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.

An apparently famous sea arch.

With apologies to those who are bored of sunset pictures by now...

With some nice sunset pics stored on our cameras’ memory cards we rolled up at the Muscat airport later that evening, well in time for our flight.

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.

M and T's Big Night Out!!!

16th October 2009 – Day 18 – Sohar, Oman

After finally managing to get up early enough to get a bus from Muscat, we find ourselves bound for the northern Omani town of Sohar. From the city bus stop, Sohar seems unremarkable enough and we settle on a plastic table with plastic chairs in the conservatively named Riyadh Restaurant for a drink as we decide what the hell to do from here. Various research missions to travel agents provide us with two bits of information: there are no more buses out of Sohar today; and the cheapest hotel in town costs 100€ a night for a double. Crap. Faced with this kind of situation, a wise traveller would not decide to head to Dubai, MoneyVille USA – but given that wisdom is not one of our foremost properties (even though, given M’s misadventures over the last 17 days, luck seems to be) we decide to do just that. We’ve read on the internet that the border crossing between here at Dubai is only open to Gulf citizens and so we decide to head to the Royal Omani Police to check out the current situation. And that’s where the fun starts. M waits outside while I go in to enquire as to the current status of the border crossing.

- Hi. I’ve come to ask for information – the Buraimi border post.. is it open ?
- Buraimi ? You want a taxi ?
- No no.. I would like to know if it’s open.

I feel already that this exchange is not really going anywhere. A few more fruitless exchanges follow until the guy asks me to follow him outside, and all seems to be going nowhere until he bumps into another guy, and leaves me in policeman #2’s seemingly capable hands.
Policeman #2, it turns out, is not only helpful but very friendly too. Not only that but, as an ex-tour guide, he speaks great English and loves to talk too. He asks me to hold on for a second while he calls a German friend of his. Buraimi, it turns out, is indeed open for EU citizens, so obstacle #1 has been surmounted. Obstacle #2 – Find-A-Cheap-Hotel – is equally easily sorted as our new friend Jaifar drives us there. Enjoying Jaifar’s company and wanting to thank him for his help, we ask him to take us somewhere to get him a drink and so we end up in the overly-opulent Sohar Beach Hotel. There’s a bar here and, so he’s told buy the barmen, there’s a Polish group playing there tonight too! A few beers later we meander off to the nightclub and the Polish group eventually turns up. I’d told Jaifar that Polish folk music was good but we never expected what we got – a Hans-Moleman-from-the-Simpsons lookalike fronted by three girls dressed in what even raging liberals would call supershort miniskirts – the whole ensemble, looking extremely bored, belting out classics from such artists as Enrique Iglesias, the Bangles, and Elton John.

The "Polish Band" feat. bored girls

As I go to the bar to get another beer, I meet Douglas, a Scottish mining expert who’s been living in the Gulf for seven years and has been recently transferred to Sohar. As with most people living far away from home, he’s an interesting character with plenty of stories to tell and the four of us make a good team in this rather surreal setting – discussing Omani culture and Middle Eastern travel (as well as Arabic swear words and miniskirts) with scantily-clad Polish teenagers singing Spice Girls hits in the background. Were we expecting this when we alighted in Sohar this afternoon? M and I agree that we didn’t. Douglas departs with the promise of trying to sort us out a bed with friends of his in the Emirates for tomorrow night and we bid him a fond farewell for now.

Jaifar, it turns out (or so he assures us), is in a fit state to drive us back to the hotel but not before getting us a shawarma each in what he tells us is the best snack joint In town, which we find hard to disagree with! This (typical??) Omani evening ends with us sitting tipsy in a shop doorway chowing down with the friendliest policeman in Oman. Well… why not indeed??? Jaifar drives off home and we leave him with great thanks and another fond farewell. He’s a keen traveller as well as a nice guy and I would hope that somewhere in this wide world we would meet again.

Jaifar and T, very happy after their shawarma

M and Jaifar feat. crooked Omani hat

It’s 3.15am as I write and we have two options for tomorrow:

1) A.k.a “What we want to happen”: We get onto the 9am bus to Dubai and get to the airport where Douglas told us we could get an International Driving License. We then rent a car, drive to either Fujairah or Ras al-Khaimah for the night with one of Douglas’s friends, before heading off to Oman’s Musandam peninsula (which Douglas has told us is extremely beautiful and full of natural wonders).

2) A.k.a “what is more likely to happen”: We get up too late to call Douglas before he gets into work, think “shit”, and head back to square one in Muscat. Watch this space, and good night.

