Ras al Had Turtle Reserve and Ras al Jinz

Arriving from Muscat with a driver booked in Muscat, I made a short stop in the town of Sur to admire the old Dhowns shipyard. Ras al Had is a small town notable for its old fortress, a small WWII airfield, some archaeological sites and obviously the turtle nesting beaches. The turtle reserve in Ras al Hadd, Oman, is known to be a nesting site for green and hawksbill turtles.

It was a great experience to be able to visit the nesting turtles during the night, always with the established means of respect towards these animals, (avoid speaking loudly, making sudden movements and direct lighting), the next day I was able to snorkel among dozens of turtles, flying fish and tunas, at night you can also see luminescent plankton on the water's edges.

But I want to highlight a negative point... I was disappointed with the ecological maintenance of the place, it is a site with great potential to be a natural WHS of Oman, but the beaches were full of plastics and garbage from both locals and irresponsible tourists, and Many locals were driving their 4x4 vehicles along the beaches at high speed, the Oman authorities should be stricter, clean the beaches and better preserve the place to be able to enter their registration.

I visited this tentative WHS in December 2020. Instead of a simple night tour as a walk-in guest as initially planned, we decided to spend 2 nights here with 2 sunrise tours and 2 night tours included, after Oman announced an exit ban just a few days before our planned departure date. This turned out to be a real treat as we increased our chances to experience hundreds of baby turtles hatching and enormous adult turtles coming ashore to dig their nests and lay their eggs.

Apparently, this year's khareef monsoon season (June to September) in Dhofar was particularly intense with constant flash floods, high winds and rough seas. Moreover, in November there was a tropical storm which developed into a category 1 tropical cyclone named Gati which wreaked havoc in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. As always, nature seems to instictively predict and quickly adapt to such events, and local fishermen have reportedly seen hundreds of turtles mating at the surface of the water close to the Ras Al Jinz/Ras Al Hadd beaches as late as October and November. In general, turtles lay their first clutch of eggs about 3 to 6 weeks after mating.

This probably explains why this year's peak season for spotting adult turtles digging their nests and laying their eggs came much later than the usual July to September months which tend to be also the hottest! This does not mean that you won't see any turtles in the …

Ras al Jinz is more than the resort/museum, tagged along a huge coastal nature reserve Ras al Had, which in turn I don't think it is accessible without going to said hotel. I'm totally up for turtle preservation and this coastal beach area gets all FOUR species laying eggs here at different times of the world. I don't think the world heritage committee would have any problem inscribing this. Okay, so let's get into detail:

The museum is 3h from Muscat with the Qalhat WHS a decent picture stopover. You obviously need a car for getting here. The resort is a very VERY expensive hotel, and the rooms are very basic. I thought hard about staying nearby and just arranging a timeslot but the emails were not returned and after calling them I still wasn't sure what is going on. I went ahead and booked the hotel to guarantee a night viewing slot and THEN the email for answered. As a guest your visit is included. I know now that not everyone got to go who wasn't a hotel guest. It was low season so they don't have enough turtles attempting to lay eggs and the max seems to be 3 groups per female with maybe 20 people per group but so many people showed up at the lobby to see it there must have been 200. Honestly the turtle laying eggs were disappointing and some tourists just kept creeping closer for pictures (that will look crap anyway as …

I cannot believe why Oman, having so many natural beauties, does not have any natural WHS. One of the best proposals would be turtle reserves of Ras al Had and Ras al Jinz. From all beaches of the Indian Ocean, this is the place most liked by female turtles to lay eggs. Turtles come there all the year, but the best period to visit is summer. In winter, if you are not lucky, you may not see any turtles. I was there in February and, fortunately, there were six turtles on the beach. The walks are organized in the night at about 10pm and at 4am in the morning. I participated in the night one and was lucky enough to see one turtle during laying eggs and then burying them in sand, but could not see the best part of the attraction, when little turtles hatch from the eggs and go to the sea. Nonetheless, the experience was wanderful. The turtles are enormous, even more than 1m in length! For me, it is must-see place in Oman.