Since Regina hadn’t been to Oman yet, we decided to book a hotel in Khasab for 2 nights. The drive was 3 hours and unlike Dubai there were no traffic jams – the worst traffic jam that you can have in Oman are some goats or sheep crossing the road. We checked in and booked a dhow cruise for the next day inclusive snorkeling and swimming with wild dolphins and friendly baby sharks.
After that, we decided to visit the Khasab Castle and discover the city center.
We drove past the Atana hotel, the best hotel in the region, and decided to stop for coffee/tea and some sweets. Omani’s always welcome you with their great Arabic coffee or tea and delicious dates. After all this sweetness, I saw that they were preparing some kind of feast and asked what it was for…
They told me that they were celebrating the opening of a new hotel store. The lovely ladies invited us for the ribbon cutting of the store. Iman is going to be the store manager and she sells only artisan craftwork that is made by hand by the local women. She has stories on every single piece in her store and of course Alexia wanted to try out the original dress and face mask. The face mask is strangely enough called burqa (here is an interesting article about it: ‘https://www.alartemag.be/en/en-culture/the-omani-burqa-behind-a-mask-of-beauty/ ) Next we knew, we were invited to share the buffet with them. We met the lovely Moroccan event manager, Sara, and the hotel manager Victor Visser. He is from Capetown, SA and has managed hotels in the GCC for some 30 years. But he still returns to SA regularly and he even showed us his antique shark tooth 😱. I could see the love and enthousiasm in his eyes when he talked about ‘his’ hotels and his plans to attract more ‘high level’ tourism. We even met Victor’s boss, who worked with the Ministry of Commerce and who participated in the World Economic Forum in Geneva in September. We ended the evening with great discussions and laughter. I love the Omani people because they are so open, they have a lot of humor, but their best feature is that they are so humble + I love the fact that the women are so much more feminist than the men believe :). We had a lovely evening and will return to the Atana restaurant for dinner tomorrow – inshallah…
Isabelle's travel stories 