2022 World Tour – Muscat, Oman
Hello from Muscat, my third stop on the trip and country #47! Below is the standard summary with a few new items:
– Cool Ranch Doritos: Yes!
– Thai ATM Card Works: Yes
– Thai Debit Card Works: Yes
– Thai Internet Purchase Works: Yes
– USA Credit Card Works: Yes
– Worldwide Telephone/Data/SMS eSIM Works: Yes
– Magic Jack Works: Yes, after app update
– VPN Works: Yes
– COVID Compliance Chronicles: Masks inside only, no vaccine or PCR test requirement to enter
– Internet Works: Yes, but slow on hotel Wifi
– Drone Flights: No. Commercial flying only with a pre-approved permit
– Ramadan Restrictions: Hardcore
– Cost of Living: $$ Yay
– Currency: 1 Rial = USD $2.59. There are 1000 Baisa per Rial, so prices can be like R1.125
– Language Issues: Easy
– City-Wide Wifi: No
I took the less-than-an-hour flight from Dubai to Muscat on FlyDubai. There’s actually a 6-hour bus, and in hindsight I should have taken it, part for the adventure and part to never deal with FlyDubai again. It starts off expensive, then they want USD $10 extra for any seat, USD $40 for a single checked bag for a total of USD $216 to fly for an hour. My Thai debit card failed due to the whole SMS security message thing, so it went onto my US Visa card. And then I got an email later saying I could “bid” on a seat in First Class. I thought, hey, I’ll throw $1 on that, but the minimum was USD $150! To fly for an HOUR!
There’s a thing I like to call “The Final Insult.” After some shitshow, there’s always one more thing. When I tried to check in at the airport, the agent asked for my onward plane ticket out of Oman. I said I hadn’t booked it yet, I have bots watching for cheap fares, etc. She wouldn’t check me in until I had a ticket. So I logged into the airport Wifi and booked an overpriced ticket out of Oman. I got back in line with another agent who didn’t ask me about an onward ticket. Yay.
At the designated time, we all piled into a bus (alert readers will remember my previous rant about take-a-bus-to-the-plane) a total of 100 meters to the plane. The only good thing is the flight is about 25% full and I had a 3-seater to myself. I hope FlyDubai lost a ton on this flight. Serves them right! :^)
My hotel, Naseem, on the Mutrah Corniche area just east of Muscat City, sent an extremely helpful pre-arrival email telling me exactly how to get here on the bus system. Cheap, fast and effective. The bus stop is directly outside the hotel’s front door. Score! The room was great for the price and excellent customer service from all of the staff – highly recommended. I went through all 530 channels on the TV and wrote down the dozen or so names and numbers of the English news and movie channels, because I’m me.
The Corniche area is a beautiful waterfront with a very long curved stone wall shoreline and walkway. After unpacking I walked out to find the entire corniche shut down for daytime due to Ramadan. There’s a large mosque nearby and lots of people going in and out, but not a chance of buying or consuming food or drink for anyone until sunset.
There are about 4 large restaurants on the corniche that call themselves “Juice Bars”, and they also serve full meals. One had over 50 kinds of juice on the menu, with mixtures, smoothies, lassis and milkshakes too – amazing. Prices are refreshingly low here, a full dinner in my first night was hummus, pita bread, chicken shawarma and a large fresh mango juice for USD $12. I spread my dinners out along the juice bars on the boardwalk, and when I went in for a second time each waiter remembered me and exactly what I had last time. It almost felt like “Norm!” from Cheers.
There is a massive underground souk here, like a rabbit warren of twisty narrow aisles and 5-way roundabouts with a thousand tiny shops. I instantly got lost but it’s fun to wander without the heat. I smiled as I got the sales pitch from every guy standing near his gold / clothing / perfume / souvenir shop until I heard one young guy point at me and say “SpaceX! Elon’s rockets take off and then they land!”. I looked down and saw I was wearing a SpaceX logo shirt, so I stopped to talk with him, very knowledgeable about SpaceX and Tesla. I bought an Oman fridge magnet from him and after he showed me his small foreign currency collection I swapped a crisp US $1 bill for a 20 Indian Rupee note (23 cents US) and a small bottle of one of his colognes (priceless). Now I’ll smell good for the rest of the trip!
The next morning I woke up to a steady stream of birthday good wishes – thanks to everyone for your thoughts from so far away!
My birthday present to myself (besides the whole trip) was a boat ride into the Gulf Of Oman to see dolphins and go snorkeling on a reef. After a hotel pickup and short van drive to a marina, about 15 of us boarded the boat and zoomed offshore with 500 dino-juice horsepower. The water was nearly glass-smooth and at one point I thought I spotted a wake to our side but Captain Khaled just shook his head. It was a very straight line and my theory is it was actually a submarine just below patrolling this critical waterway across the horizon to Iran.