First Steps in the Land of the Benevolent Sultan

14th – 16th October 2009 – Days 16 to 18 – Muscat, Oman

Arriving to Muscat from the exuberantly noisy and dirty Cairo serves as a good reminder of there being some sophistication left in this world still. Muscat airport in the evening looks somewhat like a candy store with spotlights in soft shades of green and purple surrounding the dashingly clean white building, and the airport sure has a good gardener to look after its bushes too. I was aware of that Sultan Qaboos has a very specific taste and that he likes to look after the general outlook of things, and just by seeing the airport you can tell that he has a thing for colours in particular. After all, this is the same man who ordered the Hyatt Hotel in Muscat to tone down its coating because of the pinkish building was apparently too bright – for the Majesty or for the area or what, I’m yet to find out. Now the hotel’s coating is described as ‘peachy’ instead. (Later addition: Unfortunately we never made it to the Hyatt to check out what the new coating looks like so I can’t provide evidence of the Majesty eye for style in this case.)

Omani Urban Design, colour coordination par excellence

Our first impressions of the country were unified in terms of how neat everything is. In the taxi from the airport to our hotel on the Muscat corniche we looked around in amazement at all the buildings and cars being shiny and new (there’s a fine for driving a dirty car) and at people walking on the street looking very proper in their outfits. We came to a slight panic, even, about how quiet it is around you in this capital city. There is virtually no noise, just the humming and swooshing of cars driving past and the odd hooter from taxis asking if we want to hop in for a drive somewhere. People don’t seem to speak much, to us or to each other. For a short moment I started thinking that there’s something wrong with us or that we’re not that welcome to this spotless paradise with our backpacks. As always, I decided not to let this bother me for too long and already from the first night settled on enjoying the silence, peace and beauty of this strange capital which has not got the slightest feel of a capital to it. The first two days in Oman we spent wandering around exploring the corners of Muscat, not really getting too fussed about the pace of which we were doing things. First “morning” for us started late at 5pm, and we did nothing at all apart from walking to along the corniche in Mutrah, the port area of Muscat where we were staying, and paying a quick visit to the souq. Mutrah has hotels, a couple of restaurants, a museum, a souq and the fish market which you can breathe in as you’re waiting for a microbus right next to it at the aptly named Fish roundabout.

Haggling for bargains (or not) in Muttrah souq

The second day we improved our standards enough to rise at 11.50am only to rush out from the hotel as we had to check out at noon. As we hadn’t sorted our lives out by this point enough to know where we’d even be continuing to from Muscat, we swiftly checked in at another hotel next door for 30 % lower price. We had at least investigated our surroundings as much the night before to know this was officially the cheapest hotel in town. After the downgrade in price but not in quality, we set out to explore the town a bit further and possibly to rent a car.

The Muttrah corniche by night

Muscat is laid out on the rocky coast of the Gulf of Oman, and pretty much everything is centered in or around three main areas of town called Mutrah, Ruwi and Qurm. All of these are separated by 2-3 km’s distance from each other and require a microbus or taxi ride if you don’t have a car at your use and happen to be lazy like us. In other words, no one walks in this town anyway so it’s easier to just do what the locals do and jump onto the microbus. On our first day in Muscat we had nervously looked around for where and how you could get on these things but it was only on the second day that we were awake enough to crack the formula (they just stand at roundabouts and you get in – simple as pie).

On one of these buses it’s a 10-minute ride to Ruwi which is the transport hub of town to inquire about buses and car rental and to do further research at an internet café. After a visit to the bus station, a better look at “the Bible” (Lonely Planet) and a 3-hour session on the net it turned out buses don’t go to too many places in Oman, at least not very often, and that by renting a car you can see much more as most of the attractions are in its nature and cannot be reached via public transport, and most often a 4x4 is needed as well. Best place to get a car quickly in Muscat is the airport so we got a taxi there (37 kms), negotiated one from one of the rental companies and at the point of handing my license in for the paperwork, I realized I’d left my wallet at the internet café. Back to Ruwi on the microbus we went, me holding my breath and thinking about all the places I’d have to start calling in case the wallet would not be found. Gladly the guys at the café had found my wallet and made sure I checked that every Rial of cash was still in there as well, again an example of Omani society at its finest. I had to insist five times to leave a tip to the guy running the café and once he finally accepted my small token of gratitude, he passed it on to the other guy hanging around keeping him company. Go figure. I called the lady at the car rental agency in the airport to say we could come pick up the car now, but stupidly made sure my license would actually be valid as it’s not an international driving permit, and was told that would not do. Disappointed at the fact that I wouldn’t get to drive on the wide, new roads in decent traffic, we concluded that it would be for the better to drop the car rental for now and just take a bus the next day to get moving somewhere at least.


The evening we spent visiting the Sultan’s palace in old Muscat. You can get a surprisingly close look at it without any guards patrolling around making you feel uncomfortable as the Sultan is a man close to his people in all respects. We admired some more of the nightly skyline of Muscat on the walk back to the hotel, passing by some beautifully lit rocks in pastel colours, all in perfect harmony.

Omani rock decoration - colour coordination par excellence