This is a test for the first blog post. It's 4:30pm my time, a 12 hour time difference from the west coast of USA.
I'm writing this from the southern Oman town of Salalah. The town is about 50 miles east of the Yemen border and surrounded by mountains to the north and the Arabian Sea to the south. My Airbnb is a few hundred feet from the surf and the majority of the town is covered in coconut palms and banana trees. This is the only place on the Arabian Peninsula that receives enough rain to boast a semi-tropical climate thanks to the summer monsoons. The town and the rest of Oman is very easy going and outdoorsy. People are very friendly and are helping to dispel the Gulf State stereotype of not being very friendly and welcoming. Omanis are almost obsessively clean and neat, also dispelling another stereotype of its neighbors. I'm told that the king drives around, sometimes in his usual motorcade and sometimes undercover in plain clothes, alone and in a normal car. He then looks for litter and various broken or disheveled things (light polls, fountains, street signs, etc) that aren't working and sees to it that they are fixed before his next random inspection. I'm told that if the problems aren't fixed then the person responsible is "gone".
Apparently, the King's yacht, Al Said (seen in the photos) is also for sale for a rich sum of $600 million. Contact me if interested and I will get the message to the King. Everybody here calls him a king but technically his title is actually Sultan, one of only two sultans in the world (the other being Brunei). A sultan is different from a king in that he holds religious power as well.
I have rented a car today, a Nissan Sunny. It's a blast to drive because the roads are all perfect and everybody follows the rules. I will be taking the little Sunny around the mountainous region of Dhofar here in the south for the next 4-5 days.
I imagine that as time goes on, I will post photos here instead of to the Arabian Gulf pages in order to give more descriptions to the photos.
Oman has without any doubt been my favorite of the three countries that I have visited so far. I'll write another post about my experiences in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha.
Please forgive any typos or grammar mistakes. I'll get better as time goes on.
Thanks for reading!
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