London - Dubai- Oman

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Winter sun and rugged natural beauty was what drew us to Oman. There’s plenty of the latter but the Thomas travel curse has struck again and we arrived to find we’d brought rain to the desert. ‘This never happens’ said the Omani customs official as he grinned apologetically.

We flew in to Dubai, and had a very quick transit through the airport. We’ve never been through immigration so fast, and our cases were first onto the carousel. Our driver picked us up for the drive to the Musandam peninsula in Oman. Before long we were on a six lane highway through the desert, with very little to see. After almost no sleep on the plane, we closed our eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep. Eventually the dunes gave way to an industrial zone full of cement plants, all needed presumably to enable the endless building boom. We reached the border crossing and completed the formalities with no problems. Though it took us longer than the small flock of goats that were wandering from one side of the border to the other, unchecked!

Once into Oman the road changed completely. We were driving along the coast, on a new road hewn out of the massive outcrops of highly stratified grey rock, tinged in places with caramel, that came right down to the coast. Some of them managed to support a few scrawny, dusty acacia trees but most were entirely devoid of vegetation. It continued to rain sporadically though lightly, and the cloud meant the vistas were less impressive than they otherwise would have been.

We were grateful to be allowed to check into our room immediately on arrival, even though we were more than two hours ahead of check in time. A quick shower and a two hour nap did much to restore us, and we settled onto our balcony for the afternoon, to read our books. Checking the email had to wait as there was a scheduled power cut to test what would happen in the event of a complete outage in the whole of Musandam. Not much it appeared…..

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