Advertisement
Published: March 31st 2009
Iran!
Does this mean we can say we've been to Iran?!!The start of spring is celebrated in Azerbaijan with a week off work! The festival is called
Novruz Bayram but we decided not to hang around and see the festivities. Our original plan was to go to Uzbekistan but we were tired of the cold and wanted heat, so we headed to Dubai and Oman instead!!
Tuesday's flight with
Azerbaijan Airlines is during the day so we headed out to the airport after breakfast. Soon we were overflying Iran and touching down in Dubai. 90 minutes after landing we were by the pool in the
Richmond Hotel Apartments which we had booked through
E-bookers. There were only 5 sunbeds for all the guests to share which, despite my complaints, the management thought was adequate enough!!
Once the sun went down we went off to find the
Oman National Transport Company office but the hotel staff were not able to find any information for us. They didn't even believe there were buses going to Oman!! The staff at the Dubai bus station were a lot more helpful though, and we hopped on a bus whose driver dropped us off at the right place on the other side of the city. It took a while though as there
Entering Iranian Airspace
Russ got a telling off for taking this one!! are so many roadworks going on as the Dubai Metro takes shape.
The ONTC office is actually a stationery shop which had us a little worried. Still, tickets in hand, we took a taxi to the creek where we wandered around trying to find Fatafeets, our favourite haunt from our trips to Dubai in
2003 and
2005. Unfortunately the pace of change has caught up with the creek now and the area where we hoped to sit out with a sheesha is now a posh marina! Instead we ended up in a surprisingly cheap but incredibly tasty vegetarian Indian restaurant over the road from the hotel.
The next morning we had our free breakfast, basically coffee, bread and jam, before going up to the pool. It was closed for maintenance! I asked if we could just sit on the terrace and not use the pool. Incredibly they agreed as long as we locked ourselves up there and handed the keys to reception when we had finished. It seems there was no maintenance at all, but as there was no life guard available, we couldn't use the pool. That didn't seem to apply the previous afternoon!!!!
We were
not overly upset to check out of the hotel. They then tried to get us to use their taxi to the Oman bus but wanted 50 Dhiram for it. We took a metered taxi and paid 12! We got there an hour or so before departure and had lunch outside a little biriyani shack which was excellent. Then our 16 hour journey to Salalah in Southern Oman began!
It's been a while since we did a bus journey of length, about a year really. We weren't too worried but the bus was not a patch on those we had become used to in Argentina! A couple of hours into the journey we were asked to leave the bus. This came as a bit of a shock but apparently they had to cross the border into Oman to pick up some passengers. Our presence along with a couple from Pakistan and a man from Sudan would have caused delays. The 15 minute wait turned into an hour before the bus returned! We were relaxing on the grass, accompanied by a local mullah, when the sprinklers suddenly came on and we all leapt up onto the pavement. By the time the
bus arrived again we had dried out!!!
The border crossing we eventually used was straight forward. We were even able to pay for our visas by credit card. A good job too as we had no Omani money!! Then it was a straight forward journey through the desert overnight, stopping at about 11pm for something to eat, luckily with ATMs nearby!! We didn't sleep too well but we arrived in Salalah at 6.30am and sat out in the warm morning drinking tea before contacting our friend Peta who was kindly putting us up for a few days.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.092s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 13; qc: 28; dbt: 0.048s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Muhammad Akram
non-member comment
Bus Booking
I need booking for four persons from Dubai to Salalah on 14 july and back on 17 July.