Oman

Oman isn’t the most well know country in the Middle East but it certainly is one of the most beautiful. Filled with friendly locals, good food and hidden gems, Oman is one of my favorite destinations. I visited Oman last year for my birthday with my girls and it was the best choice i made in 2019.

I started a personal travel challenge to check off all (as many as possible) letters of the alphabet since I wanted to do ’30 before 30′ but soon realised I already had over 30 countries at 26 (at the time). Anyways, my point is Oman is the only country in the world beginning with ‘O’- hence why i visited- but also because if you ever see images of Oman, you’ll understand why i decided to go.

Back to Oman, we stayed in apartment close to Muscat’s Qurm. This was close enough to the beach, Grand Mosque, Mutrah Souk, Muscat Museum and Muscat’s old town. Not having the budget for one of Muscat’s many 5 star resorts, we really enjoyed our 2-bed apartment at Coral Muscat hotel and Apartments – it was well priced, clean and accessible to most places we wanted to visit.

Oman is very conservative so its important to dress appropriate- maxi and midi length dresses/skirts and/or loose fitting trousers. No spaghetti straps or boob tube style tops. Its also worth carrying a light scarf or cardigan just in case to cover your shoulders and arms when necessary.

Whilst we do go to Qurm beach, it was relatively bare and we were a little worried about offending the locals in our swim-wear. However, having said this we were ok and even saw another western wearing less than us (yes, she was white). Anyways, for a real beach-holiday feel experience we visited the Shangri La for the day and had a blast. The day pass was about £50 and included towels, sunbeds, an amazing buffet lunch and access to the hotel’s facilities – such as the lazy river and tubes – this was definitely a lot of fun and made our experience memorable. If you do go for the day, go hungry because the choice of food and dessert was fantastic and you don’t want to miss out and get full too quickly. So maybe work up an apatite before .

FYI – at the Shangri La, we were able to wear less so fine in our bikini of choice and shorter dresses than worn outside the resort in Oman.

As well as all the tourist attractions listed above, we had the best day at Wadi Shab and Binmah Sinkhole- now this is worth a google and you will truly see why I wanted to go to Oman. Wadi Shab is a natural pool, waterfall and photo shoot worthy spot between rocks and cliff edge. I don’t quite know how else to describe it without imagery but after about a 40 minute hike, we reached the most beautiful opening of fresh clear blue water with an amazing rock backdrop. For the full Wadi Shab experience, i recommend going early and paying a local guide upon arrival. Whilst entrance to Wadi Shab is free, there is a short boat trip across to where the epic walk starts and this was about £3 each return. Our guide was £20 i believe and our taxi driver for the day was £50 between us. This is key as Wadi Shab is about 2 hours outside of Muscat and tour companies were charging us £70+ EACH- so do plan this with a local taxi driver instead. Even if you do not choose to use a guide, the route is fairly easy and usually plenty of others going in the same direction that you can follow. However, to get to the hidden waterfall and natural slide, I would get a guide. Also, for the full Wadi Shab experience its worth being a strong swimmer otherwise you may not make it to the hidden water fall – however I believe you can hire a life jacket before you get on the boat.

Binmah Sinkhole was also amazing and free to enter. This is like a huge crater filled with fresh clear blue water and looks amazingly unreal.

For nightlife, I was pleasantly surprised given how conservative the country is. However we had a great time at the rooftop bar in the W hotel (you do need to pre-book but pretty privilege helped us out since we had no idea we needed a reservation) There is also a club downstairs in the W Hotel. From the W, we were told about Cave Restaurant that turns into a club after hours and this was free for ladies and luckily we’d made friends with some US expats from Saudi who kindly bought us drinks. Otherwise, they were relatively priced.

For travel we took taxi everywhere and made friends with a particular driver who we exchanged numbers with to plan our trips at a good price. This is also worth doing since its not always easy to get a taxi. When we went to the Grand Mosque our driver waited for us and we paid for this time to avoid waiting in the sun for a taxi that may not stop.

Re. The Grand Mosque – this is open daily to the public before 11am. I would recommend avoiding Sundays as this is when the cruise ship docks in Muscat and 100s of tourists flock to the Mosque. This is also free to enter and its important to completely cover up- including your head otherwise you will not be granted access. You can however, hire traditional clothing there. Be sure to cover your entire arms and legs.

Oman truly is beautiful and I 100% recommend visiting if you can.

We also visited Dubai and our flight to Oman was about £80-100 from Dubai and was an hour. Even if you go for just a few days- do get there.