Day 21 – Wednesday 3 January 2018

Tereza had to wake me at 7.30am this morning, I was out to it, must have been all the zoo walking.  The view from our room at Al Ain is very nice out over the pool, however, time to keep moving, we had a very nice buffet breakfast at the hotel, then on the road again.  We are driving to Muscat in Oman today via Sohar on the coast.  The highway out of Al Ain towards Sohar is a very nice multi lane divided road with streetlights, the Oman border is very close to the road, a high wire fence with coils of barbed wire on top.  First we negotiate the UAE border post about 5km out of Al Ain, fairly straightforward & we pay an exit fee.  We go through 4 separate posts here, 1^st is customs, basically focussing on the car’s insurance & other papers & that we have permission from the rental company to take it over the border into Oman.  The next is immigration where they check & stamp our passports, then another check post where they take the document provided by the first checkpoint regarding the car papers.  They seem more interested in the car than us.  Last is a Police checkpoint, one policeman carrying a very serious machine gun, we think they were Omani Police checking our passports, we are now in Oman.  We then drive for another 10 or 15km through very arid land with distant hills shadowed in the haze to get to the Oman border post, here we all have to get out of the car & go into the Immigration Office to apply for an entry visa.  There is not too much of a crowd & it only takes about half an hour to fill in the forms & get our passports stamped then pay the Tourist Visa fee.  Once again they didn’t show very much interest in us.

The road to Sohar is magnificent, a really good road surface, dual divided carriageway with street lights all the way at 120km/hr speed limit.  There are no towns that slow us down, though there are some towns on the side of the highway, goodness knows what they live from, the mountainous country is so barren.  We pass an occasional herd of goats & once see a herd of camels feeding near the road, don’t know what they could be eating.  We pass the occasional old round watchtower on a hill & the odd old fort along the way to Sohar, as well as a few mining sites.  It is very mountainous all the way to Sohar & they have done a fabulous job of building such a great road through such a rough bit of country.  As we get to Sohar the number of buildings at the side of the road grows & then we are in suburbia.  Sohar is a large city on the coast of Muscat where we turn & then start on the highway to Muscat along the Oman coast.   Along the road we see many beautiful Mosques. The buildings are very much in the Arabian style – square flat roofed mostly ornately shaped or decorated windows of triangles, or the tops of them scalloped or a mixture of different shapes or sizes on the same building.  Mainly the buildings are sand colour with a few just about white.

The highway is still magnificent, still with streetlights down the middle all the way along.  As we travel we notice a road feature we have never seen before, a U-turn loop up & over the road, a very clever & safe idea.  We also notice that there is hardly any Mercedes cars on the road, in UAE they are very common, reflecting the disparity of wealth between the two countries.  The side of the road has lots of date palm & banana plantations.  Date palms are growing everywhere.  There are also lots of tended food crops & gardens, very different than what we have seen in the UAE.  We pass not one, but two Australian Jayco caravans, very strange to see, they are the first caravans we have ever seen since we left home.  We wonder what the people are doing with them, there are no caravan parks anywhere.  We take what we believe is a U-turn loop to get us to the other side of the road, but it ends up taking us straight into a shopping mall.  Great, we do need leg stretches, a toilet break & it is lunch time as well.  Outside the mall looks unpretentious, typical low Arabian architecture but inside it is very modern & beautiful with marble floors, very clean & modern shops & beautiful marble bathrooms.  We have lunch at Barka Mall, of all places, Hungry Jacks.  The food court is full of Western style take away shops.  After lunch we find our way back onto the highway, only about another hour of driving to Muscat.

As we approach Muscat the street lights get fancy & the gardens at the side of the road have beautiful flower beds & green lawns with the roundabouts having large elaborate sculptures with water features in them.  The Mosques get larger & more colourful with beautiful gardens surrounding them.  The traffic also gets heavier & we start seeing multi story buildings, but not too high as the Sultan of Oman has decreed that no high towers are to be built.  We pass the Muscat Airport & see the waters of the Gulf of Oman.  Our hotel is in Al Qurm, a suburb of Muscat & soon we are booked in & settled into our rooms, we have a nice balcony with a great view of the pool & along the beach stretching up the coast.  Thanks to Monica who researched the places we should visit & the beautiful hotels we should stay at.  We go down for a walk on the beach & do a little bit of exploring, the tide is out & the limestone has been undercut by the sea leaving interesting rock formations.  Afterwards we sit by the pool & have some drinks watching the sunset over the mountains, there is an old 1954 green Buick car parked next to the bar that adds some character.  We even squeezed in a couple of games of Uno.  Another great day.

We are very lucky to have Monica & Charles planning, organising & taking us to Jordan, Oman & showing us all the great places in Abu Dhabi & Dubai, but the best part is that we are together with them.