It only took 15 minutes to drive from the centre of Salalah to the nearest frankincense tree. We had already found myrrh in the town market: being near Christmas, my wife suggested all she needed now was gold.

Salalah, the southern city of Oman, has many riches you will not find elsewhere in the country or indeed the Middle East - largely due to the khariff, a monsoon that blows in from the Indian Ocean for three months from June to September.

A fine mist envelops a 150km stretch of the coast around Salalah and into the mountains, turning the arid desert and plains green and generating a waterfall that plunges 1,000ft over limestone cliffs close to the town.

On our visit in December, the area was drying out but still had enough greenery in the gullies and creeks to give Salalah a freshness and the air an incredible purity, most unexpected in a country which is 82 percent desert.

The town’s microclimate allows palm groves to flourish in and around Salalah, with coconuts on sale from roadside vendors ever ready to wield a machete, pop in a straw then crack open the nut to scoop out the sweet flesh. Don’t fancy a coconut? Then pick up a papaya, banana, sugar cane or custard apple.

The laid back, almost Caribbean feel to Salalah is reflected in those you meet, be it the incense seller, fruit vendor or waiter at Hilton’s beachside resort, one of only two hotels in town. Visitors are treated individually - this is not a developed destination.

Unless you enjoy the prospect of a 15-hour drive from Dubai, the only way to reach Salalah is by air from Dubai or Muscat and, as such, makes the resort a perfect place to stay for four or five days after a stay in the city. But hurry up – a metal road from Muscat is planned within five years.

The hotel beach and pool is the first port of call, but there are several ways to enjoy the surrounding area, all within an hour or two, taking in beaches, mountains, desert and springs.

From Salalah, a 45km strip of white beach runs east: all the beaches are public. One day the hotel fixed up a picnic and we drove to a perfect strip of beach near Taqah to snorkel. Nearby, we watched dolphins, dozens of varieties of birds (Oman is a huge migratory route) and abalone or sardine fishermen returning from a day’s diving. In the harbour, the fishermen with mackerel bait attempted to catch a large squid darting underneath the bows of a dhow.

Apart from the sea, and pool, we also swam a wadi in the mountains, the water crystal clear in a flooded gorge that ran several hundred metres into the canyon.

A huge crater in the mountains 50km from Salalah, perhaps caused a meteorite, deserves a day in which to walk down into the bowels and back out the other side. We envied the Kiwi couple in a campervan just arriving at dusk to park up for the night, with the intention of setting off into the crater at dawn.

There are 100,000 camels in the region so expect to slow down and stop several times when driving. They are largely the property of the Jebeli people, mountain dwelling nomads.

There is a strong heritage identity to the area as well. In Mirbat, 70km east of Salalah, lies the tomb of Bin Ali, a holy man in the early days of Islam. In the adjacent cemetery, a male grave is denoted by two stones, a female’s by three.

On the promontory where we watched dolphins at Khawr Rhori are the ruins of what was reputed to be the Queen of Sheba’s palace, overlooking a port said to be the centre of the frankincense trade, from where it was shipped to Yemen and onto Jerusalem.

Ah, the frankincense. Thousands of the gnarly, stunted trees grow in the mountains as well as fringing onto the town. Mohammed, our guide, stripped a piece of bark off the stunted Boswellia sacra tree, which grows nowhere else, and cut into the flesh. Within seconds, milk coloured resin oozed out, beginning to solidify in the air.

In a few weeks or months, the resin attains the required degree of consistency, hardening into yellowish 'tears' which are scraped off and sold. One tree can produce 10 kilos of resin, said Mohammed. We bought a dozen pots of the incense, charcoal and decorative burners – handy for Christmas presents - in the town’s market for £30 after a spot of gentle haggling.

The gold? Happily/sadly, Salalah is not the place – that’ll be Muscat or the country’s former capital, Nizwah. Still, you can’t have everything.