The alarm went off at 0430. We’d not had a bad night but it’s never peaceful when you know you have to get up early. You keep waking up!!! Anyway, we got up and got our stuff together. The taxi was booked for 0500. Lalit, the houseman, was sleeping on a day bed in the lounge and he got up and helped with getting the cases out to the front courtyard. The taxi was about 5 minutes late.
It was about a 10 minute drive to Mopa airport and unlike Dabolim, it was a very quiet, calm scene. Checkin was smooth and quite quick. There were a few too many security checks but we got to our gate in plenty of time. The flight was on time and faster than billed, at 2.5 hours. I slept quite a lot of the way once I’d scoffed a rather odd breakfast of brioche bread, scrambled egg (nice), chick peas in a creamy gray gravy (OK) and a small sausage that turned out to be smoked chicken (absolutely revolting).
Muscat airport is as modern and spotless and efficient as are all the Gulf airports. Lots of immigration desks and you get through in no time . They took photos and fingerprints.
When we originally booked this stopover in Oman it was for 3 nights and Oman Air make it very easy to stop over in Muscat for multiple days. However, their schedule changed so we actually only have 2 nights in Muscat which is a real shame. It’s a city we like very much, well…. we like Oman very much. It has real character and beautiful scenery.
Got an airport taxi to our hotel, Sheraton Muscat which is situated right downtown equidistant from a lot of the main tourist sights. It took about 35 minutes and cost about £32. Muscat is surrounded by mountains and the old part of town where we are has rocky outcrops all over the place, amongst the buildings. It’s nothing like Dubai. No skyscrapers at all.
The hotel is a nice modern business style hotel. We chose it because we could get it with Marriott points, it has a big outdoor pool area, is well placed and also we knew we would get upgraded to the Club Lounge floor which would give us access to the free food and drinks served at times in the club. We also get free breakfast every day. Our room feels very clean and luxurious after India. The bed is so deeply comfortable and with lovely smooth bedding. lots of nice towels and hot water in the sink, the shower and a BATH!!!!. Sigh…..
We got to the hotel just before 12 and we were pretty tired. We have a pretty full day of sightseeing tomorrow so we decided to chill at the pool once we’d unpacked what we needed and had a rest in the room.
The pool was very nice and heated to a very warm temperature. Its about 28C here, quite breezy and the sky is a hazy blue, no clouds. We spent the afternoon there reading, sleeping and a bit of bobbing. They have these crazy jacuzzi beds in the pool. You lie on them and press the button and a great load of bubbles erupts all around you. It feels good, especially on the back but it looks very odd. My bikini pants filled with air and ballooned up making me look even more like Mr Blobby than usual. Not flattering. I don’t even want to say what it looked like when Bob tried it but here’s some photos!
This evening we had a few drinks in the club lounge which was nice. They had good food on offer in there and you could have had a nice free dinner. We were tempted elsewhere though as happily Wednesday night is the night for their seafood extravaganza bbq buffet. For about £40 each we enjoyed a huge range of cold seafood salads, little plates of delicious stuff, wonderful raw oysters, tapas hot plates of giant tempura prawns, seared scallops. When you’d feasted on all that the bbq chefs would cook you a platter of lobster, massive massive prawns, calamari, mahi mahi, some other fish….. there were sides to go with. We had a platter of lobster, prawns and calamari. The lobster and prawns were outstanding and we dipped the meat in lemon garlic butter sauce. I’m afraid it was so good, we had the same again… They weren’t massive lobsters so it’s not (quite) as greedy as it sounds. We finished off with tiny little squares of cheesecake just to end on a sweet note. Really good value for a very special dinner.