We will be in Muscat twice on this trip. During the second visit, we have a tour scheduled (with Arizona as the leader – God forbid), so today we are doing the HoHo bus. We found a deal online to book the HoHo bus in Muscat and Dubai for half the price of a normal ticket(and half the price of the shipboard ticket). We figured we’d get a good overview of the city on the bus, then delve more deeply on the tour in a few days time.
All worked well, we managed to get off the ship relatively quickly and turned in our vouchers to the HoHo bus girl at the pier. She gave us tickets for both here and Dubai – and we were set. The bus picks you up right on the pier, so we hopped on, headed upstairs (which was thankfully covered) and waited to leave.
Neither of us are feeling well at this point. I’m almost over my cold, but I’ve now somehow got a nasty stomach thing going on – have no clue how as I’ve not had anything off the ship since Mumbai days ago (I think it was a piece of seafood in the crepe from last night, but Ed thinks it’s just a stupid shipboard virus). Ed’s now got the upper respiratory thing going full bore – so we’re a rather pathetic pair.
Which is one of the reasons why we decided to just do the city tour on the bus – and not hop off anywhere. The other reasons are that it is 1) hot, as in over 100 degrees, and 2) we’ve read that the buses are notoriously off schedule – they never arrive when they say they will. Even though the bus people say they’ll come every 20 to 30 minutes, we’re not willing to take the risk of getting stranded (ala Hong Kong) somewhere in this desert heat.
So – we sit – which actually turned out to be very nice. The tour takes 2 hours and you see just about everything there is to see in the city. We start off at the Muttrah souk, then travel down the Corniche with picturesque gardens and sea views.
Then we turn inland and start driving up into the hills a bit, enjoying all the interesting middle eastern architecture.
We pass beautifully landscaped gardens and round abouts (most of the round abouts have fantastic gold colored statuary in the shape of genie lamps) along with stunningly white building complexes. We go all the way to the opera house, then turn back and head toward the beach, with the shore on the left, and the marshes on the right.
On our way into the CBD, we pass huge auto dealerships – you want to talk about the Taj Mahal? These things are basically car palaces – yeah – there’s money here all right.
We pass the clock tower in the CBD, more great architecture, and then up into the hills toward the Parliament buildings.
The contrast of the brown, craggy mountains against these start white buildings really makes for interesting views. It’s great to watch the landscape change and the city spring up out of the cliffs.
We finally get to the Royal Palace, and since we know we are coming here on our next visit, we snap our photos from the bus and keep on riding.
There are really good views of the forts from here too.
Then we round the corner and come back full circle arriving at the Corniche again, with a great view of the Riyam Monument – that big Frankincense Burner monument at the top of the hill in the park.
Fun! This was a great way to spend a couple of hours learning about Oman and Muscat. The bus takes us right back to the ship, and we happily get back aboard to cool off and salve our wounded bodies. We thought about going back out to the market, but since we will visit it on our next tour, we decide to stay inside and just hang out for the rest of the afternoon.
Sailaway is awesome, as we are on the park side and have a fantastic view of the Riyam Monument as well as the old forts on the hillsides as we sail out.
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