Clair in Oman) were empty for us, which added to how incredible it all was.
Once the flat part of the hike through the canyons is over, you start climbing up and around the rocks, but none of it is very tricky or difficult if you are in average shape and don’t have mobility issues. The path is marked by painted black arrows on the larger rocks at times, but at other times the path is straightforward just by using common sense: “Hmm, there’s no arrow here. Do I go up this set of rocky stairs or DOWN INTO THE RAVINE?” Seriously there was never a moment where the right choice was unclear.
Because it’s a wadi, some of the walking path surrounds water, as it’s traveling to the main part of the river you start at. Oh a good rule of thumb is to follow the black pipes.
You do this climby rocky bit for about a half hour, and then, and then, and gentlemen and then, you are greeted with this:
You come around a rocky bend and voila! You’ve reached the magic swimming pools inside the gorge! After a mostly solitary hike, you’ll be like ‘oh HERE’S all the people!’ As you can see, they are all leaving their bags and shoes along these side rocks, and you do the same. There are enough people – and enough tour guides who do this everyday telling you it’s fine – that you shouldn’t really worry about your belongings. Leave your packs, your hiking shoes, and your clothes (you have your bathing suit on already right?? this is where’d you would have to change), put on your water shoes (you really want water shoes for the rocky bottoms of these pools) and get to swimming for however long you have!
Since this is where the swimming begins, this is where the photos end, sadly. You’ll have to go to see what it’s like in the rest of the pools and the cave! (Or find someone who wisely took a waterproof GoPro. I’ll get one someday okay.) This first pool is fairly deep, as you can see. You can stand for some of it but you do need to know how to swim to go any farther. The second pool is mostly walking through shallow water, which is why you want to bring those water shoes – it’s all tiny rocks which really hurt our soft Western feet (as a guide in Burma once told us we had. She wasn’t wrong.)
The third pool is the magic wonder shiz, though. It’s quite deep – you have to swim – but you are swimming to a cave! There’s a small hole that might be scary if you have claustrophobia or ya know any run of the mill fear of drowning, but you swim through the hole and then you are in the cave with a waterfall! It’s so freaking cool. There are some ledges and hanging rock bits around the cave to hang on to when you need a rest, so don’t worry about getting tired out. If you want the opposite of a rest, there are ropes hanging down the rocks of the waterfall, so some absolutely bonkers adventure seekers among you can try your best to climb up it, land on the slippery rocks up top with the water gushing over them, and jump off into the pool of the cave. Someone tried this while I was there and it seemed terrifying and painful, so, yeah. This guy also had his phone with him in a ziplock bag. Fun fact, he left Wadi Shab with a totally forked phone.
At one point, we were completely alone in that cave, which sounds kind of scary but we knew more people would be swimming in soon. But during that time, it was one of those ‘holy crap are we really here experiencing this?’ kinds of moments. It’s absolutely wonderful.
When you’re done (be mindful of the opening hours so you don’t miss the last boats!), you do it all in reverse, say goodbye to the animals, pee again, and – if you’ve planned your day properly – you drive a short distance to the next swimming adventure.
BIMMAH SINKHOLE
About a 20 minute drive from Wadi Shab is the Bimmah Sinkhole, a water-filled sinkhole by definition but a shimmering turquoise underground lake by mine. It’s back towards Muscat, which is perfect. It’s best to hit the sinkhole after Wadi Shab, on the way back to Muscat, since you’ll already be in your wet bathing suit, rather than on the way from Muscat, since if you swim in the sinkhole first you’ll have to do the Wadi Shab hike all wet both ways.
Fun fact: the Bimmah Sinkhole ALSO HAS A TOILET! What is this amazing new world! It’s also in a sort of park looking jawn, with children’s playground equipment randomly here and there. There is fencing around the top of the sinkhole so lots of people will be taking pictures of the swimmers below. When you’re ready, you leave all your stuff in the car this time (all of it; there’s really nowhere to put anything), climb down the stairs and get in that water! It’s such a beautiful place to swim.
The water was filled with those little biting fish which was funny, if weird. Despite being pretty well-known and touristed, the pool itself was never too crowded.There were all these little nooks and crannies in the rocks to explore, like little caves and enclaves. It was a lovely swim!
So that’s my favorite day in Oman! We got back to Muscat tired but happy, and ready for an amazing dinner at my favorite restaurant in Muscat: a falafel stand called Arax. More on that in the next travel post, all about the food and hotels in Muscat (including our own little resort stay! (yes I talked shit about staying in resorts but I mean ONLY staying in resorts, clearly we did all the things first!)).