After a while we started spotting pods of dolphins and they came to the boat and swam along with us, off the bow and in the wake. So cool to see nature up close! I got a lot of video footage and made a supercut of likely over 100 dolphins, I’ll post it with this update. We then headed back to shore and went into a protected cove and started snorkeling. Lots of tiny and big colored fish along with hard and soft corals. Near the end I was swimming along and all of the sudden I noticed a green sea turtle was directly under me! I was shocked and shouted “Holy shit” in my snorkel and it startled the turtle and it turned and looked at me, but then we both calmed down and it swam slowly along the bottom and I kept up with it from above. We all got back onboard and cruised along the coast back to the marina.
After a rest and sunset, I walked about 2km up the hill to a local “hypermarket” called Lulu. I wanted to pick up some food and drinks to tide me over during the day in my hotel room, when I spotted a small imported snack area and bought 3 small bags of “Original Cool” Doritos! Score! What a fantastic day!
Looking forward to my next stage in Doha Qatar, I find they’re really strict. I need a negative 72 hour PCR test, I have to register myself on a web site and upload my passport picture, all vaccinations and the PCR test result, install and register myself in the Ehteraz app (foreshadowing), fill in the ‘Undertaking and Acknowledgement’ formâ and a Qatar airlines form. Ugh. OK whatever you need. I started the process and booked a hotel in Doha a couple of blocks from the harbour (foreshadowing here too).
Geoff did his first solo flights of the drone train line April construction videos. I downloaded each of them very, very slowly from the hotel Wifi and started editing.
To wrap up the day I took a sunset dhow cruise and putted slowly up and down the coastline as the sun set over the mountains. Nice and relaxing.
The next morning I booked a long-distance taxi to “The Sinkhole”, about an hours’ drive away. Local legend says the hole was made by a meteor but it’s more likely just a sinkhole caused by the collapse of the surface after underground erosion by the nearby seawater. I realized I should have brought my beach shoes from home, I’ll find a cheap pair in the souk later, but the rocky slope down to the water was painful and hot. The sinkhole is an impressive sight and it was fun to slowly swim around the absolutely clear 20 meter deep water, only spoiled by the echoing screams of dozens of small children. As a bonus, it has thousands of those little doctor fish (Garra rufa) that nibble at your skin, so I labelled the day a spa treatment too. After climbing out I talked with a couple of goats living nearby.
Later that evening I took a very reasonably priced taxi to the local hospital for my PCR test where they did both a nasal and throat swab. It’s done in one of those construction mobile home offices in the parking lot. They said I’d get the result within 18 hours (foreshadowing getting very annoying yet?)
I finished editing the train drone video the next day and started uploading it at an excruciatingly slow pace. I included a bit about where I was in Muscat and a short clip of the dolphins.
The next day I headed for the beach areas in Muscat City. I stopped at the hospital on the way through because I didn’t get the promised PCR result email. They gave me a printout of the negative result and took my email again and I did get that one later. Ugh.
Well, it turns out the Muscat City beaches are a crumbling wall sitting above a rocky shoreline. No nice tanning areas but a nice stretch of grassy parkland all the way along. Everything is closed during the day for Ramadan so I ended up lying in the shade under a tree, listening to podcasts and surreptitiously consuming a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar with not a human in sight to take umbrage.
I got a taxi to the Mall of Oman which was deserted so I wasted an hour and a half in the aircon cinema watching “The Lost City”. I had read about a trendy restaurant area called Dolphin Village so I took a taxi there only to find it’s some kind of condo complex. I walked to the nearest major street and found a fantastic Indian restaurant where I had the spinach paneer (the only dish they had without onions), garlic naan and a mango lassi. Yay.
I uploaded the PCR test result to Qatar and got an approval email back 5 minutes later. I went to the front desk and printed out everything. I tried to register myself in the mandatory Qatar Ehteraz app but got a series of random errors (big big foreshadowing).
I woke up the next morning to find that my drone video upload failed overnight, so I restarted it and this time it went pretty quickly.
Facebook sent a message saying my Abu Dhabi #2 post violated Community Guidelines about – and I’m going to obfuscate this so I don’t get dinged again Human and putting some more words in here Exploitation. What the living fuck? Clicked on I Disagree, and the post was instantly restored. Jesus. My kingdom for a working AI at Facebook.
I got the #4 and #1A buses back to the airport. A local guy barged in front of me as I was walking the last few feet to the check-in agent. She looked at me and said “Sorry, just a few minutes.” This guy had everything wrong and was very late for his flight and it took her about 20 minutes to fix all of his problems. And she was the only one working the whole flight. Argh.
With 2 hours to wait and the food court closed and deserted of course, I watched videos on my laptop while again surreptitiously consuming a Diet Coke and a Twix bar. Man, I’m getting very resourceful. I boarded the half-empty plane and enjoyed the short flight.
Welcome to Qatar, country #48. Note to self: Wow, this is going to suck.
