Blogs from Muscat, Oman, Middle East - page 13

Day 6: We spent the morning walking around looking at Muscat. We saw the sultans palace, some forts by the sea and then went to a small local museum which had some interesting displays and old photos of Oman from the 70’s. We then decided to walk to the souk, it was miles and ended up getting a taxi, we had a large glass of fresh mango juice and then did some shopping before stopping for Falafal for lunch. We headed back to the dive centre and chilled out before our dives. The first dive we did in the afternoon was Mermaid Cove (same as our first dive). More moray eels, nudibrancs, porcupine fish and little rays. Our second dive was a night dive, lion fish, free swimming morays, lots of urchins, a crayfish and some ... read more

Day 3: During the night it was hot. Mummy put the fan on at about midnight, and then I counted the hours down til we had to get up. Not a good night sleep at all. The fan was noisy and I couldn’t get comfortable! We got up and had an early breakfast (7am) and then headed to the dive centre for a morning of diving. The donkey took our cylinders to the boat, we carried our bags jumped on and headed out to sea. Our first dive was a wreck called the Mounassia twin propellors were at approx 30m with shoals of snappers and other fish surrounding them. The wreck was a British Navy boat built in 1979 sunk in 2003 for divers. The coral life is starting to attach, lots of nudibrancs clung to ... read more

Day 1: Wayne picked my mummy and I up and drove us to the airport. It was very kind of him. We checked in very quickly and made our way through the maze of security at Heathrow. As we arrived with loads of time to spear we had lot of time to mooch around the shops at duty free and had a Panini and some juice before we needed to move to the gate. We flew over with Gulf Air. The plane left at about 8.30pm, I watched ‘Chicken Little’ on the plane ate some food and then slept (I had 3 seats so was more comfi than I could have been). The journey was 7hrs, which is very long when you are already very tired. We had a small breakfast before landing. We arrived at ... read more

What a country!!!!! Some of the sights of Oman simply have to be seen to be believed...but we'll do our best to convey some of the magic of this country via the blog... First couple of days we lashed out and stayed at the Chedi Hotel. The architecture, ambience, food, service and general experience was just divine. Spent days lying under an umbrella on the beach, evenings playing tennis or grappling with the treadmill and nights eating the most delicious delicious food! We reluctantly checked out of the Chedi to give the credit card a breather and moved into another...'interesting' Omani establishment, the Qurm Beach Hotel. Think 1970's arab kitch design meets bollywood...doozie of a hotel! Spent a few hours wandering around Muscat in the heat of the day and were left wondering why we always ... read more

The beauty of the Middle East is that everything is so close, including other Muslim countries that appear to serve as Qatar and UAE's equivalent to our Mexico or Cuba. Oman is south of UAE and is absolutely gorgeous, but also friggin' hot. A few of us from work decided to go for a long weekend and check out Muskat, Oman to see what all of the fuss was about (all other expats rave about this country). Well, we're converts now. We've jumped on the bandwagon of the ravers. I won't really go into details about what I did over the weekend, as it will probably put most of you to sleep. My sole intention of going there for the weekend was to relax and de-stress and that I did. The days were filled with lazing ... read more