Explanation: I had a few days work in Dubai with a free day on the Friday, which is a weekend over there. So, I had the chance to spend a day having a look around Dubai and its many attractions. But, modern cities are not really what I like best and with Nizwa in Oman being a so-called 4 or 5 hour trip from Dubai and having had such a lovely time there back in 2010, I decided to take the company's 'green charger' (a 3 liter Mazda car) over the border to NIzwa.
Well, leaving Dubai at 5 on Thursday and reckoning I would reach Nizwa not long after 10, little was I know that the journey would take a full 8 hours, due mainly to having massive problems crossing the border, For a start, there are no signposts from the UAE to Oman, at the mountain resort of Al Ain, and then it turns out there are a number of different border crossings, all with very long and so queues to get across. When I did finally get across, the Omani border guard told me that I had crossed the wrong one for Nizwa, which entailed another long detour across the mountains to get onto the road to Ibri and then Nizwa.
Pulling into Nizwa at 1 in the morning, I found a bed at a cheap hotel on the outskirts of town and was up at 6 to catch the best of the weekly livestock market, the source of most of the over 1,000 pics I took yesterday.
And now, I am back in Amsterdam, after a couple of very pleasant flights with Turkish Airlines, albeit without my luggage (second time running), back to a dull and damp day and a few days at home with Fred before the next trip...
