Venice, etc. - Muscat, Oman - December 5 and 6, 2013

At sea, December 5, 2013, Thursday

            Another blessed day of rest.  The ship headed east through the Gulf of Aden toward the easternmost point of Oman, where it was to turn north into the Gulf of Oman pointing toward the Strait of Hormuz.  I had lost sight of the fact that from this area, Mumbai and Karachi are less that an hour and a half’s flight to the east.

Muscat, Oman, December 6, 2013, Friday

            Muscat turned out to be a delightful surprise, not at all what I had expected, but instead a contemporary gem – just the right size.  Or so it seemed from the cove where the cruise ships dock and the street where the shuttle bus from the Nautica let us off near the entrance to the Mutrah Suq.  We had a splendid view of the Sultan Qaboos’s modest yacht:

And then, the Sultan's yacht with a dhow in the foreground:

            We were reminded once again that Friday is Sunday in Moslem and Jewish countries, so the Suq and almost every other store was closed for the day.   We couldn’t find coffee, but we claimed a few Omani Rials from an ATM and bought tickets for the Big B Bus (on-off).  The bus didn’t leave for a while. And so we took a pleasant short walk along the corniche in the bright and clear sunlight, temperature about 70 degrees, looking at an old stone fort that might have been a film set on the steep cliff above and the few ships in the harbor.

            When the Big B took off we were heading west following the shoreline.  We had a map provided by the bus company, but we were not prepared for how far the bus would travel to the first stop, how fast it would go along broad, expressway streets and how many hundreds of new buildings of quality design we would see along the way.  We passed department stores, more three-story automobile showrooms than one could count, apartments and endless office buildings.  Who on earth could be occupying all these structures, what were they doing and why? 

The first on-off stop was called Hay as Saruj, about 15 miles from the port area where we started.  It could have been ten miles or 20 miles.  The point is that in such an unfamiliar topography and among such opaque clusters of buildings that appear familiar but are not, and after moving through what appear to be normal streets and roadways at almost twice the speed that would be possible at home, one becomes so disoriented that distance is impossible to measure.  The time interval to get there was about one-half hour, and presumably my watch kept the correct hour, but after a while I couldn’t be sure of that either.   The situation became more surreal when a fellow bus rider pointed to an orange Ferrari driving away from us.  That car may have been the most beautiful object I have ever seen.  We then drove past an enormous new opera house, near an Intercontinental Hotel and past new houses that must be valued north of $2 Million each, notwithstanding a sameness in the architecture. Any color is ok as long as it’s white.

            At first we were disappointed.  We were let off at a Costa Coffee house on the beach.  A small marina extended into the sea.  To the north along the beach for about sixty yards were three or four restaurants that looked expensive, and it took only minutes longer to realize that the patrons at the tables could have been seated at any outdoor café in Los Angeles or London, give or take a couple of white desert robes and head dresses.  In the other direction there was a long block divided by a wide street populated by a Starbucks and other cafes, all with outdoor seating and all hosting expensively dressed patrons.

            I noticed two or three black and shiny Harleys parked a few feet away from where we had stopped.  One of the Costa patrons, a bearded man of indeterminate ethnicity with the graying hair of a man in a Dos Equis ad, was wearing a sleeveless heavy denim jacket with a local motorcycle club logo of three-dimensional stitchery on his back.  (I later mentioned that I came from near Oakland, where he Hell’s Angels were born, but he winced and frowned to indicate that outlaw biking wasn’t his style).

            Near the Harleys we saw two new, bright red Porsches, and several of the largest and blackest Toyota Land Cruisers in captivity.  We later learned that expensive cars aren’t quite so expensive in Oman because there are no tariffs or internal taxes to burden the price.  At least two families with small children getting out of their Land Cruisers were not Arabs but Filipinos.  Foreigners, probably descendants of imported construction workers, can’t become citizens, but they can live well.  Intermingled with the motorcyclists and car drivers were a number of sleek cyclists in skin-tight Italian racing gear out for their Saturday morning exercise.  We ordered large cappuccinos from inside the Costa shop and sat outside for half an hour in the warm sun taking it all in.  We then walked about for another half an hour or so, mostly gawking at the various café patrons of differing sizes and colors in general and their small children, quite as well dressed as their parents, in particular.  The lesson:  ethnicity disappears with money.

            We rode the bus for another hour or so, traveling at least another 20 miles over well-paved roads and streets up and down and around high hills and low points.  Eventually we could see the sea again east of where we had started from what I would guess was five or six hundred feet elevation.  I couldn’t begin to catalog what we saw, except for an extravagant marina and new parliament buildings, evidence of lavish and long-term public spending.  Sultan Qaboos is a very generous man.  If I had ever doubted whether a qaboos could move from the rear to take a leading position, Oman answered that question.

            We returned to the starting point only to find that the few shops in the Mutrah Suq that had opened that morning were closing for good as noon of the Sabbath approached.  We moved quickly, but found only another 10,000 pashminas and 20,000 headscarves to choose from until at last I found another t-shirt with a Muscat logo to take home and stuff in with the 35 or 40 tee shirts I already own.  Lunch in the two or three nearby eateries that were open didn’t look like a very good bet – one starts to get defensive at some point about acquiring a bug – so we were soon back on the rear, outside deck of the Nautica for another excellent buffet lunch.  We were losing our edge in what had been a running competition with the Arabic environment.