Muscat, reprised.

This weekend we had a long weekend for the Prophet's (peace be upon him) Birthday, so we figured we'd take advantage and get out of town to Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman for a couple days. It's only about a 4 hour drive, and we had been before over Eid when we first moved here in September 2009, but we'd been wanting to get back and do some more exploring (when we went the first time it was so hot that we didn't do as much exploring as we'd have liked). So we left early Thursday morning (2/17) and got there by 11am.

Playing on one of the old watchtowers.

We roughly knew the layout of the city from our previous trip and it's also a pretty small place, so we kind of just drove around and explored a bit before heading back to find our hotel, which was just an older cheapo, but we figured for one night who cared (although it did turn out to be fairly interesting in that they seemed to have lost our booking -- at least the 12 year old Omani boys working the front desk couldn't seem to find it, and then we later discovered that the light in the hall of our room was a communal light that could be controlled by a switch outside our door, therefore was turned on on us 2-3 times in the middle of the night and Jared had to get up to turn it off, oh, and Jared killed a giant bug in the bathroom which he swears was a baby cockroach, but I digress). After we got checked in, we promptly decided that we didn't want to spend any more time in our hotel room than humanly possible, so immediately headed back out to explore.


Our first stop was some of the old forts and watchtowers that are prevalent all over the Muscat skyline. When the Portuguese colonized the country a couple hundred years ago they built TONS of forts, so they are everywhere and fun to explore... although I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to be up this particular watchtower given the 5 foot hole in the middle with a 40 foot drop to the rocky Gulf of Oman below. Oops.

Another view of the hole in the watchtower. It gives a good view of what your fate would be if you fell through... We were just perplexed as to how the cannon is still hanging there and hasn't fallen through.

Another view of the cannon.