As planned we sailed in to Muscat at 10 this morning. The
views of the rocky coast and the mountains were quite unexpected, and we also
heard heart-warming stories of dolphins being spotted from deck 9. It was all beautiful. Breakfast on deck 9
gave us an idea of how hot it was going to be today, and so we decided to get
the shuttle in to souk, and choose for ourselves when to return, rather than do
a longer tour. That wasn’t to be because
we found ourselves in a massive queue outside in the sun. The buses didn’t arrive and hundreds of
older people were standing outside in the 35C heat, with promises of too few
buses and long waits. There followed a dose of shuttle rage, several passengers lost their cool completely,
some storming off some engaging in loud disgruntled chuntering. We decided to leave that idea alone and made
our way to the other tour buses finding a tour with 2 spaces left – called “Muscat’s
Heritage” which was a good decision.
There’s a whole world of subjects I am (or at least was)
totally clueless about, and neither my career nor my leisure pursuits have ever
sent me in the direction of geography. Today we came face to face with another
country in the middle-east with amazing history, and incredible transformation on
account of the discovery of oil. We had a really humble and charming tour guide
who was very open about the economy, education, health, Islam, the Sultan,
marriage, divorce, oil, cost of living and whatever questions we had. He was
very respectful, apologising for delays and confusion. I was fascinated to get little snippets of information
in between the stops. In about 5 hours
we made stops at Mutra Souk (where we bought our lunch of coffee, doughnuts and
falafel), The Grand Mosque, The Opera House, two museums, one of which was a
private museum and art gallery, a hill climb up narrow winding roads to get a
view down into the old city and finally the Sultan’s Palace. My it was hot, and
we definitely needed to load up with water today. Our
seats in the bus didn’t have any fans or air conditioning so we were melting into the
seats. But it was a lovely tour and
introduction to Oman’s clean streets, well developed systems, white, marble, extravagant
buildings and courtyards at one end, and the ancient culture on the other.
