Muscat Festival

There's normally not that much of a cultural life in Muscat beyond the occasional concert at our spanking new Opera House, but this month there's the Muscat Festival which I finally got around to visiting last week with a couple of visiting friends. Two of Muscat's big parks are full of things to see and do, with performances and sporting events (gutted I missed the traditional long boat racing ... next year). 

Omanis enjoying the show ...

The main feel of the Festival was of people of all ages having lots of good clean fun, and Omanis celebrating that strange combination of the traditional and modern that they're so proud of - traditional craftsmen in a brand-new 'mock' village, Bedouin tents in front of a life-size photo of a camel on a dune, drummers banging away under strings of electric lights, and the world's weirdest 'Son et Lumière' combining coloured fountains, Arabic wailing and Hadyn ... I can see that it's trying to take the best of Omani traditions while moving the country into the 21st century at breakneck speed, but like so much here, it just feel a bit too clean and new sometimes (Glastonbury it ain't!). It's all about the people though, and you really do see people of every kind  having fun at this festival, men and women, traditional oldies and hip young things, families and lads out on the (non-alcohol fuelled) razz ... Anyway, here's a little taster of the weird and world of Muscat Festival ...

Watching traditional games

A silver worker in his sparse 'workshop'

A very cheerful bunch doing a sword dance

Shopping for canes ... fleeced for £1.50!

Grandads on one side ...

... and ladies on the other

Masked ladies selling their wares

Omani ladies out shopping (feel for the lone bloke in the middle)

Massive vat of bubbling date sugar to make Omani halwa

Well, after they've slaved away to make the halwa in front of us,
it would be rude not to try it!

...which meant we also had to try these yummy snacks ...

... and these little sugary doughnuts ... life is hard ...

Smelly shoes

As an homage to a very good friend's blogging on the topic of ugly shoes, I would like to put forward my own candidate for the world's ugliest shoe - with the unique touch that these shoes do actually smell of ... well ... an old goat ...So bad in fact that I have had to relegate the offending items to the balcony, as they were dominating an entire room with their offensive stench. And I let a cute child rob me of £1.50 for these delights ... Insulating? yes. Will guarantee I remain single forever? Highly likely ...

Wading in the wadis

Wow, life is hectic! Have lapsed a bit on the blogging and have fallen badly behind on all the things I've been wanting to share with you about life here in Oman. This is a good thing, as more and more I'm out there doing things rather than in here writing about them, but I don't want to slacken the pace - my mission to persuade people what a lovely country I live in continues! You won't be able to resist for long!

Peering down into Wadi Shab

So, this week's fab activity is wadi walking - we actually did this during the Xmas hols, but anytime outside the stinking summer months is a good time to be in a wadi. A wadi is a valley or gorge created by a river, although this being the Middle East, most of the wadis have little or no water in them (remember Wadi Rum?). But some of them are blessed with trickles or even streams, and this one, Wadi Shab, turned out to have a proper river flowing through it.

Wisened old ferryman takes us across the mouth of Wadi Shab

So after parking up at the mouth where the wadi meets the sea, and getting fleeced for a whole 1 rial by the little ferryman to get across to the start of the valley floor, it was goodbye civilisation and hello wilderness ... Once we'd left behind the picnic crowd who seem incapable of walking more than 100m, it was just us, the odd plantation, a few hardy trekkers and divine colours - white rocks and blue-green water below, the odd splash of vegetation on either side, and the reddish mountains towering above us.

Water, water everywhere ... a sight for sore eyes in arid Oman

The stonier upper reaches - and me feeling very small ...

In the lower parts of the valley, there were still some signs of humanity, using their ingenuity to coax as much as possible of the precious water towards trees and vegetable gardens. 

Date trees in the lower valley, fed by the water channels called 'falaj'

More falaj further up the valley

But eventually even the water channels run out, and the nice easy path peters out too, so that you end up having to abandon the trekking gear altogether and just swim up the river - not exactly a hardship! Ah, what bliss ...

A well-earned dip ...

Heading for the hills ... Oman does green!

It's winter here - a bitter 15 degrees last night - and it's the time of year when you can properly explore this beautiful country without constant sweating and seeking out the nearest source of AC at every turn. And Oman is a beautiful country - beautiful in a very dry and savage way, but still amazing and so much more interesting than the modern skyscrapers stuck in acres of sand that you find in other bits of the Gulf. There are plenty of ex-pats here who don't often leave the comfort of the five star hotels and shopping malls in Muscat, but as you know, that's not really my style. So let me show you some of the great little haunts up in the mountains that I've discovered over the last couple of months ...

Villages teetering on the precipice ...

The Jebel Al-Akhdar (it means the Green Mountain) is a little jewel, just an hour and a half's drive from Muscat. Only four wheel drives are allowed beyond the checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain, not because it's off-roading (it has had a tarmac makeover to put European roads to shame), but because it is so steep for so long - low ratio all the way up, and definitely all the way down (certainly if you want to have any brakes left by the end). 

Our lunch spot - not one for the vertigo sufferers among us

And what is there to greet you at the top? steep drops down  into canyons, villages clinging onto the sides, and fields cut into the almost vertical drops to make use of every little bit of water as it runs off the mountain tops. The combination of water and a cooler climate (it's a couple of thousand metres up) means that this little corner of Oman is home to all sorts of agriculture, especially pomegranates and roses. So nice to be somewhere that you can almost sometimes describe as lush ...

A rare pool of water

Rose bushes and pomegranate orchards

Inside one of the little villages on the Jebel

Indigo man

So, I'm pleased to say that there is a happy ending to the tale of the mystery door to the shop of Oman's last indigo dyer - we found him! Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit his workshop, which wasn't behind the shop - it's apparently a bit too smelly to have in the middle of the market place. We did meet the man himself though - 80 if he is a day, as tiny as his door, a typical charming Omani with a smiley shyness and proud of his art. So sad that once he goes, another local craft will be lost to the cheaper Indian market forever ...

Life is art

An amazing quote from Virginia Woolf that I wanted to share with you - when I see water rippling with the wind, a sunset painting the sky, the neon shops signs and dancing lights of traffic streaming by at night, people singing on the beach ... it's all art baby, it's all art ...

" It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a delight to put the severed parts together [...] From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art [...] We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

Knock knock ...

There's something about entrances and doorways -sometimes it feels like they're inviting you in, but you're cautious at the same time when you don't know what's behind them ... hidden treasures, or someone's junk? a buzzing household or an empty ruin? are they keeping people out or hiding them away? It all brings out the curious streak in me. Oman has hundreds of beautiful doors and gateways, is famous for them even, and there are so many different types - old and new, simple and ornate, huge and tiny, plain and extraordinary, and all seem to want to tell a story ....

Imagine this as the entrance to an Alladin's cave,

for those that have followed the quest

and found the golden key ...

Perhaps the crooked doors to the beach-side shack

of a rugged old fisherman and his daughter ...

Keeping the hoi polloi locked out ...

or the beautiful people locked in?

Door to the fish market in Nizwa

- or was it Narnia?

The tiny door to the traditional 'House of the Lock',

with it's huge wooden key -

if this door could talk,

what stories could it tell from through the ages?

Door to Oman's last indigo dyer -

we never did get to see inside ...

but I do hope he's there,cooking and pounding

to make beautiful cloth for the hidden ladies of Bahla