Muscat — Jim Winslett

I know you probably don’t understand that title, “Muscat Scrambler” and that’s OK. You’d need to be a rollercoaster aficionado with a good memory and even then, you might think, “that sounds vaguely familiar, but I don’t know why.”

Years ago, there was an amusement park in New Orleans and it had a rollercoaster called “Muskrat Scrambler”. Hurricane Katrina killed it in 2005, but that’s another tale.

Reminder: you can click any photo to open it fully on your screen without scrolling

I also realize that it’s a bad pun, but the other option was something involving the Three Muscat-ears, so I think you got off easy this time.

Anyway….

If you read the post about our previous stop in Oman, Salalah, you may remember that I wasn’t particularly impressed. Salalah is an up-and-coming resort town and if you aren’t frolicking on the beach at a resort hotel, there’s not much to do there.

Sailing into Muscat, the capital city of Oman, it was already apparent that this city would be far more interesting.

The giant ice cream sundae used to be a restaurant. At the base of the hill is a small children’s amusement park.

After docking, we got our landing cards (but no passports, they hold onto those for some reason) and off we go to see the city on the included tour. We’re heading for one of the biggest mosques in the world, built under the previous sultan’s reign. One of the things that sultan did was turn Oman into a high-end tourist destination. There are no budget hotels here, that was done on purpose, and there are shopping malls - really big ones - all over the place.

As would be expected, there are lots of stores unfamiliar to me, as well as a few familiar logos (McDonald’s is everywhere). And wait… what’s this? I’ll save you from zooming in and show you the big surprise:

You’d think I’d feel really welcomed by that as a Canadian in a foreign land, but there’s still that whole “it’s a crime to be gay” issue, so no. Eventually, we get to the mosque built under the reign of Sultan Qaboos, who recently passed away.

The mosque itself is huge and mostly marble and elaborate and subject to a very strict dress code. You can wander the grounds all you like, but if you want to see inside (and you do), you gotta play by their rules.

In nearly every pic I took of this thing (and this is only a tiny part of the whole), one or more of the minaret towers appear to be leaning. They weren’t, I promise.

So, about that dress code…. I’m not opposed to following whatever rules are in place to visit [whatever]. It’s not my country, it’s not my religion, it’s not my building. Whatever the rules are, I understand that if I want to see the thing, I must follow them. No worries. I get it.

That said, I reserve the right to be amused, annoyed, offended, or even disgusted by those rules. I won’t be ‘that guy’ who expects them to conform to my standards when I’m on their turf. That’s just wrong. But yeah, I didn’t like it much. Get this:

Firstly, there are signs everywhere saying that renting or selling clothing suitable to enter the mosque on mosque grounds or even in the parking lot is prohibited. Because it’s a holy place. Got it. Fair enough.
But that would keep most of the tourists out, which means less tourist spending, so they’ve got clothes rental stands all over the place.

Very few of the men needed to rent an outfit. That’s because all we had to do was have shirts that covered our shoulders and pants that went past the knee. Our Viking Daily guide the night before warned us of that, so no problem. The women, on the other hand, might as well have shown up looking like beekeepers. Garments had to go down to the ankle, arms had to be fully covered (with actual sleeves, you couldn’t just hide them under a shawl), and head had to be wrapped in a scarf so that all the hair was concealed. I’d have had no issues with any of this if the standards had applied equally to men and women, but I found the patriarchal, women-are-less-than-men double standard appalling. We should be past this by now. We should’ve been past this centuries ago.

End of rant.
Maybe.

The first place we saw was the women’s prayer room, which holds a few hundred people. It’s lovely.

All over the room, there are intricately-carved wood doors and panels. The detail is incredible.

You must remove your shoes to go into the prayer room and there are little cubby holes to put them in until you get back. There are no places to sit down, however, so the whole take-them-off/ put-them-on routine is a bit awkward, especially for some of the less-mobile folks in our group.

The women’s prayer room seemed nice until you saw what room the men get to do their prayers in. Get a load of this, ladies…

Intricate wood carvings, etched marble, intricate patterns on the ceiling made of mosaic tile, underfoot is a 46,000 sq ft hand-knotted carpet, and above is a 46 ft tall, 2.5 ton chandelier with a half-million-plus crystals. Regardless of whether you like the “more is more” approach to interior design, the detail and workmanship is certainly impressive.

The carpet, and this is only 1/4 of it, was hand-made in the room, because of its size. Seriously impressive.

The chandelier is as impressive as it is excessive. Both it and the carpet were the world’s largest when they were made, but have both been bested recently by a mosque in Dubai.

As impressive as the mosaics on the ceiling and in the dome are, though, they pale compared to the spot where the imam lectures from:

Note the gold calligraphic script above the arch and around the edges. It continues as a border around the entire room and if you start at this spot, then read as you go around the room until you reach this spot again, you’ll have read the entire Quran.

