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Published: February 6th 2024
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We met our guide Hashim and set off for the Sultan Qaboos Mosque, which for a long time was the largest mosque in the world before a larger one was built in Abu Dhabi. Hashim helped Sara wrap her headscarf in the prescribed manner, and we marvelled at the number of women having to rent long abbayas and headscarves because they’d turned up in strappy T shirts and miniskirts with nothing to cover their bare flesh. Some pointlessly got stroppy with the polite but firm female religious guardians.
Many mosques are large but not visually very interesting, but this one is stunning. It’s set in extensive grounds with Islamic gardens featuring water channels, and has not one but five minarets to reflect the five guiding principles of Islam. The outside is polished sandstone and the inside marble. There are separate vast prayer halls for men and women, with massive crystal chandeliers. The main prayer hall has a single carpet that fills the entire hall and was woven in situ over three years by 600 women brought over from Iran, as weighs 90 tonnes and is too big ever to have been moved. One side of the complex has covered walkways
decorated with inlaid panels in various different Islamic styles.
Our next stop was the Royal Opera House, built by the Sultan and opened in 2011 and only the second opera house in the Middle East. It’s a huge imposing building, gleaming white limestone on the outside, with caramel coloured marble and teak from Myanmar on the inside. It has a capacity of over 1100, with the first tier of boxes reserved for the Sultan and VIPs.
Muscat is a huge city of over 4.5 million, and is definitely designed for the car and not for walking anywhere. It is clean, with lots of flowers and greenery; expressways run in all directions, many of them elevated on flyovers, and getting to any particular destination almost always involves driving past it a few hundred yards in order to turn round and come back on the correct side of the road. It’s a relatively low rise as building regulations limit construction to nine stories.
We then drove to old Muscat town, the original settlement, which is several miles from the new town. It is situated in a steep sided valley on the water and used to have gates which closed
it off from the land at night. It now houses a small but interesting museum and there is also a royal palace located there. It merits a short visit but there is not a lot to detain you there.
We stopped for a brief visit to the new souk, a ghastly place full of tourist tat hawked politely but aggressively by Indian traders who seem to have a monopoly. Out of there we took a stroll along the “cornice” looking out over the Sultan's new super yacht and the latest cruise ship in port, whose passengers were all over the souk buying up rubbish. We then went to a very nice local restaurant for a lunch which was part of our tour. The staff seemed very concerned that we only wanted one large dish of each of the courses!
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I've just lately looked at a tour which included 2 major cities in UAE and then onto Oman. Reading your blog helps to give me a snapshot of what that places on that tour actually look like, plus seeing them from your perspective. Thanks for sharing!