Oman, a beautiful destination!

It has been so long, since I last wrote here! :)
After coming back from holidays in Oman, at the end of March, I promised I would make a detailed description of it.. then I thought it would be far too boring “to impose” on anyone to read about my holidays and that I’d respond to any emails if anyone’d ask for it! Guess how many did... ;)

So here it goes..
Oman is a beautiful country, full of natural, cultural, maritime history! Full of amazingly friendly people who, despite the sometimes severe society they live in, have a heart of gold and a huge willingness to welcome everyone into their “little paradise”!

It is a country that just over 40 years ago was struggling with development, under a very hard political situation – and that in such a short period of time has become one of the most well supported countries in terms of infrastructures. From “almost no tarmac roads, very few hospitals and schools,...” to one of the most modern countries in these things! :) All under the supervision and direction of a Sultan that everyone genuinely loves!

We started our 11 days journey in Muscat, the capital of Oman. Spent a couple of days without a car, exploring the city by foot, and soon after picked the car we had hired for the rest of the time! With petrol cheaper than bottled water (not joking!..), taking around 5 British pounds to fill the car tank, and unlimited mileage on the hired car, we had the fabulous chance to explore several parts of the country, stopping here and there for 2 or 3 days, getting to know the places a little and moving on to the next exciting one! We only booked the first 4 nights in advance.. everything else was booked along the way, when and where we’d feel ready to continue again!

It was a fantastic holiday! We saw a capital like no other, squeezed in a stretch of land between a huge stone mountain and the sea..

The city goes on for miles and miles along the sea, but taking an area of just around a couple of miles between the mountain and the sea. The walls of Muscat were its first defense line in the fortification and protection of the city.. Today, the city is encircled by a natural "stone wall", mountains, to which the Omanis call “Al Hosn” or the fortification. As it says on the books, Muscat is distinguished by its citadels, forts, towers, walls, gates and historical houses – and it is really true! :)

Whilst in Muscat, we learnt about the history, visited a truly well done and informative museum (Bait Al Baranda), visited the fish market as a very unique experience (as it was later on the goat market in Nizwa!!), went on a dolphin watching trip where we literally saw hundreds to dolphins jumping happily on the water and following our boat in a very playful mood, and met very interesting places and people!

From Muscat, the holidays continued towards the interior of Oman. Getting further away from the sea, into the mountains, just bordering the desert! “Wild Camels” road signs started appearing.. and then the wild camels! And palm trees!! So many palm trees! And huge beautiful mountains!! Followed by a very flat valley, then more mountains! An amazing natural class of geology, right in front of our eyes, at any minute! Mountains formed by stones of such different colors, that would vary from simple brown and cream to green (if there was much copper on the soil), then to red, then to purple, yellow ish,.. with such clear lines on where and how the tectonic plates moved!


The Wadis, or dried river beds, where sometimes hard to detect, but always well signed! Normally they’d be dried and cause no trouble at all, but we saw how terrible it got in Nizwa, just a few months before our holiday – it rained so much that the whole wadi, in which part of the city lays, seemed like a tormented monster, a massive river flowing and taking with it any cars that were on its way. But as they say… what can you do… you wait for it to finish and repair the damages… it’s all part of life!

Whilst around Nizwa, we hired a 4WD (a jeep!) and its driver, to go to the higher mountains! Mountains that are so high and so hard to visit that they actually block the road that leads to it with a police control – and they only allow “proper cars” (4WD!) to pass from that point forward! The views were breath taking, the steepness and bends of the road were quite amazing too ;) and for 3 or 4 hours we were just guided into mountains where we could never have ventured by ourselves!

Just before leaving Nizwa, we visited the goat market! What an experience!! :))) Goats - and later cows and bulls - were being shown and sold in the market! Hehehe.. animals full of energy, I can assure you! :D

Our next days were around Sur, a friendly little city (town maybe?) of around 75 thousand people, truly proud of its gorgeous sea front! There we visited the area, of course, but had also the chance to go on a boat ride with an old man who, after some negotiation, agreed on taking us around the bay! “That way to Iran!! That way to Pakistan!! That way to India!!” – he was a great sea guide, pointing into the horizon!!

We also visited a place were huge boats, real ones, were being made by hand! What a fabulous, meticulous, tremendous job!

Also around Sur we visited something that truly brought tears to my eyes and made me feel how beautifully strong – or fragile! – life is.. We visited the Raz Al Jinz Turtle Reserve!! It is a nature reserve centre that organizes small group trips to the beach, where we can see huge, patiently slow, green turtles, coming to the beach during the night to lay their eggs in the sand, well hidden from foxes and sea birds, on a ritual that has lasted for more years than anyone can imagine. This (even better than the dolphins we saw in Muscat!) truly made me cry.. Of happiness, of course, experiencing such a beautiful miracle of life happening right in front of me! It was a (huge!) full moon night, on a deserted beach, far from any “civilization” apart from the distant research centre that holds the reserve visits. In small groups with very clear instructions, we calmly and silently approached the place where 3 turtles were, all in different phases.. one was digging the hole where she’d lay the eggs, another one was already laying the eggs, another one had almost finished and was now covering the hole where the eggs were at the same time as making a “false hole”, in case any foxes would come searching for eggs on the beach! The instinct, the natural surviving, the ritual, the beauty of it all really made me stop and think of how precious life is, in every sense!

From Sur we went to the desert! And spent the second night of a magnificent full moon in a desert camp!! Later, we came to know that it had actually been a “Super Moon”, the biggest moon in 18 years! Right there for us, in the 2 nights where we “needed” it the most – watching the turtles on the beach and watching it in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing but camels, sand and stars, on a desert camp!

To get to the desert camp, we left the car “where civilization ends”.. in the middle of nowhere, but right before we could not drive any further! From there we were taken by 2 “friendly strangers”, on a 4WD (again, yes!) into the sand! Really feeling that if it wasn’t a desert camp and if it was all a scam, we’d never leave alive from there! Hehehe.. I don’t know why these thoughts even crossed my mind, but I guess it was the immense sand around us, the feeling of being in a completely different environment, where there is nothing except sand, the sun, wild camels on the horizon up in the dunes.. and sand.. and sand..


Feeding the camels in the evening, just before going on a crazy “dunes drive” and watching the sunset from up there was great! Naughty big animals, crazy for food, but much more friendly than I thought!

Ridding a camel at 7am, before it gets any hotter in the desert, was a great experience too! I was a little scared, because of a silly story that Andy mentioned with moody camels in some “faraway place”, but once the fear passed, it was amazingly calm and comfortable!

From the desert camp we went back to Muscat, got overwhelmed again by the crazy traffic of the capital city and stepped into a plane to make our way back to England during the following night..


There’s absolutely no way of expressing here how much I truly loved these holidays, how much these days made me think about life, about what is important and what is to be valued.. it was a very relaxing holiday, in which we didn’t stop much, but fully enjoyed! A beautiful country, so different from anything I had seen before, smelling of frankincense and with breath taking views!

And that’s it, finally.. a small idea of what our holidays in Oman were, hoping that I didn’t bore you too much or made you give up reading by half way! ;))

Enjoy life, have fun – and visit Oman one day, if you have the chance!!