Okei Wapi ?: Plane Stupid

21st-22nd October 2009 – Days 23-24 – Muscat, Oman

Needless to say really, but we did not only miss out on the mosque but got to Gabor’s office closer to 1pm more to show our humiliated faces and to say thanks once more for the tour than to rent any cars. I also felt a headache strong enough to put me off driving mounting already early on in the morning, so this time the disappointment of still not getting to drive does not swoosh over me in the slightest.

Instead, we took a microbus to the nearby fishing town of Seeb as our afternoon activity. Less than an hour’s drive west from Muscat city, this quiet town is a regular stop for the locals for some fair-priced tailoring and other shopping. During our stay in Seeb we scoured the main street and the corniche in search of squid kebabs – the first we did slightly poorly at, but the squid kebabs we managed to enjoy fresh out of fire and concluded them being worth our rials even if they don’t top the ones I’ve munched in Cambodia and Vietnam on my earlier journeys. I also ended up spending a couple of rials on Omani halwa (softer and gooeyer than its Middle Eastern counterpart and made mostly out of dried fruit instead of nuts and almonds) and local coffee to take as souvenirs to be indulged in on those social nights to come along the way.

The lure of the squid man

Pre-empting our morning flight out of Muscat the next day we decided to come back from Seeb in good time and spent our evening recovering over some excellent Moroccan tagines and thé à la menthe in one of the centres of Muscat we hadn’t yet explored. Back at the hotel well before midnight, we should surely wake up to the six alarms we set to start at around 7am and safely embark the plane scheduled to leave at 10am.

Next picture – a déjà vu from my Parisian times when we had a certain TGV to catch with my flatmate and I shook her up too late for standing a chance at catching it – “T! T!!!!! T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We’ve missed the plane!! It’s 11am!!!!”. What followed from this was a trip to the Gulf Air office with one of T’s well-renowned stories that he has a habit of making up at tough spots. As I was focusing on looking miserable and ashamed, T blabbered away to the clerk about how our rental car had broken up on the way back to Muscat this morning and we couldn’t make it to the airport on time despite having got up at 4am in order to drive the distance from Nizwa (a town in central Oman, in the Hajar Mountains) specifically reserving enough time to catch our plane. A couple of remarks about how beautiful Oman is but how crappy it is to have a car break down here as the distances are great and roads winding was all it took to get the clerk to issue new tickets for us for the same evening, with a layover in Bahrain airport overnight. After the clerk said we would not be charged for the re-issuance this time, T nicely topped the story off with a joke about sending the bill to Europcar even if that would have been the case. Hurrah! Bravo! Academy award! And good luck on your career as an act… I mean politician, T! And too bad for your brand value, Europcar. We walked out of the office with our new tickets and couldn’t resist to high five already before turning the corner.

We suddenly had an extra afternoon in our hands in Muscat. Without further ado, I spotted an ad for dolphin watching trips and within 30 minutes we were at the marina sitting on a boat with some well-to-do Emirati tourists. We got a nice and speedy (read: bumpy) ride along the coastal corners around Muscat and were offered various snacks by the smiling women of the party which seemed to appear regularly out of some miracle secret pockets inside their abeyyas. We didn’t see any dolphins, however, as they apparently come close to the shoreline in the mornings to eat and then bugger off further out of reach of these kinds of trips. Oh well, we’ll just have to come back for the bottle-noses or try catch them elsewhere another time.