Oman

After Pakistan, Oman was an oasis of peace. It’s a well-developed and rich country. It’s also 10 times bigger than Belgium.
Why visit Oman? It’s filled with nature, from dry mountainranges to sandy desert dunes, from coral reefs to lush green ravines. There’s a lot to see!
It’s very much a car country. There’s a lot of good roads, everyone is driving all the time, even if they are going to the store right around the corner. Since they are a big oil state, the fuel is very inexpensive there, only 0,5 euro per liter. I saw a lot of cool and expensive cars there, revving their engines and being loud.
Oman was my short break from chaos and spicy food. I ate a lot of pizza and Arabian food there. Lovely tahini, great tea. I thorougly enjoyed eating non-spiced food and was able to recover and rest.

I arrived in Muscat airport really early in the morning, after a night with barely any sleep. I ended up laying down in the airport for a couple more hours until 7 o’ clock, when I felt rested enough to venture out and find my hostel. Oman has a great bus system, good AC and a fair price. Even the bus stops have AC cabins to wait in. Muscat is the capital and the biggest city in the country. It’s pretty big and you can find almost everything there. I went to the mall there and found an IKEA, so I had to go and eat a piece of almond cake. I was dissapointed however as they had the same cake but without the chocolate 🙁
After some searching I reached the hostel. I was early and decided to wait until the owner arrived so I could check in. Shortly after, another guest arrived from the airport. It was Peter from Australia, he decided to wait aswell and we were there until 5 in the afternoon when the owner finally arrived. We were greeted with the news that he was relocating the hostel to another property nearby, and we had to move all the stuff. So we packed everything and he drove us to the new house. Once arrived we went inside to discover it was still in the middle of being furnished. Everything was brand new, from the matresses to the kitchen chairs with the plastic still on them. We didn’t have a shower head, toilet paper or plates in the kitchen, but we decided to wait it out and by the next day everything got sorted out.
The next day Peter asked me to join him to visit some of the city and together we visited the main highlights of the city. First we went to the Sultan Qaboos grand mosque. It’s a truly impressive building, It’s full of fancy decorations, like the massive glass chandeliers or the biggest handwoven carpet in the world. We walked around for a bit and took a lot of pictures.

After the mosque, we headed towards Mutrah. It’s the old town of Muscat, where the city first started. There are still a lot of old forts remaining, first build by the Portuguese when it was their colonony. After a while, the British took over and they also build a bunch of forts there. The town is surrounded by hills and was easy to defend against any attack. The old city walls and gates are still there, same goes for the palace of the sultan. There’s also an old Portugese house we went into. We walked about 5kms back, all the way from the palace back past the coast, through the old city gates, until we got the the harbour again. There’s the Mutrah Souq, a fish market and 2 giant yachts owned by the sultan.

After this we headed to the sinkhole at Dibab. It was cool but pretty overhyped, and the sky was overcast so there wasn’t a lot of sun. So we were done pretty quick there and headed off again.

We eagerly continued to the main highlight of the day, wadi Shab. It’s one of the most popular destinations, for all the right reasons. Wadi Shab is a big canyon carved deeply by the river, which makes for some very beautiful shapes in the stone. At the end of the hiking path there are some pools. You swim through the pools for a couple 100m, and then you end up at a cool cave with a waterfall. I had my diving goggles with me and dove down to the bottom a couple times, I found a lot of things that people lost, from swimming goggles to a carabiner and shoes. The cave was so cool, to enter it there’s a tiny hole for your head above the water, so you have to duck under and then you’re in. There’s a rope going up the waterfall so you can climb up to it and jump off. Really a fun place. It was hard to leave and I went back one more time because I enjoyed it there so much.

After we got out of the water we managed to make it back right before the last boat that was bringing us across the river. We decided to find a hotel close by in the village and after some searching for the entrance and the owner, we had a really nice room for the night with sea view, even for a reasonable price. We ate dinner at a local restaurant, I was still thorougly enjoying the food.

The second and last day of our roadtrip we decided to visited a wadi right next to the village called wadi Tiwi. It wasn’t as cool as the previous one, but it was waay bigger. It’s a special one because you can drive your car through it all the way to the end. It was a difficult road and it was really steep at times. It was kinda sketchy and with our rental car we were getting worried and it one point it got too steep and the car didn’t have the grip to go up anymore. So we had no choice but to very slowly reverse back down and park the car. We got lucky, some tourists passed us with their 4×4 and offered to take us further till the end of nhe road. Much to the dismay of a local guy who wanted to charge us 50 euros to take us in his car. Even with the 4×4 the road was still challenging but we made it until the end. The views were amazing all along the road, looking over and into the valley. We stopped several times to take pictures. After we arrived we started walking towards the waterfall that we came to see here. It was some obscure path without any signs and a local had to guide us. We had to climb a bit and there were some chains to help. Once we arrived at the bottom of the ravine we realised all our efforts had been worth it. There was a big pool of water with multiple small waterfalls surrounded between huge walls of stone and several smallers rocks sticking out of the pool. Oman is filled with hidden gems like this and it keeps surprising you every time.

The trip into wadi Tiwi took us a lot more time than anticipated and we had to hurry to see the next things we wanted to see that day. It was a 2 hour drive to Sur. A bigger city at the coast which was the furthest point from Muscat. It’s a cool city with a couple things to see. There’s 2 old forts, a nice beach and some hotels but what we came to see here was the ship building museum. It was very interesting to learn about the different types of wooden ships they build and even cooler to see them build ships the same ways as they did a 1000 years ago. These traditional dhows as they call them, were all build by hand by master shipbuilders. There were a couple ships still being build, including the largest wooden ship they ever made, almost 40 metres long.

Next destination was wadi bani Khalid, another 2 hours of driving. It went fairly smooth and we passed cool sand dunes on the way there. The highways are very well maintained, but they are full of speeding cameras so you cannot drive over the speed limit, I almost felt like I was back in Europe. Driving to wadi bani Khalid takes you over a bunch of mountains, since it’s located right in between them. More pictures to be made, after already having made hundreds. When we arrived we felt very unimpressed at first. It’s just some pools of water to swim in and there’s no impressive rocks or tall walls on the sides of the wadi. When you walk further along the wadi it does get more interesting. There’s these big white rocks everywhere that you have to zig zag between, and the walls get higher and higher. Eventually we ended up at a small cave and that was it. It’s a cool wadi but not nearly as impressive as the 2 previous ones that we saw. It was getting close to the evening and I wanted to watch the sun set over the sand dunes at the Wahiba Sands desert. I tried to make it there in time but it was just too late, we stopped next to the highway to see the dunes from a distance and then it got dark. I had to drive 2 more hours in the dark back to Muscat, with very bad headlights, I must say, but we made it back and we still had a great 2 days of roadtrip. At midnight I had my flight to India and I said goodbye to Peter and Monika, as they were saying for a month in Oman.