All the lamentations about the shortage of time in Northern Ireland and England also apply to this trip. But so does the riposte: better three days than no days.

As with Northern Ireland, we chose an out-of-the-city itinerary. After all, we enjoy the pleasures of city life on a day-to-day basis, and breaks should bring change. Our route was suggested, and our car and guide/driver supplied, by Nomads, who also run a very nice guesthouse out in the suburbs of Muscat, staffed by helpful people and an extremely friendly cat called Smoky.

We've truly been from the freezer to the microwave on this trip. From single digits plus wind chill in the British Isles to about 47 in Oman...

Highlights:

1. Rocks... Well, mountains actually. But when you look at them, you think "rocks". They wear very little. Hardly any vegetation, hardly even any covering soil. They're there in their bones -- austere, dramatic, and totally majestic. I guess my favourite manifestation was the Grand Canyon up at Jebel Shams. We explored this from several angles, including walking an hour or so along a path clinging to its rocky side, which revived all my trekking aspirations.





2. Forts. These are really like something out of 1001 Nights: craggy backdrop, massive fortifications, simple but quintessentially Arabian furnishings, and lush date palms. We visited a little one and a big one: Nakhal and Nizwa. Worth every sweaty step.









3. Coffee. People are tradionally welcomed with a bowl of dates (which I'll come to in a minute) and tiny cups of the most delicious coffee. The coffee is mixed with cardamom, and the extra je ne sais quoi comes from a hint of cloves, saffron, and rosewater. Totally magical. Omanis obviously have the knack where coffee is concerned. Even a humble roadside Nescafe with milk, costing just 0.2 riyals, tastes pretty damn good.

4. Dates. We tasted dried dates, fresh dates, and date honey (otherwise known as date syrup). The latter is delicious for breakfast, with butter and that crepe-like flat bread. Alternatively, it can be heated up, and poured through the "murder holes" of antique fortifications onto advancing enemies... In those same antique fortifications we saw the "date stores" where this liquid is (or was) produced. You basically pile up sacks of dates, and construct channels to collect the liquid that oozes out. Years later, these places still smell wonderful...



5. Other food. I'm not totally sure what constitutes Omani food. But based on what we had, I would single out the following: interesting meze (eg, parboiled carrot rounds with grated coconut; eggplant stuffed with pinenuts; that interesting thing that looked like a cheese and spinach tartlet, but turned out to have a vegetable base; plus all the usual delectable array of olives, tomatoes, cucumber, hummus, baba ghanoush, etc); bread rolls stuffed with chicken; pilau rice with dhal and/or chicken curry; and excellent yoghurt...

6. Water. When the scenery, for mile after mile, consists of rocks or dunes...





... you rapidly begin to appreciate the oases. The wadis were mostly dry when we were visiting, with the exception of permanently lush Wadi Bani Khalid, but we viewed some springs, and a couple of venerable channel systems that have nurtured life for centuries. Petrol here is cheap as chips. Water, on the other hand, is precious.





7. House styles. I love looking at other cultures' housing styles. Here, outside the major towns, you're struck by how randomly situated the plots are. The neat little compounds -- consisting of a surrounding wall, house, a tower housing the indispensable water tank, and sometimes a few date palms and other plants -- seem to be just plonked on the rough ground, with no connecting streets or other manifestations of urban cohesion. There's a clear distinction between inside and outside: inside is civilized, outside is not. Perhaps this is why the gates -- the transition between inside and outside -- are so ornate and distinctive.







8. Men's clothing styles. And let's be honest, there was little opportunity to observe women's clothing styles because so few women were out and about... Many men here wear the long white robe that's common in the Gulf. Underneath (as I was able to observe when our vehicle broke down, and several men stopped to help) they wear another skirt-like garment, which becomes visible when your outer layer is hitched up to stop it picking up dust from the car you're trying to repair. Unlike the headdresses in the UAE or Qatar, there is no black rope-like arrangement. Men wear either a printed white peci-shaped cap, or a simple turban, made of cloth that is half-plain half-patterned. Sometimes the robe matches the turban, usually in shades of lilac or beige.



9. Goats and camels. Not many animals are visible in this searing heat. So kudos to these humble beasts. The goats are surprisingly shaggy, given the ambient temperatures. And having watched a few gamely attempting to masticate a cardboard box, we can now confirm that goats really will eat anything. The camels weren't doing a lot. But a camel resting under a date palm is always an exotic sight.





10. The one upmarket bit of Muscat suburbia that we had the chance to encounter. Very, very nice... Quite palatial houses, and parked outside, the kinds of cars that can only coexist with this level of petrol price. There were a number of nearby restaurants. We chose "Arabian Fish', which turned out to be a Turkish place. Generous portions and excellent flavours. Pomegranate juice, mixed appetizers, a huge, hot, crispy, sesame-strewn flat bread, minty fattoush, and "fish tikka" (grilled fish chunks) -- all excellent.



So, all in all, an excellent and rather different stopover from our usual city breaks. Definitely not cheap -- Oman's riyal must be one of the highest valued units of currency in the world -- but worth it for an unparalleled glimpse into a very, very different world.