Our guide told the group a bit about the Quran, and judging from the reactions he got and the questions he was asked, I’m thinking that the vast majority of our group were completely unaware that the Quran contains many of the same ‘characters’ as the Christian Bible. Mary, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, and dozens of others are in there. Mary is mentioned more times in the Quran than in the Bible, in fact.

After everyone had put their shoes back on and returned their rental clothes, it was back on the bus to visit a 200+ year old shopping area, the Mutrah Souq.

The buildings in that shot are not the Mutrah Souq. Those are new storefronts that hide the Souq. Behind those is a labyrinth of tiny alleyways, dead ends, and tiny shops all crammed to the ceiling with wares.

It’s in these shopping areas where culture clash really hits hard. I’ve lived in both the US and Canada and the shopping experience in both countries is similar: The stores are laid out so that you can easily see what is for sale. An employee will greet you, let you know that they’re available if you have any questions, then leave you alone to browse at your leisure.

This is absolutely not the case in this part of the world, at least not in the traditional markets. See those people standing in front of the shops? They’re going to come right up to you, stick products up in your face, and ask you if you want them. They will leave their store and approach you if you aren’t going to walk close enough to their store for them to hawk their goods. They will greet you with “hello, sir” as friendly as can be…. which is a problem.

A guide on one of our early tours in Egypt warned us that unless we plan to shop in one of the stores, we should never respond to a shopkeeper who says hello. To respond is to indicate interest. To make eye contact is to absolutely express interest.

I grew up in the Southern US. I was taught manners. If someone says hello to me in a friendly way, ignoring that person is simply not done. So I got practically accosted by shopkeepers who thought I was going to buy something - and they were probably far more offended by me returning their hello and then walking on without shopping than they would’ve been if I’d ignored their hello in the first place. Sorry, fellas. Bless yer hearts.

On occasions where you actually want to shop for something, the cramped nature of the shops makes it nearly impossible to pick out what you’d like on your own. If there’s a t-shirt you want, for example, you can’t thumb through a rack of them until you find the size and colour you want. You have to tell the shopkeeper what style, size, and colour you’d like and then trust that they know where in that massive pile of stuff to look until they find one. After they’ve done all that searching and pulling stuff for you to look at, you feel like crap if you decide not to buy something, even if they don’t have what you were hoping to find. I found the whole process very stressful. I’m sure that folks used to this style of shopping find it annoying to go to North America and have to look for their own goods without a shopkeeper’s help.

Speaking of stressful, I should also mention that once you’re in the labyrinth that is the Souq, it is very, very easy to get lost and be unable to find your way out. Occasionally, the cramped and crowded passageways will open up into a hub of sorts, which relieves the claustrophobia momentarily…

…but the hub leads off in multiple directions, down narrow passages that may or may not lead to others. Even if you plan to retrace your steps to get back to the exit, you’ll need to know which of the passages you entered the hub from and which one you left by, and they all pretty much look the same. We had a definite “be-back-at-the-bus” time and every turn we made seemed to lead us deeper into the maze. We did eventually make it out, though, and hopped back on the bus for a stop at a museum. The museum was quite small and was more a celebration of Omani culture and lifestyle, as opposed to historic artifacts and antiquities. One thing that stands out: Omanis are certainly not afraid of a splash of colour.

After the museum, we headed off into Old Town Muscat, where remnants of Portuguese fortresses loom over everything. The Portuguese took Muscat in 1507, then they got taken by the Ottomans in 1552, and then more history happened, etc etc etc. The end result is that lots of the high points overlooking the sea are fortified.

Eventually, we got to the Sultan’s Palace, which is oddly named, since the sultan doesn’t live here. It’s used to host important people and diplomats and such. It’s quite the complex.

Then it was time to head back to the ship. I mentioned early on that there’s a small amusement park within sight of where we docked, but I didn’t make any effort to get there because they only have a powered coaster. That means the coaster runs under powered motors rather than gravity. Some people count those, anyway, but I don’t. If it doesn’t coast then it’s not a coaster. All of that is quite subjective and gets really sticky and complicated. I wrote a whole article about the debate between what ‘counts’ and what doesn’t, in fact.

But remember all those malls I talked about earlier? Some of them have a coaster inside. There’s also an outdoor park with a coaster - a Pinfari brand (maybe) Zyclon/Galaxi - but all of them were at least a 30-40 minute taxi ride from port. I was hoping for Uber, but that was a no-go. I still considered it, even though nothing opens until 4 pm. I’d have time for just one - but I discovered that my cell phone provider doesn’t have an agreement with anyone in Oman, so I have no ability to phone/text/email if I get stranded somewhere. So the coaster possibilities died a quick death with that realization. Le sigh.

At least we got a nice sunset to look at before we head out into the Arabian Sea.