Wadi Aboul

Saturdays' trip (October 3, 2009) with the Emirates Natural History Group was to “Wadi Aboul, historically one of the more popular oases to visit for expats living in Al Ain. Faculty from UAEU have been enjoying a day out in Wadi Aboul from the late 1960's.”

This is kind of ironic because when we were on Eid al Fitr break we drove up here by mistake. We had been trying to make the connection between Mahadah to Wadi Sharms but ended up in Aboul instead. We stopped but did not get out of the car had I know that it was as easy and entertaining as it was I would have much rather spent my time at this wadi instead of the Wadi As Sudiyah. Oh well you live you learn.

Well the first issue was getting the family out of the house for the trip they were pretty reluctant to go after spending all Friday in the house playing on the computers and watching movies on TV. But I prevailed even dragging Ttia out of the house.

Once we arrived I tried to take a shot and the battery on the camera was spent. Luckily I was able to take a shot at a time so I ended getting some high resolution pictures to supplement the camera phone shots I had taken.

The walk starts at a gentle slope going up the wadi, at several points you see small pools of water that are “iced” over. In fact they are covered with a film of calcium carbonate (like Tums ant-acids and bones) the water percolates through the lime stone dissolving the calcium and when then it deposits this over the course of the wadi. This is very interesting and in some of the larger pools the bottom of the pool is covered in white – including the plant material that has fallen in.

On the tip we did see some pools that looked good enough for a small group to splash about in. I am not saying it is swimming but it would be a nice spot to have a picnic and I am going to try to convince some of the guys to go out with me there.

On to the Aboul Fort, this place looks great and it is hard to believe that is has not been used or maintained for more than 50 years. The fort is in a great location on a small hill overlooking the formerly large oasis. It is a great place to explore as most of the fort is still in tack and you can get up to the top of one of the towers in the fort. A nice thing about the fort is that it has new occupants. There were several bats and geckos. This was a main selling point to the kids. And we were able to see several bats up close and personal. We got some shots of the bats but he picture I am posting I lifted off a newspaper article about bats in the UAE. One of the nice shots I have is of the interior of the mud brick wall where you can see that they stacked rocks in the wall to make it fortified. It makes sense as the people in the village would come here in times of raiding parties.

Not far from the fort is a village that still has some buildings being used for storage. The village is for me at least your standard mud brick and rock village. Granted some of the building did show signs of cement which according to Brien indicates that they were built or renovated after World War II. Brien indicated that swan lumber and Portland cement did not arrive in the region until after WWII. It was nice village with many houses in a fairly spread out area. The village still has a mosque that Brien says is still in use by the workers in the oasis across the wadi.

On to the Oasis, it is hard to believe how green it is in the working part of the Oasis- several plots on the lower plain of the wadi system had been abandoned due to lack of sufficient water. The Oasis was your typical Omani style with dates, mango, orange, lime, and lemon trees. This particular oasis also had the additional plants of eggplant and okra, which I found rather interesting.

After a walk through the oasis we returned to the cars on the donkey path which is opposite the fort and along the foothills. We stopped along the way to look at a cemetery.
All an all a good trip out, we were home by 7 pm and watching Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”