The Hermit of Hormuz

I had never met a genuine hermit. A full-on, go-away, leave-me-alone kind, of the stone-throwing variety. That was until I visited the Musandam Peninsula on the Strait of Hormuz some years ago when we were living in Dubai.

I had been commissioned by the BBC to make a film about how much the Gulf states had changed in the space of just a few decades. There was no shortage of modernity to film amid the glittering skyscrapers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But I also needed to find somewhere that hadn’t changed, a part of the Gulf that had somehow managed to resist so much of the transformation that had swept through this part of the Middle East since the oil boom of the 1970s and even before that.

Traditional wooden boats in Qumzar

“Qumzar” my friend suggested. “We need to get to Qumzar. It’s about the remotest place I can think of. It’s right on the tip of the Musandam Peninsula, opposite Bandar Abbas in Iran”.

He wasn’t wrong about it being remote. We left the metropolis of Dubai behind us and drove north-east along the coastline of the UAE, through Sharjah and the smaller emirates like Ajman and Umm Al-Qaiwayn until we came to the towering cliffs of Ras Al-Khaimah.

From there we crossed the border into the Sultanate of Oman and after driving through spectacularly rugged mountain scenery we reached the port of Khasab.

Here the harbour was buzzing with long, narrow speedboats with impossibly powerful outboard motors. “Iranian cigarette smugglers” my friend explained. “They can travel at over 40 knots in those things. Enough to outpace the Iranian Coastguard. But they’re all in on the racket anyway” he added, taking a puff from his own un-smuggled cigarette.

From Khasab we hired a small local boat that took us right around the tip of the peninsula until we turned into a tiny sheltered cove, dwarfed by mountains on either side, where barefoot children ran out to greet our boat.

Qumzari basket weaving, Oman

Qumzar at that time had no electricity and it was indeed one of the most unspoilt places I had ever seen on the Arabian Peninsula. But I remembered a good-natured argument I had once had with the veteran explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger. He mourned the advent of the motor car and the oil-fuelled modernisation of Arabia. Surely, I argued, people in Oman were better off now that they had schools and hospitals and clean water to drink? But Thesiger was not to be swayed. Oil, he maintained to his dying day, had ruined the region.

In Qumzar we spent our time chatting to the basket weavers amid the relaxed, unhurried pace of the village. I’m not sure I did a great deal of filming that day, it would have somehow felt intrusive.

From there we drove up a winding dirt track into the mountains, high above the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow waterway that is now the centre of so much of the world’s attention.

And there, standing guard outside a cave in the mountainside, was the hermit with his long and unkempt beard. He was dressed in rags and carried a large stick. Images of Monty Python’s Life of Brian came instantly to mind.

“I don’t think he looks very friendly” my friend said. “Probably better leave him alone”. “Nonsense” I said. “I’ll go and talk to him in Arabic”.

The first stone whizzed past me and missed me by quite a margin, the second landed at my feet. OK, I got the message. The hermit really did not want to talk to anyone and he was clearly prepared to throw stones at anyone who came close to his cave. To this day I have no idea how that man fed himself as I could see no sign of vegetation, let alone a well. Somehow, I doubt he’s still there today.

Frank Gardner above the Strait of Hormuz