Southeast Asian Spielplatz

From Oman we joined southeast Asian expat-workers heading home and western oil workers on holiday (the Thai airways flight was actually a codeshare with the Oman Petroleum Development Corporation, which apparently operates some sort of airline).  Our destination was Bangkok where we'd meet Sarah's brother and whanau and begin the final, southeast Asian leg of our travels. Interestingly, we had a stopover in Karachi, where through-passengers didn't leave the aircraft. Before the new passengers boarded, the crew went through and confirmed that every piece of carry-on luggage corresponded to a passenger who was still on board.  Stopovers like this are pretty rare these days!

We met Sarah's sister-in-law Carmen at the airport and, soon after, her nieces Melinda and Vanessa at their school in central Bangkok.  

As with our visit with my family in Canada, I'm just going to give a limited account of all the fun stuff we did with the whanau in Thailand.

In Bangkok we ate tons of yummy Thai food.  True street food is getting tougher to find, with the government trying to force vendors indoors.  But we managed some of that anyway. And had heaps more in fun little restaurants too. Pad Thai, Som Tam (spicy-sweet-peanuty-savoury green papaya salad), green and red curries, Tom Yum (spicy-sour lemongrass flavoured soup), satay chicken, pad krapow (stir fried meat with basil leaves and chillis).  I'd been looking forward to this for months, and eating in Thailand was every bit as good as I remembered.

We took a four-day family holiday out to Koh Samet, driving from Bangkok then taking a speed boat across the brilliant blue water for my first visit to a Thai island.  Lots of reading, sand castle building, swimming and hammock swinging followed. As well as a few short walks around the island and lots more yummy Thai food (seafood green curry for breakfast is the best!)

While we still had the borrowed car, Michael, Carmen and the two of us took a trip out to Wat Sam Phan on the city's outskirts.  It's more modern than the older temples at Bangkok's heart, but this nunnery is centred on a sixteen-storey round building with an incredible Chinese dragon spiralling up and around it as though climbing.  It also features a giant turtle that you can walk into, a larger than life-sized white elephant statue and a giant rabbit. And very nice ladies selling still more delicious som tam and pad Thai.

On our own while the family was at school and work, we headed out for a lovely walk along Bangkok's canals and out to the Chao Praya River to watch the once-in-a-generation royal barge procession that forms part of the two-year long coronation ceremony for a new King of Thailand.  Given the huge number of people who wanted to watch, and the fact that they all had to queue up, present ID and be photographed to get (free) tickets for the public viewing areas, it all went amazingly smoothly. There were ample free cold water stations, free public transport for the day and municipal trucks had been pressed into service as shuttles for those who lived in parts of the city not really served by public transport.

We didn't really have the best viewing spot, but it was an aural experience as well, with the thousands of rowers chanting, and the timekeepers on the boat banging down their poles in time.  Our trip home was on one of the canal ferries ("Klong Taxis"), which are one of the funniest ways to get around the city (and when traffic's bad, one of the fastest too).

Despite the fact that it was "winter" in Bangkok, the temperature was usually over thirty degrees for most of our visit, often with lots of humidity to boot.  As such, we spent plenty of time in the rooftop pool at the family's apartment, both for our own enjoyment and swimming, splashing and babysitting with Melinda and Vanessa.

The night before our departure we joined Carmen for a beer at one of Bangkok's rooftop sky bars for an expensive view out over the nighttime skyline.  It was the sort of thing we'd be quite unlikely to have done on our own, so I'm glad Carmen talked us into it.

Our final day in Bangkok was early Christmas.  Literally. Because we'd be on holiday with everyone and away from home, we built a homemade tree (which looked really impressive, given that it was made from faux-evergreen garlands, a table and a chair), exchanged gifts and, perhaps most importantly, ate most of the gingerbread house that Sarah and I had constructed and the girls had decorated.

That evening Michael (who had another week of work to do before he could join us). saw us all into a taxi as we headed to the train station for an overnight journey to Nong Khai, in Thailand's northeast right up near the Lao border and just across the river from the Laotian capital of Vientiane.

It took a little work to get the girls ready for bed, but with the gaps in their bunk curtains plugged, pajamas on, teeth brushed and bedtime story read, Vanessa and Melinda eventually fell asleep and they, like we, woke up the next morning halfway across the country.

The World's Friendliest Strip Mall

Our time in Oman was short.  We would have liked to visit for longer, as Oman's mountains, oases, wadis and desert are legendary amongst outdoors and adventure enthusiasts.  Unfortunately for us, all of this good stuff is only reachable by private car. As one of my driver's licenses was expired and the picture on the other had been rubbed into invisibility, there would be no rental car for us.  And driving taxis is a profession reserved for citizens of the Sultanate, who make up only 60% of the population, hiring a vehicle with a driver was prohibitively expensive. So we decided that we'd just have to content ourselves with a quick visit to Muscat, Oman's capital city.

This visit was made still shorter when due to national holidays all the buses between Dubai and Oman were sold out for the next 36 hours when we originally tried to depart.  So we ended up with 2 nights and approximately 40 hours in Muscat.

