Letter from Clara in Muscat, 13 January 2006

Robert Tyabji, Shah Alam, January 2006 

This letter from my niece Clara arrived a few months after she left Malaysia to help manage her father's game fishing business in Muscat, Oman:

Muscat, 13 January 2006

"Hi everyone and sorry for the long time between drinks!  Somehow the last six months have just flown past with us getting into the routine of being in Muscat.  We’re loving living in our house, the only drawback being that we’re only meters from (and at Minaret height) with the local mosque which we’re sure has amped up it’s volume in the last couple of months.  One of the muezzins has the most dreadful voice on the planet, and as his technique consists of rapping the microphone and coughing before he starts to sing the adnan we are very grateful on the days that he sleeps in and misses the 5.30 prayer (as he did strangely but fortunately all the way through summer!!)

"One of the great and unexpected bonuses has been that we’ve made great friends with a couple of neighbors, Mohana and Shanoo; she’s the editor in chief of the best-selling local media group, which is how I met her.  Mohana is great; someone who understands where I’m coming from, which is not so usual here where at a dinner party you can’t ask the women what they do ‘cos they do nothing! and Shanoo is like a twin for Tony so you can imagine that we have a lot of fun together.  Seems like every causal dinner turns into a 3 am hangover fest; that combined with the fact that Heba who lives next door to them is the advisor to the Minister of Tourism and another great girl pal of mine, and the people between us and her are the head of Corporate affairs for HSBC and her husband and we don’t have to go too far for entertainment!  Quite a joke really, apart from anything else, it’s also a great place for Qais.  The big central courtyard & garden means that all the kids congregate of an evening to skate and play, most of his friends are within walking distance as is the beach, so he’s not complaining too much.  And whilst some of the shine has gone off Paul the houseboy who needs the occasional terrible bollocking to keep his game high he’s still with us!  Though like a cat I’m not sure whether I’m training him or he’s training me!

"Dad’s estate is still not finally settled though we are slowly getting there.  We’ve also managed to launch the charter service in Waterworld Marine (check out www.waterworldoman.com if you’re interested ..) which took a fair while but nowhere near as long as we’d been threatened it might!  The number of ministerial permissions required are phenomenal; Tourism, Environment, Fisheries, Commerce & Industry and then the ever present Royal Oman Police; but once dealt with fortunately never have to be revisited.  So we’re just about to launch our major marketing efforts catching the tail end of the tourist season, fingers crossed.  It’s the most phenomenal place to go fishing or simply take a private charter to bays and sounds where the water is pristine and the tropical fish are as abundant as on the Great barrier Reef, so it’s a good way to use Dad’s two boats whilst having the opportunity to use them occasionally ourselves.

"Basically though we’ve just spent the last few months settling in to life in Oman.  Qais has made some good friends at school, some from last school year and some from his new class, including some Omani friends which is great (the only drawback of the school is that most of his friends will not live in Oman after they graduate, if they’re even here that long).  We settled into a routine of lunch every Friday with my Aunt Maryam and Uncle Brian, with my sisters Laila & Zahra, Laila’s family and our cousin Saleem with his Malaysian wife Norma and their 6 kids – it’s always a great afternoon with all the kids running amok but fortunately Maryam and Brian spend a lot of time in the UK including this Christmas so we all get a break from the routine!

"We do also get a break on the weekends we go camping; yes, even I have been camping, who for at least 15 years have declared that the closest I would get to nature was a Hilton hotel.  Oman does that to you - the only way to get out of town is to go camping cos there ain’t anywhere worth staying!  We’ve ventured out in search of surf, down to the east coast which is around 3 hour’s drive away from home.  We started at a place called al Ashkara, which I think I wrote about last time, where we’d ventured during the hottest part of the summer in Muscat.  Since the east coast is subject to the monsoon wind known as the khareef, though it was 40 degrees in Muscat at the end of July it was only in the high twenties in al Ashkara!  Having the Hummer we managed to get to a place called Ras Sukla, where the guys found amazing and very consistent surf and consequently when we got back to Muscat the biggest thing on our agenda was a proper four wheel drive.  So, having checked out everything in the market by test driving through the dunes (!!) we settled on a Jeep Grand Cherokee which is now Tony’s pride and joy!  It’s certainly given us fantastic access being very comfortable for long trips as well as very capable in the sand (the Bedu love them) consequently we have been back to Ras Sukla as well as finally not long ago finding an even more perfect spot about another half an hour down the road where we camped for two nights just before Christmas on the last full moon.  It was just magical - the moon rising over the desert and the sea, with a camel or two wandering around in the distance, being kept at bay by none other than Lucy the wonder dog from Fingal!

