Muscat Oman for the day

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As Spectrum of the Seas is a brand new ship, this is it´s first visit to Muscat. When it arrived, the port authority had laid on a special presentation for the captain to welcome him and his ship. Unfortunately, they would not release the ship for the passengers to leave until this was finished, so we were half an hour later leaving the ship than anticipated.

Muscat is not really a passenger port, it is more commercial. So they lay on buses and everyone has to be transported to the port entrance. At 8.00am they started giving out numbers for the port buses. When we got there at 8.30am they were already up to number 13.

This gave us plenty of time to catch breakfast before our number was called for the bus out of the port.

Prior to leaving home, we had looked at the Big Bus for Muscat but were a little confused as to what would be on offer. It turns out that when there are no cruise ships in port they offer two buses with no opportunity to hop on or off. When there are ships in it converts to a hop on bus and runs about every 30 minutes.

The buses were outside waiting with the other buses to take passengers out of the port, so we decided that we would join there.

The circuit of the Big Bus around Muscat was about 2 hours. As it was still quite early, we were able to sit at the top of the bus all the way round. We got to see lots of the city that we were not expecting. We were expecting it to be like Dubai, but it is actually very different.

A great day out for us.

We got back to the ship in time for a late lunch. We did try to revisit the place where we had lunch yesterday, but found out it only does lunch on sea days.

Time change notice for tonight - One hour ahead - 4 hours ahead of UK time.

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