Adventures in Oman - plan B as the bike didn’t arrive....

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My cycling (and a bit of other stuff) trip didn’t get off to the best start when my bike failed to depart Heathrow on the allotted plane. To be fair Heathrow was completely mobbed, and probably had been so for the last week or so, it being Christmas Eve when I travelled out. Luckily I was booked to stay in Muscat for a couple of nights, not that far from the airport, so the fact that Gulf Air don’t deliver late baggage was not nearly as inconvenient as it could have been.

So day 1 was a case of Plan B. As I crashed out on Christmas day at about 9.30pm, having not touched a drop of alcohol (usually unheard of in my case!), I was up bouncing around by 6am. I popped on my trainers and hopped in the car in search of the beachfront to go for an early morning jog. The area I found was the more utilitarian stretch, with lots of fishing boats lined along the beach and in places quite a ripe smell of rotting fish and a smattering of opportunistic cats, but all relatively clean and orderly in spite of that. Further along it morphed into a public beach, with private residences and the odd mosque on the other side of the road, so still blissfully devoid of hotel complexes. Then back to the hotel for a hearty breakfast and a crash out by the pool.

Around midday I finally got my arse into gear to go and explore. Muscat is very spread out along the coast, so it was a 25km drive along pretty freely moving motorway to get down to old town. I pottered around there in the blistering sun. In my view it didn’t look very old, even less than the 200 years old indicated by my guide book. There are quite impressive gates as you enter the small harbour area and a couple of strategically placed forts high on promentaries either side of the Al Alam Palace. The call to prayer was in full flow as I meandered around the Palace grounds along with a couple of coach loads of tourists, but the poor chap summoning all the faithful had a fit of sneezes which then reverberated around the grounds thanks to the multiple high pitched tannoys. That raised a laugh from everyone.

On my way back along the coast to Muttrah I pulled off the road at Riyam Park as there was a trekking trail. I didn’t have my proper boots but at least I had trainers as opposed to flip flops as the route was up over a steep craggy path before dropping down into a valley where the trail then followed a wadi most of the way down to Muttrah. There were lots of route markers which helped me evade my usual tendency to get lost. In the wadi, which is effectively a river bed with a trickle of a stream and quite a lot of pools of varying depth, it was quite tough scrambling around without getting my feet wet. I don’t think you are supposed to be precious about such things in a wadi hike but never mind...

I eventually came out by a churchyard just above Muttrah so I decided to get all the sight seeing done then to save on the hassle of parking if doing it later. There was quite a good souk with lots of touristy tat and an impressive fort overlooking the harbour, that you could climb up to. There were a couple of massive cruise ships which probably accounts for the primary fare on sale in the souk.

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