"Yes, Lucy is the latest member of the family to join us - having imposed on Phil & Dee for a year we finally flew her out at the beginning of October, with Tony & I driving up to Dubai to pick her up.  Amazingly, she bounced out of the container seeming none the worse for wear, happy as larry to see us and settled in happily to the jeep for the drive home to Muscat!  Since we’d done this run with the cats I was confident that I could handle the border, but hadn’t counted on two things – one, that it was only the third or fourth day of Ramadan and as we were fasting like everyone else we weren’t as relaxed; and two, that being a dog there was sure to be a hassle (many Muslims really don’t like them, and the vet at the border seemed to fall into this category!) - anyway, Tony sat in the car for nearly an hour while I haggled with the guy over whether Lucy needed to go into quarantine for six months (!!) or not; obviously I finally won which was interesting as we carried out our argument in two languages, me in English and him in Arabic! I think I just wore him down or bored him or something ‘cos he finally let us go!

"Ah yes, Ramadan. ‘Whilst in Rome’ is always our way so we fasted the whole month, more than I’m sure most of our Omani friends and family did!  In the end let me tell you it gets very, very boring and we’re sure the reason everyone has SUCH a good time in the Eid that follows Ramadan is that they’re so very grateful that this boring period is over!!!!  Life changes utterly; school schedules & office hours change (not our school of course) so though mornings were deserted, the traffic jams at 1 o’clock had to be seen to be believed!  And then you could fire a gun down the streets till 6.30 pm when everyone comes out again after breaking their fast to go to the mosque or just promenade, play volleyball, football or cards till the dawn!  Most people cheat dreadfully turning night into day – it’s very social. All the hotels and restaurants get into the mode, with big buffets and everyone sits out smoking sheesha, the hubble bubble pipes.  This is interesting - you can’t usually smoke sheesha here in Oman except in a few places that are licensed, because everyone apparently used to smoke drugs (tut tut).  They just lift the ban in Ramadan = hmm .. and yes, we tried it ourselves.  You don’t smoke tobacco in a sheesha pipe, you smoke dried fruit mixed with a little local tobacco - the favorite is apple - and it has a lovely smell and a very perfumed taste.  It’s quite nice, and fun with friends, but we havne’t gone as far as getting one to smoke at home!  So what’s it like to fast?  Well, apart from boring, it’s not that hard once you get used to it!  We used to get up very early and have breakfast (porridge and coffee) and then nothing till they call the prayer at sunset - which at the beginning of Ramadan was about 6.30 and by the end was thankfully about 5.45!  Breaking fast is very social as well, with people going to family and friends to share a veritable feast of lots of fried and fattening foods like samosas, pakoras, biriyani and the like - most people put on weight in Ramadan and you can see why!  Tone and I, virtuous as we are, both lost a bit of weight, not unwelcome as we’d both put it on in Bali, especially me!  It was good to get into the swing of it, we were as glad as everyone else that it was over, and we’ll probably do it all again next year - inshallah!

"Eid was great - everyone buys new clothes and goes to visit their family and friends - all the kids get money from their elders so Qais really cleaned up!  We had a lovely time as my cousins Sami and Suhail came from Saudi Arabia with their respective broods of five and six kids each, Aunty Hala came in from the States and Alawi and his wife were here from London.  So lunch on Eid was a huge affair and dinner that night at Aunty Maryam’s was a riot.  The next day 35 of us - uncles, aunts, first cousins and their spouses and kids - sat down to a formal lunch at Uncle Omar’s so you can see how the weight goes right back on after the month of abstinence!

