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The Sultanate of Oman has plenty to offer
This gorgeous destination is well-worth the trip
By: Mary Gostelow
The Sultanate of Oman gives such a warm welcome - as here, at Shangri-La's Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa (photo) - says Mary Gostelow. The experiences on offer go from one extreme to the other - and WOW.travel loves them both.
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First, Oman is a serious business venue, with travelers who have meetings well looked after, wherever. At the same time, it is becoming a popular leisure destination: for many years incredibly difficult to access without ministry or diplomatic assistance, now visitors from most countries can pick up visas on arrival at Muscat airport (one tip, work with your hotel to get fast-track immigration, which means that by sending a scan of your passport and arrival details ahead of time, you will be met airside, and whisked quickly through, thus avoiding what can be long lines at immigration).
Take the geographical extremes. On this quick trip we went right to the south of the country, Salalah, 600 miles south of Muscat and close to the Yemen border. It is lush and green as you fly in. Right now there are only two noteworthy hotels, although many big developments are planned. We stayed at the Hilton Salalah Resort, unique in that it was once a bowling alley with restaurant attached. Now it is a four-floor, 151-room pleasant oasis. There are no other buildings in sight. To your east is the Gulf of Oman, thirty yards away. To your west is the busy two-lane highway leading from Salalah city, three miles to the north, to the port at Raysut, five miles south (more, below) and immediately to the north and south of the resort is barren land, with literally dozens if not hundreds of camels roaming by day. The resort, run by Klaus Schack, is really comfortable, with very agreeable rooms, a good gym and lovely curvilinear outdoor pool and surrounding gardens, www.hilton.com
OK, that port. Well, the Omanis are cleverly building up Salalah Port as a useful logistics hub. Just in case anything should happen at the Straits of Hormuz, which separates the north of the country from Iran, supplies can still be got in and out and transported by land to Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE, which would otherwise quickly be starved. Dubai's own Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority has also signed to manage and partly-own what will be a massive free zone extending from Salalah Port right up to the hotel. Soon, I am told, there will be other hotels; the mighty Egyptian Sawiris family, who literally made the multi-brand El Gouna complex on the Red Sea, are, via their Orascom holding company, partnering with the Oman government as Muriya Tourism Development Company. This plans several new resorts and a championship golf course in the Salalah area.
From the south of the country, we flew back to Muscat and were driven nearly five hours to the extreme north of Oman, to the Musandam Peninsula, bordering the Straits of Hormuz. The Peninsula is actually cut off from the rest of the country by Fujairah, one of the seven Emirates of the UAE, so you exit Oman, enter UAE, exit UAE and re-enter Oman, but all you need to do is show your passport.
Honestly, the main reason for going to the Peninsula these days is to visit Six Senses Hideaway at Zighy Bay, an amazing Heath Robinson-like 'village' built on one mile of sandy beach at the north end of the three mile-long crescent bay. Look out to sea and you have Huffa promontory to your far left, otherwise there is nothing. To your immediate right, along the beach, is the tiny fishing village of Zighy Bay and at the far end of the bay there is a marina that will shelter over 30 yachts, including mega-yachts. The bay is only about half a mile across - with the 2,000 feet barren Hajjar Mountains behind - and to reach it is quite something. Yes, you can come in by sea, and if you are really intrepid you can - as Six Senses' marketing people suggest - paraglide from the top of the mountain pass but most people are driven, by one of the resort's 4x4s. It is under 20-minute' drive from Debba dam, and once at the top of the pass, you are awestruck by the vista far below you. You are also amazed by the skilled driving, negotiating the steep Z-bends of the rough road.
Cleverly, the architect, Mahfouz Shuhaiber of Al Marsa Travel & Tourism Sharjah - who co-owns the luxury resort with Sheikh Sultan bin Saqr al Qasimi of Sharjah - has made the inner gateway a twisting drive through a covered soukh alley. You emerge, to a sandy turning circle in front of a two-floor wattle building, and into the full-height lobby. You quickly realize that this resort is local materials, local colors. Floors are big stone slabs, deliberately left rough. Inner walls are wattle, ceilings are tied sticks. Sand-tones are enhanced with simple colors, green for grass (soukh cushions, the main restaurant's upholstery), blue for the sea (lobby, spa) and orange for sunset (all bedrooms, and the open-sided deli): some employees wear cotton pyjamas in one of those three hues.
