There is plenty of construction going on so that I had to cross a very busy street and pass under a bridge. Then I followed my map and it brought me over a sort of main street and later through some nice narrow alley ways. This was also the time when the prayers started to sound from the minarets. I felt really oriental and was quite an exciting walk. I took a good few pictures and already enjoyed it much more than Dubai. People along the way greeted, the sun was not too hot and after buying a pack of Omani date sweets (Halwa - similar to Turkish delights) I eventually reached the souk. Here it got slightly more touristy but luckily not as bad as in Dubai and no one tried to throw a towel over my head.
The other side of the souk directly leads out to onto the cornice and the view was wonderful, with the mountains and the old fort on top, the palm trees lining the granite walk along the seafront. I seeked shelter in one of the little resting huts in order to try my new Halwa sweets. An Indian man taking a rest was sitting there and was interested from where I was and what I do here and all that.
I picked up a tourist map from the Big Bus (that's the name of a sightseeing hop on hop off bus) and followed the road a little further when I met a couple from Germany who were also exploring the City. They headed further along the Corniche but I had to meet up with Aziz, my potential host for the evening, around 3 pm. So I slowly headed back towards the souks and tried a little different route. I decided to take a rest in the shade of an arch and check my messages. It turned out that I sent Aziz the wrong number (stupid copy paste on the phone) and he tried to reach me but couldn't. So we rearranged the time to 7:30 in the Muscat Grand Mall.
Good, I had a bit of more time to explore the old part of Muscat so walked further along the coast and passed a couple more watch towers. It started to remind me of Dublin where the Martello towers are positioned approximately at the same distance to each other, just here most of them were higher up and looked much more Arabic. It was a really nice walk along a newly finished pedestrian foot path and I could even go up to one of the old towers.
Further down the coast was a really picturesque fishing village, which today are probably luxury apartments, but It looked nice nonetheless.
Passing through another City Gate of Old Muscat I walked past another Fort on top of a hill (Al Mirani Fort) and little later ran into the two Germans again. Since I was very hungry by now they pointed me towards a little place where I had some Chicken Curry with rice (and a cold can of Mountain dew) for 4€. It tasted ok but certainly good for the price. The last stop on my tour should be the Al Alam Palace, which looked very impressive with it's white marble and golden decorations. Interestingly it also has the FLAK canons located in the back yard ready to take down any attackers.
Taxis don't have meters in Muscat (or the rest of Oman) so you have to fix the price with the man before you take off. I was sure this is a good way for the taxi drivers to rip off tourists. So I did some research from the steps of the Palace, using my new Omani Sim Card. Google maps told me distance to hotel was 13 km and google search told me each km was 0.25 OMR (+1 OMR) starting fee. So I was hoping not to pay more than 4.5 OMR. I hailed an old Nissan Sunny Cab with a much, much older taxi driver in it and he told me it was only 3 OMR... great.. so off we went.
I picked up my backpack at the hotel and took another taxi (in which the Taxi driver seem to have a very heated argument with a (presumably his own) woman on the phone while he drove me) to the Mall.
Compared to Dubai, (despite the name Muscat Grand Mall) this mall was more like a little shop. I looked around but finished pretty quick and decided to wait (and catch up on the blog) in a Costa Coffee shop for Aziz to call me.
A little later he called and told me he was on the way and I should meet him in the car park at the lifts. Somehow we missed each other and had to meet up in another way but it eventually all worked out. Aziz is a cool guy, self-employed at 26 and runs a construction company which keeps him very busy, so that we had to pass by his work to pick up a couple documents and drop them off somewhere else. We had a good chat on the road but it was quite late when we finally got to his appartment (in a block that his company built of course).
After a good shower and another cup of coffee (I don't know what I was thinking - but he offered it :-)) I went to the couch and had a good, deep, long sleep. Already Oman started to fascinate me. The atmosphere, the architecture, the people... it was all so brilliant.
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