The City of Salalah

I had heard and read a lot about the city of Salalah, which is at the southern tip of Oman. It’s the second largest city in the country (after Muscat) and a holiday destination for many locals. Salalah is marketed as a tropical oasis, that has festivals and entertainment and is the home of frankincense. Sounds interesting, right?

Anyway, we fly down late on Wednesday evening – the day before the official start of Ramadan – and arrived at the airport to be driven to the resort. I should mention here that the boys omitted telling me until that moment, that the resort was an 80km drive from Salalah… Arriving at 10.30pm that night, we were directed to dinner before the restaurant closed at 11.00pm. We were all hoping for one last alcoholic beverage before Ramadan began because alcohol is not allowed during this month – even for Westerners’. Horror of horrors, we discovered that the resort had already stopped serving alcohol!! No problems, we’ll just raid the mini bar when we hit our rooms.

Therein lay the next shock – all the alcohol had been removed from the mini bar! Our dry month had begun earlier then anticipated.


(This is a view of the back of the resort from the beach - it was a great place to stay and because it was off-peak there were only 25 guests staying at the resort!)

Thursday, being the first day of our weekend, we decided to catch the bus back into Salalah and hit the souq and the museum. So off we trundled, 80km back into town, hoping it was worth it.

Hmmm….. Most of the city was shut. I should clarify that although it is labelled a ‘city’, it doesn’t really qualify as one, even with its 180,000 residents.

The souq was an experience, it was mostly run by Indians with Indian-made products, but we did manage to snag a few items – traditional Omani headwear for the most part. We also picked up an entrepreneurial guide who decided to attach himself to use and be our taxi driver.

Disappointingly the Frankincense and Archaeological Museum was shut, even though the sign said it was open. So we headed to the Crowne Plaza for lunch (Western hotels still put on lunch behind curtains, for those not partaking in the fast). Can I just mention here that the Crowne Plaza is the epitome of gawdiness! It was hideous. And lets just briefly mention the cranky waiter we had, he must have been fasting, no one is that rude on purpose!

After lunch our taxi driver picked us up for the trip back to the resort, yep that’s right, an 80km trip in a taxi. We had previously found out that the trip would be about 15 rials ($45 Australian), which to us was pretty reasonable! Well, that was until we arrived at the resort anyway. Turns out that because there was no one returning, we had to pay for that trip also, so our $45 ride suddenly jumped up to a $90 ride… Ouch! Needless to say, we did not tip.



(The end of one of the alleys of the souq looking towards what I think is a residential area)

Oh I forgot to mention the spate of bad luck did not start (nor end) there. My partner had a shower before we left that morning, I was lying on the bed and got up to get ready, only to step into a pool of water! The drain in the bathroom had backed up which flooded the bathroom, then flowed into the room (where I discovered it and damed it with a towel or two) and then it flowed out under the door into the hallway.

This is my improvised dam.

We each scored a pair of Marriot slippers for our troubles!

Later in the afternoon however, there was a blackout when the generator went down, oh and just before dinner the fire alarms started to randomly go off throughout our section of the resort.

Salalah was not exactly living up to its potential.

But that was the first day, I’ll tell you about the following day once I’ve recovered from this one!