The road rolled out in front of us and snaked up a jagged mountain, backlit orange and pink by the low-slung Omani sun. We powered our Ford Explorer out of the country’s capital city of Muscat and up into the wilderness. As the street lights pinched out one by one, we found ourselves guided by the piercingly bright stars alone.

Two friends and I had just set out on a few-day mission to camp our way across Oman, the quiet corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The country’s diverse landscape of beaches, valleys, sand dunes and islands inspired our to-do list, and its superb road system and generous camping laws promised an easy trip.

As we rumbled south from Muscat into the mountains that ring the capital, we entered a valley (called a wadi in Arabic) and pulled over to examine possible campsites. The first was too rocky. The next: too sandy. The third bristled with prickly bushes. We pressed on and eventually made out the gently swaying profiles of towering palm trees.

A melody of trickling water and chirping frogs drew us away from the road and to a small clearing, where we set up our first campsite. As we sat around our camp stove and tucked into our simple meal of instant noodles, tuna and sweet corn, the sounds of night creatures quickly serenaded us to sleep. We retired to our tent and slept with our heads poking out of its flap, an iridescent view of the Milky Way painted across the night sky.

Having camped in a mountain wadi, we cruised farther south the next day, watching as northeastern Oman’s mountains gave way to a gravel desert plain that stretched on in every direction as far as the eye could see. Hours into our drive, a 10-story-high sand dune materialized about a half kilometer off the highway. We veered off the road, jumped out of our car and scaled the golden mountain. As we took in the commanding view from the top, we saw nothing that could explain the sand dune’s presence in the middle of the Omani plain. We were, as we had been for a long while, in the middle of nowhere.

The sun began to set, so we once again pulled off the highway and drove into the vast expanse of nothing (aptly named “The Empty Quarter”) that makes up Oman’s undefined border with Saudi Arabia. Our previously flat surroundings had morphed into a scene of tiny dunes and stout, parched trees, and it was here that we began to search for a place to sleep. But soon our car shuddered slightly, and we felt its tires pull hard through a soft spot of sand. We continued on carefully, but before long our tires spun out and we sank a crippling 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches) into the sand. Our campsite chose itself; we were stuck.

The next morning, sweaty and sandy from an hourlong dig-out, we agreed that watching the blood-red sunset over Saudi Arabia had been worth the slight waylay. My friends and I were thirsty for a swim, so we navigated back to the highway and set off for the coastal city of Salalah.

Located at Oman’s southernmost point and ringed by mountains, Salalah is transformed by the summer monsoon (called khareef) into a verdant landscape. The city is also home to the ruins of Khor Rori, an ancient frankincense trading post that sits beside a deserted beach populated by flamingos, sea turtles and camels.

After a day spent snorkeling, swimming and wildlife-spotting, we found our third camping site in a hillside cave beside a freshwater spring. Tiny crevasses glinted as a few hanging bats blinked down at us, but we blessed their presence as nature’s defense against buzzing mosquitoes. The site was a popular grilling spot at night for locals, who chatted at tables on the other side of the park.

The following morning we had nowhere to go but north. Our final stop was Masirah Island, an underdeveloped 95-kilometer-long island just off the central Omani coast. As we drove toward the ferry terminal in Shannah, the land beside the road slowly split into colorful gorges, carved out by rushing water during the rainy season.

There are no scheduled boats to Masirah; the ferries run during daylight hours and leave when full, so we directed our car toward one that looked ready to depart. We arrived at the island as the sun sank low and drove along the coastal road to find the final campsite on our checklist: a deserted beach. Tearing along windy roads that cut through Masirah’s compact mountain range, we finally spotted a pass into a protected slice of beach facing the Indian Ocean. Our final site, our final tent and our final night: just us, our fire and a gentle ocean breeze.