I somehow like rock art sites. Mostly it’s not about the art itself (they look like drawings of a five year old kid), but about the achievement, if you actually found them. The Sharjah rock art sites certainly trigger my inner Indiana Jones, as they are not marked on google maps or open street map and you need to rely on the location markers within the dossier.

The only place with a marker on open street map is Wadi Shie. But that one was a bit too far out of our itinerary. On the map, Kalba looked like the easy to find it’s a conical hill surrounded by desert. Unfortunately there is a huge construction site around the hill and there is currently no way to get close to it. But I didn’t want to give up yet and so we drove to next location with the least deviation on the way to the Al Bidyah mosque: Al Modaify.

Al Modaify is set at the beginning of a mountain chain, still within Khorfakkan. We crossed a dry canal to access the area and hat to climb up the hill. There are signs, marking the area as an archaeological zone, but no fences. While I groomed the area together with JayT, it was actually Els who spotted the rock art with her camera focus.

The disadvantage both sites (Kalba and Al Modaify) had, was the lack of big flat rocks to draw on. Other rock art sites I visited provided lots of space suitable for drawing. In Sharjah it seems they had to work with much less. As a result, the drawings are very underwhelming and in size and quantity nowhere near e.g. the Saudi sites. I can understand that this has local value, but not on a universal scale.