The Imprint Of The Desert: Oman In The 1940s

No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.

This podcast, the Sultanate, is entirely about Oman. It is made by D. Michael, an American teacher living and working in the capital Muscat since 2011. (Don’t feel embarrassed if you need to google where Oman is, because when the maker of this podcast first saw the job posting, he also thought: “Where the heck is Oman, and is this a place that I can live?”)

In this episode, he interviews Tom Ordeman, an information security practitioner at Oregon State University and a part-time military historian. They discuss the travel classic Arabian Sands (1959), written by Wilfred Thesiger.

In the 1940s, this British military officer, explorer and writer visited Oman and what is now the United Arab Emirates. He spent five years travelling with different groups of nomadic Bedu or Bedouin tribes in the Arabian country on camels and on foot.

“Part of the Bedu culture was that they were obligated to be generous. So if you had something and someone asked you for it, you were basically obliged to give it to him,” says Ordeman. And:

Reading it, you almost feel like you’re being told a story.

If you would like to know more about Oman, you can also listen to the previous episode, which will tell you everything about the surprisingly many types of Omani crisps, or to any of the other episodes about travel and culture in the country.