Oman (Muscat)

     Muscat is only about 440 km away from Dubai and is the capital city of the Sultanate of Oman. A bus ticket from Dubai will cost you 90 AED / person for a two way trip. Buses from the Oman National Transport Company (ONTC) leave Dubai from behind DNATA and Ponderosa Restaurant in Deira (map ↓). You can take the metro to Al Rigga station and walk from there, it takes about 5 minutes. If you want to book a seat on the bus, the telephone number for Dubai is +971 42525909. 

     The bus ride took about 7 hours but the mountain-filled scenery was really impressive so we did not get bored. The local currency in Oman is the Omani Rial and it's abot 10-11 Romanian Lei for 1 OMR. One Omani Rial is 1000 Baisa, and people use that a lot in Oman aslo. When entering Oman, European citizens will need to get a visa, at a cost of about 50-60 AED or 5 OMR and you'll only have to fill in an application, explain in 2 sentences what you want to do in Oman and you will be granted with one. We got ours for 14 days. It's very interesting because we did not see any security guards or anybody checking your documents. Everybody goes willingly to the small windows and applies. No one gets verified afterwards when entering the country, there is no point of control or anything like that, or we did not stop to any.

     The city of Muscat is very outspread throughout the coast and has more than 50km in length. So you can ask the ONTC bus driver to drop you anywhere from the entrance in the city to the central Ruwi bus terminal.

     Some of the coolest places we saw in Muscat are the Muttrah Cornishe and Souq (A on map, ← picture) where you can walk, eat or do shopping on the coast, the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque (B on map) which was the largest in the world before the one in Abu Dhabi got built and where you can enter only before 11:00 AM, the Royal Opera House (C on map) where the entrance is 2 Rials, the Muscat Gate (D on map) and we also got to relax on the Qurum Beach (E on map). Another really cool place to see, not that far from Muscat is the Bimmah Sinkhole Park (← picture), located 127km to the south. A bus ticket from Ruwi terminal will cost 2.2 Rials / person for a one way trip and the bus leaves sometime around 3:00 PM. You will however have to ask the bus  driver to stop at the location since there is no scheduled stop at the Bimmah Sinkhole Park. The Sinkhole is located just after the village of Dibab and it is permitted to swim in it.  

     

     We stayed at a local that we found on couchsurfing, he and the rest of the locals were absolutely amazing people. Everybody was open and willing to help you, mostly in a broken English, but you managed to get along somehow. The scenery and the landscape in Muscat is absolutely amazing, with mountains rising from the sea and watch towers on nearly every one of them.

     The food is really cheap and people use taxis to get around. In the central touristic area (Muttrah Corniche and Souq) the taxis are really expensive compared to the ones on the outskirts, and one more thing... prepare to bargain for everything including taxi fares. One taxi ride could cost you 300 Baisa or 3 Rials, depends how you bargain. Funny fact: drivers in Muscat honk for everything they want to communicate to somebody that is outside of their vehicle, so you will hear honking at every corner which could mean: "do you need a lift?", "get out of the way", "wow, what a pretty girl", "i'm full", "I'm selling grenadines" and so on... :)

     Muscat is a very authentic place, with very authentic people, filled with color, natural highlights and history, nothing like Dubai. People are more "local", the city does not have 80% expats, therefore all of the experiences are much more genuine.

     For our departure we got on the bus leaving at 3:00 PM from Ruwi bus station in the center of Muscat, located near the Sun City hotel. We had to be there at 2:30 PM, which meant we had enough time to have a lunch on the run (← picture) for only 800 Baisa.