The Ade Tour - Day 11

---

This had to be one of our most boring days on the road so far. We set off from Sur early in the morning again, after a lovely complimentary breakfast at the hotel. Mum and dad spied some packed lunches being made and decided that it would be a great idea to get some of those for the trip as we weren’t so sure how long we would be on the road today. However I declined the honour of one of these lunches, quite rightly assuming that it wouldn’t really be to my liking.

Our travels today took us only on tar sealed roads, and after the adventures of the day before it really was totally boring. But would you believe that Pa Ade still complained about the bumpiness of the road, and how it was interfering with his filming. And we were on TAR SEAL. I mean really. There is just no pleasing some people is there.

We didn’t take the easy route to Nizwa, instead travelling across a few different routes that was a more direct path. And I am pleased, and somewhat amazed, to announce that we didn’t get lost once today. That has to be a record for us, as we usually manage to get lost at least once a day.

The drivers on the roads today were totally crazy. Especially the taxi drivers. We saw the remains of two crashes and quite frankly I am a little surprised that we didn’t see more crashes. They seem to think nothing of overtaking on a blind corner, and many was the time when I had to slow down and head off towards the verge to avoid the maniac coming towards me in my lane. One guy I even had to flash as he was totally out of order. He responded by merely giving me a little wave, as if to say “never mind - if it is the will of Allah we won’t crash into each other’. I was not amused

We arrived into Nizwa a little after 12 o’clock. And much to the disgust of the elder Ade’s I had refused to stop on the way for them to have there lunch. I had figured out that Nizwa couldn’t be too far away and I was hungry, having opted to not have the packed lunch, and wanted to get to our hotel to eat!

The hotel that we are in tonight is just lovely. We are staying at the Golden Tulip in Nizwa and it is a much, much, much better hotel than that horror in Muscat. I wish we had left Muscat earlier now and come here for two nights. It has lovely, friendly staff, beautiful grounds and pool and the rooms are just gorgeous as well, with lovely big baths!

The only way in which the hotel in Muscat was better than the hotels of the last two nights is with the internet access. In Muscat they had wireless broadband (which was pretty slow) but which in hindsight is a whole lot faster than the dial up access of the hotels in Sur and Nizwa. The internet is so painfully slow that I have been in this internet café for 1.5 hours now and have only managed to upload 5 photos to the blog. I am about to tear my hair out! How I long for the Bovis Lend Lease server in Dubai. I promise that I will never say bad things about the speed of the internet in Dubai ever again.

After relaxing by the pool for a little while in the lovely hotel that we found ourselves in mum decided that we really needed to head into Nizwa town to see if she could buy herself a carpet. So with a rather disgruntled air, I managed to force myself away from the lovely relaxing pool side location that I found myself in, and we found ourselves back in the mighty jeep driving towards the city of Nizwa. We were quite surprised to find out that our hotel is actually 25km out of Nizwa. So it was a bit of a drive to get to the souk. The souk itself was very interesting. We got there at 4pm on the dot, which is the time that it is meant to open again after the afternoon siesta. However a lot of the stalls were not open again yet and this really was a locals souk rather than a tourist souk. There was a section for fruit and vege, for fish, for meat, for silver (which was the tourist part) and my favourite section was the goat section. Dad kept joking that he was going to sell his old goat for a new one. Mum was not amused.

The karmic part of the trip was that I managed to buy myself a xmas tree decoration, but mum didn’t manage to find carpets of any way shape or form. Apparently Nizwa doesn’t do much carpet trading.

The downside of today for me was the fact that I could not get any money out of any bank, anywhere in the country. I tried at three different ATMs and none of them would work with my cards. And to add insult to injury the hotel in the morning couldn’t get my credit card to work so dad had to pay my hotel bill. O the shame of it.

---

Photos

The goat souk
where dad tried to sell his old goat

Tired out after a hard journey
Dad and I having lunch

CAKE
Mum was most excited