Agathe Daae-Qvale

Redemption at Wakan.

Dawn in Oman arrives with a soft rattle—camel bells skimming sand like wind-chimes. Agathe unzips her tent to a gaze of long-lashed curiosity, the first of many moments where she is both “curious, yet cautious”—a foreigner welcomed into a land that still feels timeless. She packs the 4x4 and heads toward Wakan, a high shelf village tucked into the eastern reaches of Al Jabal Akhdar, where mountains rise from the plains like a stone wall and the sky seems close enough to touch.

Author Agathe Daae-Qvale at the Livingroom Bookstore & Cafe.

The plan sounds simple: climb. In practice, it’s a baptism by heat and altitude—zigzags up animal paths, sun-baked rock, and narrow shelves strung with hemp ropes. “One hand on the rope, one hand in a sweaty palm, and one thought in my head: one more step now.” The desert’s minimal palette suddenly gives way to astonishment: terraced orchards blooming with peach, apricot, and cherry; banana palms and alfalfa; the delicate hush of falaj channels threading water through stone.

“I was not prepared for the sensory impact of walking into a flowering fruit orchard on a terraced mountainside in the vast desert of the Arabian Peninsula.”

From there, the ridge demands everything—boulder after boulder under a punishing sun, knees and ankles mutinying, the horizon running unbroken toward the Wahiba Sands and the Empty Quarter. Agathe wobbles more than walks, repeating a private metronome of courage: one step, then the next. And then the descent: the first acacia, a flare of oleander, the softening of color—life returning.

At the base, she steps into a village mid-ritual. It’s Eid al-Adha. Elder men portion the sacrificial ox; bowls of meat disappear into doorways where women wait to cook; ribbons of red cross the path. Agathe feels the villagers’ glances, then the smallest smiles. As-salāmu ʿalaykum. Wa ʿalaykum as-salām. Peace offered both ways. “The gift I received was gratitude,” she writes—not for any creed she claims, but for the humility of being a stranger honored inside someone else’s sacred day.

What began as a test of endurance becomes something quieter and larger: a reminder that travel’s rarest treasure isn’t the view from the crest but the human space we choose to open between us. In Wakan, redemption is simple: bell-bright mornings, water finding its channel, strangers wishing you peace.

Read Agathe’s full chapter in Wanderlust Chronicles: Transformative Travel Tales—true journeys that lead us back to ourselves.