My trip to the Mleiha Archeological Centre!
Sharjah is one of the best emirates when it comes to making museums, and I am a huge admirer of historical things. So naturally when I heard about the Mleiha archeological centre and the fact that it had a museum and a dig site, I just had to go. The Mleiha archeological site is located just off of the Umm Al Quwain - Al Shuwaib road going from Sharjah to Dubai, and it is to say the least pretty remote. The "site" consists of a museum, the valley of caves, the camel rock, the fossil rock, and the actual dig site with a fort, a palace, and some other discoveries, dating as far back as 120,000-130,000 years ago.
When you first reach the "centre" (that has the museum in it) you are greeted with some very modern looking signs and buildings pointing you to the main building. Upon entering you are met with a reception desk with the museum behind it and the gift shop to the left. In our case we saved a spot ahead of time so when we walked up to the desk we gave them the information and a nice gentleman came and ferried us to his SUV. Now I believe that you can sign up for three different things: a tour of the valley of caves, a tour of the camel and fossil rocks, an entry into the museum, or any combination of the three. For our trip we signed up for the camel and fossil rock tour and entry into the museum.
As I mentioned the first thing that we did was the camel rock and fossil rock tour, so once we got into the nice man's SUV he took us out into the dunes. Of course he had gotten a special license to be able to drive throughout the dunes and his skill in handling the slippery and easy to get stuck in environment was very impressive. The first stop we made was at the camel rock which is (as you might guess) a big rock that looks like a camel looking upward. We also came across another crew who didn't fare as well.
After that our tour guide took us to the fossil rock, which is a huge boulder-going-on-mountain that is chock-full of pre-historic fossilized shells which was pretty cool. We then went on to get a couple of nice views of the area from various hill tops and we were taken back and dropped off at the main center.
Once we had taken a minute to cool down we moved on to the museum, which I must say was small but impressive, in terms of its displays and information -- it was really well executed. The museum took us through the different time periods that the archeological site date back to and it featured some very interesting displays including: a recreation of a camel and horse that they found specially buried, and an old manuscript burial stone written in Aramaic, which has been extinct for hundreds of years.
Once we had finished with the museum we went outside and up a few stairs to the viewing platform over-looking the most recent and fully intact tomb that they had been able to find from the Um an-Nar era. After gazing at that find we went on to the "valley of caves" without a tour guide, just so we could see what it was like hiking up the mountains ourselves. The center authorities had set up a very handy path running through the length of the mountainous area leading you up to a viewing platform, where you could look down on the five or six small caves embedded in the mountain that were supposedly lived in by some of the first nomads in Arabia. Then just a few minutes down from the path, we found a very intriguing rock formation that they said was used for shelter by the first ever humans during the ice age.
As a last stop we attempted to go by the actual dig sites but we were only able to see the fort because the rest of it was still being excavated and was all closed off.
All in all I really enjoyed the place, although we didn't get a tour guide for the caves I think that we did fine without one and I would highly suggest that if you feel you can't afford to invest in a guide, you still should go up and see what you can. Anyway hope you all enjoyed and stay tuned for whatever comes next.