Hard Come, Easy Go.....

19th – 20th October 2009 – Days 21-22 – Muscat, Wadi Shab and Wahiba Sands, Oman

With our total bill for the Dubai visit rising to roughly 250 € for what was effectively two nights stayed over and less than two days spent exploring this tower town (without only two of these €s spent on conventional shopping in the form of a skirt for me!), we courageously turned our back on all the glitter in order to head back to the more cozy coast on the Omani side.

Bus ride back from Dubai started at 7am, and the bus can be described cozy in a similar fashion than any town in Oman could be; comfortable with no frills and delivers the experience with just enough hassle that you feel the human factor. On this particular ride the human factor presented itself when there was less than 20 kms left to ride until reaching the terminus and the bus driver told everyone to get off and change onto another vehicle waiting outside in front of the bus. Either the first bus must have broke down at a seriously ridiculous moment on the main highway that feeds into Muscat downtown, or there’s some kind of restriction on buses older than certain vintage from being allowed inside the ring road. No explanations given or asked for, as we had to be woken up by the bus driver for the change and were far too sleepy to question anything, the journey continued safely for the last 20 kms. The only other moment that I can recall from the journey was the deliciously fit border guard on the Dubai side while exiting the Emirates. Could I have a stamp, pretty please, sir?

Back in Muscat, we staggered through our day with professional backpacker tactics. This means, of course, hitting the beach area of Shatti al-Qurm for some chilling under the sea breeze while enjoying various treats, ordering them one at a time and from different places so that you have the feeling of moving around when in fact you’re just staying inside a pathetic 100 m strip of beach. We don’t do this kind of thing too often, though, so we allow ourselves to feel good about spilling over to the enemy side. After intoxicating ourselves with some lush juice, fish & chips (yep, guess who’s the true Brit here…) and coffee with ice cream – all neatly within the set 100m strip limit – we booked ourselves in for the big bang to decorate the spending log a bit more: full day tour of some wadi and desert bashing covering a total distance of 600 kms to be driven across the country with a private driver-guide in a 4x4 with lunch and drinks included. Fun starts 8,30am tomorrow morning and comes wearing a price tag of 280€. The guide said that the only thing we need to bring is ourselves wearing hiking shoes and swim gear, but I’m guessing I might want to remember to wear something over that too.

Livin' the hard life in Shatti al-Qurm

Hard come, easy go – you know it.

----

The next morning we wake up at 8.25am and rush downstairs for our rendez-vous with Gabor, our possession for the day. This Hungarian guy turns out to be a lot of entertainment with his stories of experiences in Oman, where he has been living for five years now and running the tour operator business with his partner for the past two years. He is one of these straightforward individuals that I can imagine to split opinions, and we take the positive attitude towards this and feel at ease with him instantly.

Striking a pose to match the Omani coast.

Driving south on the eastern coast of Oman we stop at a sinkhole and some spots by the ocean accessible quickly on his colourfully painted off-roader, apparently unique in Oman and admired by the local guys. You can’t but smile at the camel smirking on the side of the car. After these preliminary shows of what him and his vehicle are made of we reach the first main attraction of the day, Wadi Shab. Gabor explains how the mouth of this wadi used to be accessible by foot until the area flooded under a year ago and leads us over what is now a creek coming out of the mouth of the wadi. A local young entrepreneur is running a monopoly service in crossing visitors over with his little boat which Gabor is not very impressed about as he has to dish unreasonable cash to the kiddo and also pay in advance already for what will be the return crossing later. We start walking up the wadi, which changes from being a gravel path to a more rocky climb on the way with some occasional jumping over the falaj, the local irrigation canal, that runs on the bottom of the wadi.

Taking a wander along the falaj

After about an hour’s walk we reach the end of the wadi, or the point of no further penetration by foot at least. We have come to the mouth of freshwater pools or lagoons which lead into a cave with some funky spots for climbing out of the water to do jumps back into the lagoon inside the cave. We climb and bomb back into the water a couple of times and just generally float around admiring the rock formations above and around us for a good hour before starting to head back. The cave is like a sweet secret haven, tailor-made for cooling ourselves off after the hike. We express our open envy to Gabor for his job and he starts scouting out for our possibilities to join his company for some work – he’s desperately short of staff and is complaining about how difficult it is to recruit suitable individuals for this kind of job who really make an effort towards the guests’ experience and don’t just play around at the company’s expense because they get to drive fancy cars around in scenic settings meeting new people and cashing out on decent salary on top of all that. Apparently the local guys have a bad habit of causing extra work at the garage as a result of some reckless off-road bashing. He starts to paint careers of a guide and a camp chef (that are always taken to the desert trips) for us. We kindly refuse for now but promise to come back to him if our other dream jobs fall through.

Gabor's demonstration of "another day at the office"

After the return crossing back to the parking lot Gabor loops his car around to provide a shady spot for our lunch break. We are offered various treats in small boxes and we feel happy about the first meal of the day, but Gabor mouths his opinion about the undercooked rice in the blunt wording of “I’m very sorry about the rice, it is just shit – I don’t understand how these people can toss up even in the simplest thing like this”.

As we drive further south to reach the Wahiba Sands I have “a micro nap” of a good half an hour in which time Gabor and T exchange life stories – Gabor having to tell his again later in the evening due to my badly timed doze-off. Dune bashing at the sands remains slightly disappointing due to the fact that by the time we get to the furthest town down before the sands begin and deflate our tires, there’s only an hour left until sunset. Gabor knows the limits of his car and skills, not being a Bedouin-level expert at desert driving just yet, and provides us with the best he possibly has time for before the darkness sets upon the dunes making them too hard to read well enough to avoid getting stuck. Gabor tells the story of his last failed attempt and the resulting dig-out mission and we insist on him not trying to cross his limits.

"The only Hungarian-speaking tour guide in Oman" bashes some dunes

M bashes some dunes in her own way

A few lucky dunes escaped a bashing...for now.

At sunset we pop into the nearby house of Gabor’s bedouin friend for a brief moment of Omani coffee, or kahwah, and dates. Despite T’s immense effort at coffee drinking (two cups downed for a non-coffee-drinker is fair enough), I master to paint us black as I receive a cup with my left hand, something which earns me a blunt displeased remark from Gabor. Luckily this mistake goes fairly unnoticed as the children of the house are putting up a right show off in front of the visitors with the little girl tricking her older brothers to mistreat her and her crawling back to mommy and the guests for some attention-seeking weeps before running off again to aggravate the boys some more. A case in point in revealing the true power structure of the families in Arab countries.

We head back into the darkness for the three hour drive back up to Muscat and hear some more great stories of the Omani way of life in the view of an expat worker. We tell Gabor about our troubles with getting a rental car and he makes some phone calls to check the situation concerning driving without IDP in Oman and gets confirmation from his friends about IDP not being necessary for renting and driving. He then promises to try sort out a car for us the next morning and we schedule a date at his office for this. He suggests we should not miss out on the Grand Mosque either so we agree to show up after a visit to the mosque first. In the end, Gabor leaves us at the InterContinental in Muscat and we head inside to splash yet some more cash under the pretext of celebrating my upcoming birthday. We dine in true expat style with a bottle of import rosé followed by some stinking cocktails which we could well have skipped... But once having opened the money-spending flood gates they just seem to be stuck open and result in other gates popping open with the flow. One of the white and orange coloured taxis carry us back to our hotel and yet again we strongly doubt our ability to make it to Gabor’s office (let alone the Mosque) in time.