Muscat: On the Water

If you go to Muscat, you must go out on the water with the remarkably genial Captain Salim, or -- as we did -- with his equally genial son, Akhdar. (Captain Salim was busy driving a boat to Oman from Bahrain. Better him than us.) The text messages alone will be worth it. There is also a little matter of honey cake (made by the Akhdar's mother) and Arabian coffee on board.

It was sweltering as we waited at the marina's bar (yes, that's another reason to love Oman) for our ride. But when we got out on the water, the weather was perfect. Breezy, even.

And....there were dolphins!  Big, graceful ones, giant versions the small graceful ones we saw on our last trip to Oman. And *lots* of them -- more dolphins than we'd ever seen all at once. Apparently, it wasn't too special. Akhdar told us he'd once seen a pod a kilometer long.

Akhdar was a clearly worried we wouldn't get to see dolphins; we kept insisting that it was amazing just to be out on the water. We meant it. The coast is beautiful, orange and rocky against the deep blue of water and sky.

We stopped to swim near a reef, when the honey cake suddenly found a whole new purpose. It turns out, fish like honey cake as much as we do; Akhdar threw in a few tiny pieces, and fish came storming over.  With just goggles and flippers, we drifted through the coral reef, where we ran into purple butterfly fish, big greeny-blue fish, little yellow guys, and even a few turtles! They're easy to spot when they pop up to breathe. But unlike us, they only do that once every half hour.

And then it was back again, to our friendly marina with its beer on tap. Oman, we love you.

Muscat: Forts and Palaces

Abu Dhabi has preserved only one of its forts -- and that fort is barely preserved (as our friends, visiting from Chicago, can attest....we scrambled through construction to take a look at a few of its exposed walls).

Does this story grow old? Yes, Oman has forts. And they are gorgeous, and huge, and interesting, and exquisitely preserved.

They make for crazy silhouettes on the city's wonderfully dramatic cliffs.

Some, the Portuguese built. Others, are Omani. Which, you ask? We wouldn't know. The only real fault we managed to find with Muscat is the impossibility of visiting even one of its many forts. But in a city with friendly locals and wide-open beaches....

...souqs that are distinctly different from malls....

...menus full of items like "shrimp cheese burgers"...

 ....real theater, varied and beautiful mosques....

...where even our hotel managed to be an interesting architectural space, without boasting giant chandeliers, too much glass, or ridiculous staff uniforms...

....we really, really aren't going to start complaining.

We'll just stand outside and smile.

Muscat: Royal Opera House

We planned our trip around tickets to the Royal Opera House to hear Joyce di Donato sing.  

The Oman Opera House is the cultural pride of the city; its impeccable programming is mouth-watering to Abu Dhabi residents who are spoon-fed Cindarella on ice and Moscow City Ballet's back up corps. (A child could leap higher than most of their principals.)

We didn't get a great picture of the building -- but check it out on this dress, which at least
one of us wanted to bring home.

But the inside is better. Here is the lobby.

The theater itself is small, but piled high with balconies and boxes, from which -- by some freak of chance -- the Omani ushers decided to extract us. Perhaps they knew that it was past our bed-time, and that sky-scraper dwellers like us are no longer pleased about the existence of stairs.

They deposited us in the second row.

And there we sat, on our violin-print chairs, listening to a heart-wrenchingly beautiful voice, and watching the tiny minutia of each musician's movements, surrounded by gorgeously arrayed expats gathered from all over the Gulf region, and a sizeable Omani contingent. (Omanis are always gorgeously arrayed.)

We have always wondered why friends from Abu Dhabi can do nothing but rave about Oman. But now we know. Oman is just the best.

A quick jaunt to Oman

 

We should go to Oman more often, we concluded after our trip last weekend. It has everything. Huge rock formations....

 

 

Dinky towns that boast multiple castles.

 

 

Carpeted boats....

 

 

....fit for a young sultan....

 

...or even his lady.


These gentlemen are probably closer to being sultans than we are. When asked how many children he had, the man on the right first said he didn't know. Unsettled, the Dutch man who had asked inquired again, and got a vague mumble: "dozens." Nick had a brief conversation in Arabic with them, which involved much laughter.



We were on the Musandem peninsula, at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Though it is surrounded completely by the Emirates, it is part of Oman, a vestige of the tribal affiliations. And, unlike the northern emirate of the UAE, Ras al Khaimah, it is wonderfully empty.

Look carefully, and you'll see a tiny fishing town. No signs. No fancy hotels. Want to get there? You'll have to take your own boat, and you'd best speak Arabic.



There are other, more accessible towns, but they are almost as small and quiet as this one. And that means that their beaches are even quieter, though some are surrounded by little fishing boats. You can camp on many of them, including Bukha beach, with no questions asked. We will be back soon, sand tent in hand.


And when we do go back, we will take our new kayak, and will likely skip the carpeted boat. But the boat trip was marvelous. Here are butterfly fish (or so we're told), swarming to eat little pieces of apple.