"Just after Eid we packed Tony off to London for a few days to go and represent WWM at the big travel trade fair there - he had a ball staying with our friends Phil & Amanda though the weather turned cold just as he was leaving and he was glad to escape back home to Muscat with a few well-chosen Christmas presents in tow!  Then it was my turn to go to Bombay - a much awaited trip to see my old school friends and family.  We worked out I hadn’t been back for 21 years, which is a fair while in anyone’s language and I had an absolute ball.  My old friend Charmaine and I took up exactly where we’d left off – we’d last seen each other in Sydney in 1989 - we shopped till we dropped (boy can you do that in Bombay) and since I was staying with my uncle Qays just down the road from where I grew up it was eerily as though we’d never been away!  I couldn’t believe how little the place had changed and how many businesses were still the same, in the same places, how many people still lived in the same buildings, so unlike our experiences in Australia!  Unfortunately I missed out on seeing my darling Raksha (last time we saw each other was in London in 1995) but she’s now living in Goa and we have promised to meet up this year – it’s so quick and easy to get there (and so cheap) there’s really no excuse apart from time!  T and I plan a trip in early Feb for my birthday – Charmaine’s husband Papu’s birthday is on the 6th and he’s turning 50 so we’re planning some damage possibly in Goa - will keep you tuned!

"Back to Muscat and it seemed like five minutes to Christmas - which we celebrated in style I have to say!  Alawi and Safia were back from London with a bunch of their friends, so I did lunch at Al Bushra for 21 adults and 9 kids - Tony was Santa, we had a feast and a wonderful day with all the Al Bushra cousins and Aunty Meena, Mohana and Shanoo and our friends the Gongets - Grace and Christophe and their kids Gabriel (Q’s best mate) his brother Raphael and sister Lucy.  Grace is Philippino, and Christophe is French - he works for Petroleum Development Oman - as he says, “I’m the guy who tells them where to drill!”  The kids had an absolute riot, swimming, playing football and generally eating and drinking themselves silly which is part of the purpose of a Christmas feast after all!! Thank God for Al’s suggestion that we do it there and not here at our place - apart from the fact that it took me two days with the help of two chefs and on the day we needed two waiters as well as a helper on the bar!  Meant that I could enjoy myself as much as anyone else, which I can tell you I did!!!

"On to new year’s, which we’d planned various things for all of which we decided not to do at the last minute!  It came down to a quiet night in with Mohana and Shanoo and Shanoo’s brother Raj - except that Mohana had gone on a business trip to Bombay and thus was there when their son Nishaan (who started university in London in September and was in Bombay on his way to spend new year’s eve in Goa) had his money, passport, ticket and ipod stolen from his bedroom!  Poor Mo spent two days fighting with the Indian bureaucracy trying to get the kids’s passport reissued, decided to cancel her flight home on new year’s eve, immediately had his passport and ticket etc returned on the Friday night!!! at their doorstep (all very suspicious of course) and then couldn’t get on a plane for love or money on Saturday!  So poor Shanoo was left with us and an unreliable phone service to India!!! To make things interesting it also poured with rain and was freezing cold (most unusual of course!) so we all just stayed in and drank Laphroaig - consequently at least had no hang over on New Year’s Day!  So quite a memorable NYE but for some of the wrong reasons!!! 

"Anyway, having started the year with a bit of a whimper, we decided to rev it up with a bang and headed for Salalah, the southern capital of Oman, on the 2nd (Cam’s birthday - 21, can you all believe it??) Tony driving the mighty jeep and Q and I taking easy route by flying down (it’s a 1000k journey) - I’d booked us into the Crowne Plaza as I had found it was the only hotel on the beach, and when we arrived we knew we’d lucked it in - there was a great shore break just outside the hotel, the skies were clear blue and the temperatures were top 27 - since we’d left Muscat grey, raining and cold, this was great!!! Of course T had driven down to take the boards - we knew that Dhofar (the region that Salalah is in ) had a reputation for great surf though only a very few people have ever surfed there!)

