Oh My – Oman – Such a Surprise!

Oman

DAYS 81-83 – On March 27 – 29 we traveled to two ports in the surprisingly fascinating country of Oman…Muscat in the north and Salalah in the south.  This nation borders the Gulf of Oman, Arabian Sea, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen…all located on the Arabian peninsula just southeast of the Persian Gulf.

The charm, beauty, cultural heritage, and landscapes similar to our home in Arizona were a real surprise!  Frankly, I did not know anything about Oman, so the entire country fascinated us in many ways.

These two ports were early destinations for European explorers such as Marco Polo and Vasco de Gama…all searching for the many spices that are found in these lands.

Sultans rule in Oman, and they are very benevolent with their people and loved for all of the ways the rulers spend the vast oil income and monies from natural gas, fishing, and other resources on schools, healthcare, highways, water systems, and so much more.  You cannot find more welcoming, honest, family-oriented people, and their country is wealthy, litter-free, safe, and progressive in every way.

Oman is renowned for its perfumes, frankincense and myrrh, and the vast irrigated desert plantations and orchards of mangos, bananas, coconuts, dates, citrus, flowers and vegetables are beautiful.  The father of the Virgin Mary is said to have lived here, and the tomb of biblical Job is also here.  The three kings who were said to travel by camels to give gifts to baby Jesus were carrying gold, myrrh and frankincense from here to Jerusalem.

The photos below might give you some idea of the surprises we found while visiting these two ports in Oman:

As we approached our first port in Muscat, we saw mountains that reminded us of Arizona, except these mountains have old forts on them all around the harbor.  The forts were built to protect the city in earlier years when spice traders and Portuguese invaders traveled the seas to this seaport area.

We were so privileged to have the opportunity to go inside one of the largest, most gorgeous Muslim grand mosques in the Arabian peninsula - accompanied by our Islamic tour guide.

This is the world’s largest chandelier, 4 stories high, in the Guinness book of world records.  It is hanging in the center of the mosque’s huge dome.  (To clean/replace lights, the chandelier has to be dropped down from the ceiling and it takes a month to clean it!)

This is our 20-year old outstanding Muslim tour guide showing us the Koran in the grand mosque.

We discovered this wonderful display of many painted Arabian/African antelope sculptures at one of the museums in Muscat…like our painted horses and cows in the United States.

My camera captured Larry as we visited the building behind him – built to honor the sultan’s wife.  The sultan was inspired to have this colorful temple built in Muscat after he saw the Taj Mahal in India.

In Salalah, in southern Oman, we found out what a frankincense tree looked and smelled like when young.  They grow very large and the tree trunk is sliced so the frankincense resin drips out and is captured, much like the maple trees in New England and Canada.

This is a frankincense shop (souq) in Salalah, with bags of hardened pieces of resin for sale.

The entire shopping area had the wonderful aroma of burning frankincense – it can be burned like incense or dissolved in water for a drink that has been used for centuries to help cure all kinds of ills.

The white sand beaches and villages along the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea stretch on for miles.  This is our young tour guide, who dreams some day of building a home and restaurant up here on this bluff to support his family .  Huge sea turtles were swimming below us…so easy to see in the crystal turquoise blue waters that are so prominent along Oman’s coastline.

Just like Arizona’s early inhabitants’ rock-walled historic villages, we visited a site being explored by archeologists near Salalah.  This has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it was just recently discovered after being hidden beneath many years of blowing dirt and sand.

Camels have the right of way, and they lumber along roaming the roadways in Oman, expecting drivers to wait for them to cross the roads.  They aren’t wild…someone always owns all the valuable camels you see wandering around, and they go home every night for their food.

This is all that remains from this three-story home of a spice trader from three centuries ago in Salalah.  Spices were worth more than gold at that time, so he had inside ramps up to the flat roof and he kept his 100 precious camels that carried the spices there for safety from thieves.

Oman’s top three money producers are oil, natural gas, and fishing.  We visited a fishing village in the outskirts of Salalah and found active bartering and many boats all along the docks as buyers looked over the great catches of tuna and other fish found plentifully in the warm Arabian Ocean this time of year.

COMING UP:

We enter the southern tip of Oman waters today, March 30th.   This area is considered the most dangerous Somalia and Yemen pirate waters in the world.  The photo above shows the high power water canons our crew has mounted all along the perimeter of our cruise ship, just as a precautionary measure.

Our ship has also added many security personnel who are constantly monitoring our decks with binoculars and night vision equipment to spot any pirates, in addition to all of our navigational radar and other means of detecting any ships or boats of any size.

Any hooray, here is the US Navy seen off our starboard bow in the distance today, keeping watch on us, visually and by helicopter, in these open waters!   Our captain has cranked our ship’s powerful engines up to 23 knots so we can quickly pass through this potentially dangerous area of the seas…we’re going so fast we’re leaving all other ships behind us as we charge ahead toward the Red Sea, which has little to no pirate activity at this time due to the heavy monitoring by Navy vessels from many countries.

Our next ports in the Red Sea are Safaga, Egypt, where we will travel to Karnak, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings (many Egyptian tombs) and the Nile River; the next day we travel on to Jordan and a land excursion to Petra, the lost Rose Red City carved into stone that was recently discovered and is the site of the filming of Indiana Jones.