My first impressions of Oman were a bit odd and, it must be said, pretty uninspiring.  Pretty much the whole way from the Dubai border to Muscat looked like it was one giant strip mall.  Almost the entire route was lined with a mix of furniture shops, mechanics/car dealers and hypermarkets.  First glances on arriving in Muscat around 22:00 didn't do much to improve this.

Things looked up quite rapidly, however, when the formerly-grand-now-slightly-run-down hotel we'd booked upgraded us to a suite.  And even moreso when I went across the street to try to get some dinner at a vegetarian Indian restaurant (like the UAE, Oman has large numbers of Indian expatriates and they've brought their food with them).  All of the banks and currency exchanges were already closed for the night. When I asked the proprietor if he could take credit cards or Emirati Dirhams, he said no, but that I could just have dinner that night and pay them the next day.  A gesture of kindness like this (especially when followed up by a pretty decent south Indian thali) is always going to do wonders for your impressions of a place.

Muscat isn't really a city as such.  It's more a collection of villages that sort of grew into one another and became the sultanate's capital.  You could also say (about much of the city, as far as I could see) that it's just a part of the coast where the density of the endless strip mall makes an order of magnitude increase.  All of which is to say that it's mostly a sea of four to seven storey concrete buildings with repeating retail on the ground floor and a mix of nondescript offices and apartments above.  And also to say that, despite improvements in public transport, it's not easy to get around (there is a fleet of modern, air conditioned public buses. It's very hard to get information about schedules or [especially] routes and stops, but the system staff are very friendly and helpful).  

But there are some pretty positive points to Muscat as well.  The old bazaar is pretty cool. True, about half of it is now dedicated to selling tourist trinkets and little bags of frankincense to cruise ship passengers, but it was still pretty and pretty low pressure.  Interestingly, taxi drivers offering to tour us around the city seemed to lose interest on hearing we weren't passengers from the cruise ship that was in port (also interestingly, we originally thought there were three cruise ships in port, but two of them just turned out to be the Sultan's yachts!)

Above the old bazaar was a restored Portuguese fort.  And following along the coast from it was the tidy and pleasant corniche.

One of the other cool things about Muscat was how each of the former villages that make up the city is separated from the others by not particularly high, but incredibly rugged mountains.  I took a back route roughly parallel to the corniche, up one wadi (which, to my surprise had running water in it) through and over an open bowl, then down another wadi. It was only a tiny taste of what Oman's wilderness can offer, but if it has this level of prettiness and adventure almost within sight of the capital, I'm really jealous of those who get further afield.

Aside from the historical and natural attractions, most of the rest of the good bits of Muscat centre on the grandiosity of Sultan Qaboos.  He's almost universally beloved by Oman's citizens, and he has done an incredible amount to improve living conditions in the country over his 49+ year reign.  Old Muscat is now filled with bright white government offices surrounding his spectacular palace.

And a goodly way north of the city centre (insofar as it has one), about two thirds of the way to the inconveniently distant airport, the Grand Mosque that was built under the Sultan's orders is a really spectacular building, and one that illustrates how modern construction techniques and old architectural styles can actually come together to create beauty.  I'd left Sarah outside with our bags while I went inside for a look. I'm glad Sarah did eventually get a look, because the place was so big and impressive that time kind of got away from me and I forgot that we had limited time left to visit before it closed for prayers.

Even though prayers were about to begin and the entrance was shut a volunteer from the Islamic information centre attached to the mosque showed Sarah in the exit door so she could see the inside of the main hall.  And afterward he and his colleagues offered us coffee and dates and, with great warmth and openness, offered to answer any questions we had about Islam. We actually had a really nice talk with him, and I was very impressed with some of his explanations.  Most notably about how for him and many Muslims, god provides a constant focus for meditation and removal of worldly desires (which sounds practically Buddhist!) and how his belief in the political and legal aspects of Islam (the Omani interpretation of which is, as you may have guessed, fairly open and liberal) stems largely from his belief in their ability to make the world a better and more peaceful place.

Seeing as the Grand Mosque was, as previously mentioned, most of the way out to the airport, we made it our final stop in Muscat, save for a short and semi-abortive visit to the national opera house a little ways back towards town on the same road.  We arrived at the airport kind of ridiculously early. We didn't even have an airport beer to pass the time (had to make do with a horribly oxidised, too sweet non-alcoholic malt beverage imported from Portugal of all places). The long wait in the shiny, new, slightly boring Muscat airport seemed an entirely appropriate way to finish our time in the city.

Post Script: I've already alluded to this, but I'd be entirely remiss if I didn't explicitly explain one more thing about Oman: just how friendly everyone we met there was.  Whether they were Omanis or expatriate workers, taxi drivers or shopkeepers, Indian contract workers from Hyderabad or Omanis from the desert come in to do some business in the big city, everyone had a smile and a wave and seemed to be doing their best to ensure we left with a positive impression of their country.  Which, despite all my earlier complaints about the sprawl and sameness of much of Muscat, I think we did.