 

And here are the peninsula's famous dolphins, playing nearby.

 

 

 

Perhaps they were more exciting in person.

 

The boat took us to Telegraph Island, which the British used to string wires to India in the 19th century.

 

 

We had a lovely hour of swimming in the coral reefs surrounding the island. We saw starfish, sea slugs, all sorts of medium sized fish, and a few different kinds of coral. And then it was back to Khasab, where there is a wonderful beach, just outside of town.

 

 

...with little huts to shelter in...

 

 

 
...lined by jagged rocks.


And populated by small children, a few people intently doing calisthenics, and some goats.

We ate dinner in the most beautiful parking lot on earth, surrounded by craggy cliffs, a crescent moon overhead, and calls to prayer ruffling the crowd mid-way through our meal.

 

 

We were happily reminded  of Washington's core strengths on the trip up.

 

 

No other apple comes close....but Oman's beaches will give Seattle's a run for their money.

 

Our first weekend in Oman

We went on our first camping excursion in Abu Dhabi this past weekend, under the guidance of the Meetup Group UAE Trekkers. At seven hours each way, the trip was a marathon of driving ("that was a great three hour drive," our trip leader blithely miscalculated, as we stretched our legs at 4 pm, having set out at 8 am). With only one night outside, the driving seemed a bit much. But it was a lesson in border crossing, and a tour of places we'll definitely want to revisit when we have a few days off to see the area properly. 

(Yes, that's Steerforth - after his first try at off-road driving!)

The interior of Oman looks a lot like the interior of Abu Dhabi - scrub land, sand dunes, and not much else (though Oman boasts some very tidy, fancy looking houses in the middle of nowhere, which set us wondering about what one would do each day as a well-to-do, yet isolated Omani). But Oman also has mountains - funny, curious uprisings that look rather like whale skeletons in some cases, and like cliffs plunked down in the desert in others.

And it has castles. Like really, really old castles. Between locals' hyperbole and our trouble translating the Islamic calendar to Gregorian years, we can't pin down their age...but are reasonably sure that they are somewhere between a few thousand and 11,000 years old. Anyway, we saw two castles.

Here is our first (very near Wadi Damm, where we camped). Nick briefly took up residence.

The second castle we visited was under renovation, the Omani man employed to keep visitors out let us in and gave us a tour for a small tip. He explained that the castle was occupied by two families who got along, until they didn't. They ended up fighting each other, then abandoning the castle after it sustained irreparable damage. It was rediscovered in Islamic year 1375 (November 4 is the beginning of year 1435 -- happy new year!).

This castle's buildings are a mix of Persian and local architecture. They are made out of the rock mixed with straw -- even in these ancient structures you can see the straw in the walls.



Near our camp, we saw the beehive tombs. Not much is known about them, but apparently thousands of them have been discovered, strung over the hill sides. These ones were particularly impressive, because of the funny, jagged jebel (mountain in Arabic) in the background.

The rocks in Oman were wonderfully varied, and made us want to learn more about rock identification (something that always seemed a bit too dull to be memorable before). At the tombs, it seemed as if every nearby rock was a fossil - we saw leaf-like prints, shells, and funny textures.

Even the caterpillars are orange!

Once we got to the Wadi, we saw rocks of even greater varieties. There were still fossils galore, but there were also zebra rocks, black rocks with big stripes of quartz running through them at regular intervals. And there were the sandy rocks that make up the California cliffs....and there were jagged, redder rocks that looked almost like hardened mud. And there was also mud...lots of it!




We went for a run, and then clambered up to the biggest pool we could find and went for a swim. The rocks were slippery, so the easiest way in was to make a big jump off a rock, about a meter high. It took Nick a while to be reconciled to this method. It was a lovely pool - a waterfall on either side of a deep, greeny-blue swimming hole in the hollowed-out rocks. We didn't end up taking pictures of our swimming hole, but this one (from a nearby canyon) looks rather like it.

When we got back to camp, dinner and a sky full of stars were waiting for us.



On the drive there and back, we were delighted with many run-ins with camels.

There were real camels, grazing in the scrub lands on the sides of the road....there were herds of camels right at the Abu Dhabi side of the border, in some kind of camel farm....and there were camels getting transported....all of which made us very happy. We have a tourist's delight in seeing camels in any and every context.

We also learned the relative confusion of border-crossing here, which probably accounted for an hour or so of our trip each way. To cross into Oman, we had to leave Abu Dhabi - pay, get passport stamps, get our car vaguely looked at and waved through. Then, we had to enter Oman - that's right: pay, get passport stamps, get our car vaguely looked at and waved through. On the way home, there was the added necessity of showing that we had previously entered Oman (people have nightmare stories of too-faint entrance stamps that officials won't acknowledge) and exited Abu Dhabi. Contrary to the signage, the process was anything but peaceful.

Next camping trip will definitely be on the Abu Dhabi side of things - we've got some good tips to go to Wadi Kitna next time, which has a cave!