Muscat

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Friday 13^th April 2012:

Friday 13th certainly proved to be a day of good fortune with a lovely visit here in Oman. We docked in Muscat, the capital, and then drove over 125 kilometres to Nizwa – home to an ancient fort and collection of souks. The drive through the mountains was fascinating as the rocks are clearly borne of a turbulent time for the earth and are an amazing array of colours: brown, beige, red, green, blue, grey and white. There is very little traffic – try to imagine driving the M25 with a maximum of about 6 other vehicles in sight at any one time! It’s surprising when you learn that water is twice the price of petrol here but maybe the “Beware Camels” signs are enough to keep some people away!

Muscat looks very clean partly because it is and partly because all new buildings have to be clad in white and nothing taller than 11 storeys is allowed. It helps the city to retain a very human dimension and the humans in Oman have a pretty good life. It is such a wealthy country that no-one has to pay any taxes. At all! And every man is allowed up to 4 wives but the women are only allowed 1 husband. And they say they have no discrimination! The challenge for men – and probably the reason most of them choose only 1 wife, is that all wives must be treated equally. They can’t take the youngest one off to a fancy holiday unless they take the other 3 off to a similarly fancy holiday. But our tour guide today was explaining that it makes for a wonderful family life. He has 13 brothers and sisters and they all meet up every week for a family barbecue. I hate to think how much food that must entail!

Nizwa fort was very impressive. Much larger than I had expected and the same colour as the desert sand – not surprising really as it was built from the desert sand. It is surrounded by 4 souks: meat, fruit & veg, crafts and spice. Today is Friday, holy day, so most of the souks were shut but 4 lorries were loaded with live goats and cows. I guess in this heat - 36ºC today – you want your meat as fresh as possible. The fort was still in active use up to 1986 and then it was restored and opened as a museum. The date stores fascinated me – there isn’t a single part of the date palm that doesn’t get used. It’s even stored in sacks made from date fronds and when a room is loaded up with sacks of them, the weight squashes the dates to produce a syrup which they used to boil and pour over the heads of any invaders! Luckily the hotel we went to for lunch today only fed us fresh dates, not boiled date oil.

Back in Muscat, we went to the Grand Mosque which was only finished in 2002. It is stunning and looks plain from a distance but when you get up close, it is breath-taking. Clad in white marble, it has parts of the Koran inscribed on the walls and small highly decorative mosaics. Its stained glass windows look lovely in the sun and the surrounding gardens are quite beautiful. It accommodates 20,000 worshippers in one sitting and has the 2^nd largest carpet in the world. It was shut to tourists today but it whetted the appetite to see the inside on another day.

We were so tired after our 2 days in Dubai that we weren’t really very excited about today. But it turned into quite a treat and was definitely well worth the visit.

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