"Dhofar is a wonderful place and we loved Salalah.  For one, it’s tropical - coconut palm trees, banana plantations, pawpaw plantations - it gets the southern monsoon so is green and fresh with rain from July to September!  This is peak tourist season when the place fills up with 350,000 tourists from Saudi, the emirates and the rest of Oman, so we were there right out of season.  The hotels were full though - as an indication of how popular Oman is becoming as a tourist destination, a Swedish company has started bringing in planeloads of Swedes and the hotel, which last year at this time had 6% occupancy, was full!  Though Muscat is surrounded by jagged stony mountains, the hills (or jebel) of Dhofar is huge, high rounded craggy sandstone cliffs that look like nothing so much as a very dry Australia - the Blue Mountains with far less vegetation, say, or the area just south of Byron Bay.  The grass was bleached dry, and the trees all had black trunks which made them look as though a bushfire had been through - really if you squinted a bit we could have been in Australia in a dry dry summer. Amazing.

"This is the border with Yemen, and in the 70’s was a warzone.  Apparently, there are still landmines in some of the remoter hills (a good deterrent to going wandering!) and there is a military checkpoint on the road to the remoter southern towns where the guys are very seriously armed!  But they were lovely young Omani soldiers who laughed at our surfboards, no wonder as their checkpoint was high above the world with a beautiful view of the jebel and the ocean!

"This road (if you want to look up a map, the village is Rakyut) is one of the most amazing feats of engineering we have ever seen on our travels.  Created to be utterly defensible, it carves its way up, switchbacking to 1000 metres in one go!  The mountains are phenomenal, and on the first day we went up there it was crystal clear and blue, so that when you’re so high you really feel as though you can see forever.  It would be like being in the Blue Mountains and being able to look down to the sea - if you can imagine that, you’d get Rakyut!

"So you drive up this huge mountain to a massive plateau, where people farm camels, cows and some small goats, building thorn enclosures to keep them in at night (they wander freely during the day, which makes driving tricky, the last thing you want is a camel through your windscreen) which look exactly as they must have in the days of the Bible (by the way Dhofar was the northern part of the ancient kingdom of Hadhramaut, and was the home of the Queen of Sheba .. and to prove it we went to visit the tomb of the Prophet Job) and then down, down, down the other side to the sea!  At Rakhyut there is a small village (which like all other villages in Oman has been completely rebuilt by the government, but you can still see the tiny old mud brick and stone houses) but at the other end of the beach there’s no one (and unlike on the east coast, no one comes to check you out, either!) and we spent the most fantastic days there with the boys surfing some really good quality waves with the water so crystal clear and blue it looked like a postcard.  Just amazing.  One and a half hours from Salalah and not quite the last town on the Omani side.  The whole coast here must be these lovely sandy beaches separated by massive cliffs - would be great to have a boat down here to explore, that’s for sure!

"As I said before, Dhofar has an amazing archaeological history as the location of Samhuram, the city of the Queen of Sheba, and the capital of the ancient land of Saba.  Whilst there are some extraordinary sites - Khor Rori, for example, is a hilltop over the ocean which has a ruinous site that must be at least a hundred acres, dating from this period - and Khor Balid, which is right next door to the Crowne Plaza and is a partially excavated site of at least 200 acres - there is so little information available that the visitor is pretty much left gobsmacked but ignorant!! Hopefully this is in the process of being changed by the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture, but I’ll read all I can find before going back to make sure I really know what I’m looking at next time. Certainly, the palace at Khor Balid is extremely impressive, and reputedly that of the Queen of Sheba … impressive enough to think about anyway!

"So back to Muscat and ready for the new year.  Hopefully this one will see us in Oz in July and August, that’s our plan anyway.  While it’s probably true to say that of us all Qais is the only one who really misses Australia, we really miss our friends and certain things like breakfast at the Choux Box!  Lots of love to you all, hope you have a wonderful and happy new year with all that you wish for!

"Clara, Tony & Qais."