OMAN
Oman - Luxury Travel Magazine
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Tales of Arabia | |||||
| By: Hillary Doling, Issue 36 – Spring 2008 | |||||
| (Oman) | |||||
| SHIMMERING SAND, MYSTERIOUS MINARETS AND THE CHANCE TO STAY IN LUXURY RESORTS MAKE OMAN THE PERFECT PLACE TO CREATE YOUR OWN STORY OF ARABIAN NIGHTS. | |||||
| Have you heard the story of the camel’s hump, or the one about the goat and the swimming pool? These aren’t sketches from a bad comedy routine they are true tales of Arabia. While much of the Gulf is now a bright, brittle homage to progress with skyscraper hotels and designer malls, the Sultanate of Oman is an oasis of old-world charm. From its mosques and minarets to its date palms and desert, it is the perfect place to play out your own tales of Arabian Nights. | |||||
| The Tale of the Missing Carpet | |||||
| Walking into the lobby of The Chedi, Muscat, is like entering a giant tent. The walls are draped in sheik-white cloth, benches are piled high with coloured cushions and little side tables are just made for coffee and dates. The fact that the hotel doorman wears a traditional white dishdasha (floor length shirt) and a khanjar dagger at his waist, only increases the illusion that Omar Sharif will sweep in B-movie style and carry you off on his Arab stallion. The hotel is built in traditional Omani style with whitewashed low-rise pavilions and hidden courtyards with fountains, orange trees and giant Ali Baba pots. My suite welcomes me with traditional Arab hospitality in the form of bowls of almonds, dates and fruit and more cushions strewn on day beds. The sunken tub is the ideal place to laze in jasmine scented water eating the odd grape in a suitably desultory fashion. The heat dazzles as it dances off the hotel’s white walls and down at the private beach the water is bath-warm. The Chedi style is sleek and simple with polished floors and clean lines. Arab taste normally favours flamboyant gold decoration, swirling patterns and bright colours (think the Burj al Arab). “When we first opened locals were a little bemused“, says Lore Koenig, Director of Sales & Marketing, “they kept asking me ‘where are the carpets?’ but now they love it”. They also love the international cuisine in The Restaurant, including offerings from the Australian chef, and varied indulgences of the spa. | |||||
| The Jewel in the Turban | |||||
| Muscat is a beguiling city with its bright, white buildings, square as sugar cubes, its bougaivillea, its wide, clean boulevards and sensitive tourist development. And a testament to the much loved Sultan Qaboos Bin Said, who in thirty or so years has guided his country from an almost medieval regime to the 21st century without making some of the mistakes of his near neighbours. We head for the water and stroll along the elegant Corniche lined with historic merchant’s houses, past a café selling rosewater tea and ices and the cavernous entrance to the enticing Muttrah souk. An old lady in a full black abaya is shadow-like against the stark white walls. Further along the Corniche are the twin Portuguese forts of Mirani and Jalali and the madly retro Al Aalam Palace, (think Austin Powers meets Ali Baba), the official residence of the current Sultan. Down at the Mina Qaboos fish market old men in dishdashas and tradition embroidered kumma caps haggle over the prices of the silvery catch. The jewel in Muscat’s massar (turban) is the Grand Mosque, inaugurated in 2001. Swathed in headscarves and suitably modest kaftans we walk along the impressive entrance bridge and into a serene structure of white stone and cool marble with archways, cloisters and closed courtyards. Islamic patterns are carved into the snowy stone and played out in colourful turquoise mosaics. Inside the vast prayer hall, chandeliers drip Swarovski crystal and we avoid stepping directly on the world’s largest carpet, woven in Iran to cushion the genuflections of 6000-plus male worshippers. The women’s room is much more modest and the Imam is watched only on closed-circuit TV. | |||||
| All the Perfumes of Arabia | |||||
| On the outskirts of Muscat we make a special stop at the House of Amouage, a perfumery that produces the world’s most expensive perfume, named Gold. This signature scent was created by French perfume legend Guy Robert and contains over 120 ingredients, including the prized silver frankincense from Dhofar. I stare into a glass case at the golden flask designed by Aspreys of Bond Street. A 120ml bottle sells for around $3,000. The price is a little beyond my reach, but Amouage has a range of other fragrances, all produced and bottled by hand with ingredients like myrrh and the rare rock rose harvested high up in the Jebel Akhdar mountains. I dab the exotic scents onto my wrist, they conjure up images of perfumed gardens, dusky-eyed maidens and sultry Arabian nights. | |||||
| The Tale of the Silver Dagger | |||||
| Early the next morning we head inland towards Nizwa with its imposing fort and tourist-beguiling souk. The covered market is an Aladdin’s cave piled high with wooden Omani wedding chests, brass lamps, sheesha water pipes, kohl holders and carved wooden camels. Heavy strands of coral, turquoise and amberbeads hang from shop fronts and everywhere are chunky ‘slave’ bracelets and silver necklaces with square pouches to hold miniature Korans. My traveling partner, Sonja, is after a traditonal Omani dagger to take home to her beloved but it is a confusing search. “Is this a dagger I see before me,” I joke as we plunge down yet another laneway and enter yet another shop with a floor-toceiling khanjars in leather scabbards. The Omanis are less insistent and more gentile than shopkeepers in some of the world’s other great bazaars, but are shrewd bargainers nonethe- less. In my opinion Sonja caves too early, but maybe she can’t drink any more cardamom-scented coffee – an integral part of any serious negotiation. | |||||
