In Musandam, the Omani peninsula that closes the Strait of Hormuz, the sea is the road: limestone walls up to 800 metres high drop into long inlets that no track follows. The inlets are not fjords, whatever the nickname says. No ice has crossed Arabia in two hundred million years. These are river valleys the sea has flooded, and it is still flooding them: the plate itself is bending downward a few millimetres a year. The boats are wooden dhows, and they leave Khasab in the morning and do not turn for home until late afternoon, with lunch cooked on board, so your day is spent almost entirely on the water. Spinner and bottlenose pods usually find the boat in the first hour; the crew cuts the engine and lets them circle.
The anchor drops in the cove under Telegraph Island, where you can swim beneath the roofless walls of a cable station. Britain built it in 1864 to strengthen the signal on the London-to-India line and gave it up within a dozen years; the phrase "round the bend" is often traced to the men posted there. Off Seebi Island the water is clear enough to see fifteen metres down when you go over the side, over coral and reef fish the wider Gulf has mostly lost. Skiffs carry people between cliff villages that have no road at all. The one road inland takes you out of Khasab on gravel from sea level to 1,600 metres in ninety minutes, where the limestone is studded with shells and coral. Halfway up, the Sayh plateau lies flat and green with wheat and alfalfa, ringed by squat stone houses built to lock a year's grain away while families went down to the coast. At the northern tip is Kumzar, which no road reaches and whose few thousand people speak their own language. Kumzari is Arabic and Persian with Portuguese, English and Hindi worked into it: a spoken record of the ships that have come through the strait.