It is dark when we arrive - note, for a reason known only to themselves Six Senses Hideaway at Zighy Bay operates on Zighy time. GM Rochelle Kilgariff, from Perth, and a team that includes at least one former Four Seasons veteran, tell you that you are one hour ahead of anywhere else in the entire Gulf. This will, apparently, give you an hour extra in bed in the morning, an hour extra before starting your evening. It means, on arrival, that you are an hour later than you thought - but you do admittedly gain an hour if you are going on to Dubai, which is under two hours' drive, or back to Muscat.
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So we are told the time, and then taken down past a big communal pool, fan-shaped and fed by a series of upper pools, and, sinking into the sand, to our villa (memo for next time, do not arrive in Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin or even lower-heeled Ferragamo). There are 82 villas, of which 79 are single-unit, single story, all presenting a plausible artistic-licence facsimile of a fishing community. Villas have large private compounds, the whole surrounded by walls of enormous pebbles from Nizwa and rough fences of date-palm sticks. Your villa number is marked on a stone step outside your compound's main double door.
Beach-set villa 23, 4,100 sq ft of it in all, was mostly taken up by exterior, with two outdoor showers, a 25-ft infinity pool and two salas-in-the-sand. Inside, there were two rooms, a parlor and adjacent bedroom, which has the inside bathroom at its rear. There were Samsung flatscreen televisions, Firefly health drinks in the minibar and both Moët and Veuve Clicquot in the separate wine cooler, but the toiletries are folksy, unbranded in ceramic containers, and the coat hangers are merely straight sticks suspended by string.
You have superb food here, be it an Arab barbecue on the beach, or private dining in your compound or the buffet breakfast, with fruit cut to order, in the main dining room. Soon, we are told, the Edge restaurant will open, at the top of that 2,000 ft-high pass, and yes you will be chauffeured both ways. You have a range of water sports at hand, a good gym and a marvelously-relaxing spa, with separate men's and women's sections (the largest villa, the Private Reserve, which has five bedrooms, plus two for staff, has its own gym and spa, as do the two two-bedroom Private Retreats). Those who are really fit can follow our lead and run back up that mountain path, early morning before it gets too hot, and so far people as young as five, as seasoned as 76, had successfully done the fly-as-a-bird paraglide that brings you down from the top of the pass, attached to a Bulgarian professional. You can also use the dark green Hero bikes that come with each villa, marked with villa number and His or Hers to prevent pilferage - the bikes have cotton pouches holding refreshing towels (real fabric, not the things they give you on planes) but they are the sit-up-and-beg variety and difficult, anyway, to manage in the sand, www.sixsenses.com
All this is deliberately back-to-nature, let's go gleaning on the beach kind of thing, the mantra of Six Seasons Resorts and Spas that is beloved by a growing number of enthusiasts. By contrast, the sheer simple symmetry of The Chedi, Muscat, is the extreme opposite. (We have already written about The Chedi.
Muscat does, as one would expect, have a range of luxury hotels. On this visit there was no time to return to the magnificently-tiled Al Bustan Palace Muscat because it is still closed for upgrading: it is scheduled for reopening October 2008, with Tony Zamora continuing as GM, www.ichotelsgroup.com.
We did find Shangri-La's Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa, 45 minutes' drive from the airport, the ideal resort-for-everyone. The 124 acres hug the Oman Gulf, with the other three sides rising immediately to rugged, barren and strikingly beautiful mountains. The campus itself, however, is lush and green. There are three hotels, and the 262-room Al Waha is ideal for families, with plenty of sandy beach - watch the green & hawksbill turtles laying eggs and hatching January to June - and lots of water activity. Teenagers and their parents appreciate the free internet café and snooker table in the Sufe Café here, and all ages enjoy sitting in rubber rings and taking the 11-minute lazy-water ride from here to the nearby 198-room Al Bandar all-purpose resort. WOW.travel, not surprisingly, was really happy to be staying in the 180-room Al Husn (Castle) resort, a short distance away. This is more exclusive, and we loved the calm around the pool, and the beach here. End room 1236 may be ten minutes' walk from the lobby but it looks out over nothing but blue water, and it is next to stairs that take you down one flight to the poolside. Do not miss the Chi Spa Village, a separate complex with the variety of treatments that Shangri-La always offers: the spa is so popular it is expanding from 12 to 19 treatment rooms. Another must-do is learning about Omani handicrafts and pursuits at the Heritage Village, a couple of minutes by shuttle. Arbind Shrestha, who is GM of the whole complex, says that a full soukh (market) is planned. We were bidden farewell by the doormen (photo): we were so sad to leave. www.shangri-la.com, omantourism.gov.om
Shangri-La's Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa - Al Husn, Muscat, Oman
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