| Midday at the Oasis | |||||
| Leaving Nizwa, we climb a hill outside the little town of Birkat Al Mawz and look down on an almost biblical scene of tiny cream houses with flat roofs and TV antenna surrounded by lush palm trees; a paradise in the midst of the parched country. No wonder Jannah (heaven in Islamic culture) is depicted as a garden. All over Oman wadis, riverbeds that only flood at certain times of year produce these shady respites from the heat. Oman has more dramatic, and more varied cenery than its purely desert neighbours. The spectacular coastline has topaz beaches and rugged pink cliffs that plunge straight into the sea. Down south in the shadow of the Dhofar Mountains the countryside is lush and green during monsoon and dotted with curling frankincense trees. | |||||
| The Tale of the Camel’s Hump | |||||
| It is late afternoon when we arrive at Wahiba Sands; the desert has a 22-carat glow, like the jewellery in the Dubai gold souk. We’ve been booked onto a sunset camel ride so there is hardly time to deposit bags in rooms before we ourselves are deposited onto the backs of two ‘ships of the desert’ and led out across the sand. Distance in the desert is deceptive; the dunes we’re heading for don’t seem to be getting any closer and our limbs, unaccustomed to straddling camels, are protesting. Many of the camels used in the high stakes races in the UAE are trained in Oman and I have a renewed respect for the young boys we passed earlier, exercising their steeds at high speed. It feels as if we’ve been on our camels an awfully long time. “Do you think this is what they mean by Camelot?” says Sonja. “I don’t know, but if I were a King Arthur I’d give my kingdom for a jeep right now”, I say waving to two amused Bedouins who have stopped in their battered 4WD to entertain themselves watching our inelegant progress. Rescue comes in the form of Ali who arrives in a spin of wheels and sand to speed us the rest of the way by Land Rover because “the sun has its own time and will not wait.” | |||||
| The Tale of the Shimmering Sand | |||||
| From the top of the dune the desert stretches out in undulating waves as far as the eye can see. A warm wind billows my scarf like a sail. The sky is purple, and the sand is a deep bronze as the light fades. Far below us the pointy white roofs of our camp looking like shells on a beach. We’re expecting a gentle descent but suddenly Ali tips the land rover straight over the edge and we’re on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride down the dune in a sea of sliding sand. Desert Nights is a new deluxe camp near Al Wasil with airconditioned tent-roofed cabins coralled by a low fort-like wall. It is not quite five star but it is certainly better than pitching your own. Guests mingle in a central facilities block where local Bedouins play tradional music as the stars crowd the desert sky. An arabesque archway separates my bedroom from a small sitting area, a table is piled with dates and sweet spiced halwa. I share my tiled shower with a black scorpion, not dangerous but disconcertingly large – at least I know I’m really in the desert. | |||||
| The Tale of the Magic Flight | |||||
| I step off the edge of the mountain into mid-air. Miraculously I don’t fall, I could be on a magic carpet as I fly over jagged rocks, a tiny fishing village and berber-blue sea. Over 2,000m below me is Six Senses Hideaway Zighy Bay, and I’m experiencing the resort’s optional check-in by tandem paraglider; the ultimate way to make an entrance. The unconventional check-in is just one of the elements that make this resort special. Another is its location, surrounded by barren mountains on a secluded half-moon of sand on the Musandam Peninsula in the far north Oman, cut off from the rest of the country by the pregnant bulk of the UAE. Six Sense Resorts and Spas is known for seminal resorts such as Soneva Fushi in The Maldives and Six Senses Hideaway Hua Hin in Vietnam. At Zighy Bay, you’ll find the same level of eco-friendly luxury, innovative design and five-star service. Individual private villas built from local stone make the resort look almost like an Omani village, except all 69 villas in this village have bright cotton furnishings, private courtyards and personal butlers. We’re not the only ones who think the resort, open less than six months, has captured the Spirit of Place; as we walk across the hot sand to our room local goats with golden eyes are staring at their own reflections in the hotel pool, completely at home in the luxury of their surroundings. It is hard to leave our walled villa with its private pool and beach views but since this is Six Senses, known for its sublime spas, we do manage a day of pampering and indulgence in the separate spa building with its harem-style daybeds. We also pay homage to Sinbad the Sailor, fictional son of Oman, and take a traditional dhow trip around the spectacular coast and swim with rays and turtles. On our last evening we venture aloft to Dining on the Edge, a restaurant perched at the top of the mountains and look down on the bay as the sunset turns the rock to the colour of pink champagne. | |||||
| Details | |||||
| The Chedi Muscat | |||||
| Six Senses Zighy Bay | |||||
| Desert Nights Camp | |||||
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