Elphinstone Inlet
Interesting facts
- A popular story claims that the phrase going round the bend was born here, from heat-crazed telegraph staff longing to sail round the Strait of Hormuz back to India.
- The repeater station used Siemens equipment, and its staff had two moored hulks, small boats and regular newspapers to relieve the monotony.
- Even with the Musandam repeater, a telegram from Karachi usually needed at least five days to reach London.
- Shipworms gnawed at the gutta-percha insulation of the Gulf cable, one of several reasons the line was never fully reliable.
- In 1904 Britain put up flagpoles on the island but never flew a flag, unable to decide between the Union Jack and the Blue Ensign of the Royal Indian Marine.
- Laying the cable section from Gwadar to Musandam took about a month in 1864.
- Local stories tell of sailors diving to fill leather bags with fresh water from springs on the seabed, fed by aquifers in the mountains.
- Dolphins often swim alongside the dhows that cruise the calm waters of the inlet.
Why it is worth it
On the Musandam Peninsula, the rocky tip of Arabia that juts into the Strait of Hormuz, the sea runs deep into the mountains along Elphinstone Inlet, known in Arabic as Khor ash Sham. The inlet stretches about 16 km inland between bare limestone walls that rise to 1,000–1,250 metres, so that the calm turquoise water feels more like a Norwegian fjord transplanted into the desert. The landscape is the product of plate tectonics: Musandam lies at the edge of the Arabian Plate, which is sliding beneath the Eurasian Plate, and at its northern tip the peninsula is being pushed down by about 6 mm a year.
The mouth of the inlet is less than a kilometre wide and hard to spot from the open sea. In the early 19th century this made it a perfect refuge for local sailors, and British officers recorded their astonishment at seeing vessels vanish from sight as if by magic. The inlet takes its English name from Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay, whose government commissioned the British nautical survey that mapped this coast in 1820. Just inside the entrance stand the village of Sham and a large island of the same name. The mountains around it have long been home to the Shihuh, who were known for their independence; Musandam came to be recognised as Omani territory by the early 20th century.
The inlet also holds a small chapter in the history of global communications. On a rocky islet less than 400 metres off the shore, now called Telegraph Island (Jazirat al-Maqlab), the British Indo-European Telegraph Department built a repeater station in 1864 on the cable that ran from Bahrain via Musandam to Gwadar and Karachi. The line was used only from 1865 to 1868, when it was abandoned in favour of a new route between Aden and Bombay and the cable was moved to Hengam Island. British soldiers continued to man the island until 1873. Today the inlet is reached by traditional dhows sailing out from Khasab.
Getting there
Elphinstone Inlet can be reached only by sea; boats leave from Khasab, the main town of Musandam, about 11 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Khasab Airport (KHS), about 12 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Elphinstone Inlet, or Khor ash Sham, is an inlet in the Musandam Peninsula of Oman. It was named for the then–Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, by the British survey team that mapped it in 1820.
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