Fish Tales

It’s been an action packed weekend of clubbing (both in the party sense and hitting fish over the head!), swimming, fishing, eating, sinkhole diving, dead skin eating and beach chilling. I feel like I've done so much this weekend that I could think of a few blog entries I could write, but I’m just going to lump them all into one big entry because everything seems to have one common link......fish!

I accepted an invite from a friend (Ali) to go fishing very early Thursday morning, so early in fact that I managed to convince him to put me up for the night so I could get an extra half an hour in bed. This became even more vital when an unplanned night out clubbing on Wednesday followed by a 3am swim in the sea meant I only got 2 hours sleep before I was shaken awake at 6am and told to ‘Get the f*ck up!’. Just a side note about the late night swimming; the sea here is packed with phosphorescent plankton, which light up when you disturb them, so after a few drinks it can be kind of mesmerising. All you want to do is move as much as possible to watch the small twinkling green lights all around you, it’s great fun and is totally free of course!

Ali with the Mahi-mahi

Despite me being a bit tired, the fishing was a brilliant experience and I soon woke up when being sprayed in the face with sea water. We drove down to meet the boat at the Shangri-la hotel where there is a small marina. It was a very simple 29 foot boat with bench seating for at least 10 people, but there were just 5 of us on board and two of those were local fishermen. The first fish we caught was a Mahi-mahi, a white meat fish which I thought was a decent size, but the fishermen laughed at it and said it was tiny. After a quick Google search today for Mahi-mahi I can confirm that it definitely was tiny.

Me with the big Tuna

The second fish was our first Tuna, but a small one at about 10 inches long that we just threw back to mother nature. The third fish was another Tuna and this time we thought it was worth keeping. Still only small for a Tuna, but big enough for a decent meal. The fourth and final fish was just what we were searching for! An 8kg beast, which was now destined for our barbecue that evening. I was shocked with the shear amount of blood from the fish, it was everywhere! One of the fishermen had spiked the big Tuna to haul it onto the boat and in doing so had created a massive hole straight through it, which was gushing blood everywhere. We did our best to catch some more, but despite all the other boats around us catching loads of huge Tuna our luck wasn’t in and we only managed the one. Still, it was plenty to feed 10 people at the barbecue that evening.

The fisherman with his bucket + smart phone!

One thing that really made me laugh while we were fishing was how we found the Tuna. We’d been searching for a while with no luck, so the fisherman went to this white plastic bucket, took the lid off, pulled out a zip lock bag, opened it up and got his Samsung Galaxy smart phone out!! He then called a fellow fisherman to find out where the Tuna were today! Modern technology…..…even a simple fisherman can’t live without it these days.

The next exciting thing to happen this weekend was the arrival of 4 friends from Dubai. The weekend in Dubai is Friday and Saturday so they arrived late Thursday night. They drove here straight after finishing work, which took them roughly 5 hours. So Thursday night we all went round to my friends place (the one who took me fishing) and we cooked all the fish from our morning of hard work at sea. It was absolutely delicious……….….some said ‘life changing!’

The next day me and my visitors decided to go to something called the Bimmah Sinkhole. It’s in a place called Hawiyat Najm Park, which is roughly a 1.5 hour drive from Muscat. The park has a very odd feel to it when you arrive. There are no signs telling you what the place is (apart from the sign from the road side) and no obvious ‘sinkhole’ in site. There are plenty of trees around and patches of grass with picnic benches. If it wouldn’t of been touching 42 degrees it would have been a lovely spot to have a barbecue picnic with the sea on one side and the mountains on the other. A short walk into the park and you start to notice a large circular brick wall, no bigger than 1.5 meters high. As you get closer to it you realise it’s the wall that surrounds the sinkhole, which protects it from people falling in! Over the wall you are confronted by a crystal clear pool of blue water surrounded by 20-30 meter tall rock cliffs. Luckily the people who built the park around it also built a set of concrete steps winding down to the bottom.

Bimmah Sinkhole

'Just get in the hole!'

Some mad people do jump in from the top, but on this occasion no one in my group was brave enough to take on the challenge! Maybe next time. One guy who looked like a local did though, here’s the pic…….

The water comes from the sea through a series of underground caves so it’s nicely chilled. Just what we needed in the 42 degree sun. I could have floated in there all day. There was one more group of people there when we arrived, but when they left it was so peaceful and quiet. Every little sound echoed off the rocks.

There was one more surprise in the sinkhole, which we had no idea about. Doctor fish! Science geek name: Garra rufa. These are the little fish that have become very popular in spa’s in recent years which nibble all the dead skin from your body. Most of this is on your feet, so naturally they flock around your feet, nibbling away. It takes some getting use to, especially if you are ticklish, but I find it very therapeutic. I have (or had) a rather large cut/scab on my shin from climbing which they seemed to like way too much! It hurt a little at first when the fish discovered it, but today the scab has all gone and it appears to have done the cut some good. Maybe someone will research this one day and discover they can heal wounds? Who knows!

The rest of the day was spent chilling out at the Oman Dive Centre. This is a small bay nestled among large cliffs with a restaurant, bar and dive centre. The beer here is surprisingly cheap and you’re allowed to drink it on the beach, so it would be a great place to spend the whole day if you aren’t the designated driver! The restaurant even does camel burgers!! Something I’ve never tried before. You could say it’s similar to lamb in taste, so it was very nice. I’d definitely have one again.

 



Chilling at the Oman Dive Centre



Restaurant in the Oman Dive Centre

The final night of the weekend was spent in an amazing Turkish fish restaurant called Turkish House. This is the place I first wrote about in my blog entry called ‘Second Impressions’. My visitors were blown away by the food. Freshly caught fish, which you pick from a counter in the entrance, char-grilled and served with some amazing Turkish bread and salad. Simple, but great food. We had two large fish (one was a type of snapper and the other I kept asking the name of, but still can’t remember it!), 15 tiger prawns, lemon & mint drinks and a ridiculous amount of bread and salad between us. All that came to 36 Rials (about £11.50 per person), which is a total bargain for such good food.

The weekend is sadly over now and my friends have gone back to the bright lights of the ‘big city’, but I’ve gained some great memories and I’m already looking forward to the next weekend when I can see what else Oman has to offer.

Keeping It Simple

In Muscat, they like to keep things simple. No messing around with complicated brand names, which make you wonder exactly what the place sells or offers.

Tips 'n' Toes

Starbucks

Toni & Guy

Curry's

Victoria Secret

H&M

Greggs / Fish 'n' Tackle

Tesco

Sudds

Iceland / KFC

Oink, oink!

Here's a bit of back ground information first on pork in a Muslim country (for those who do not know). Pork isn't usually easy to come by in a Muslim country. They just don't agree with it! Something to do with pigs eating their own sh*t I think. In some countries in the Middle East it's actually illegal to import or sell it. So, if you are lucky enough to live in a country that is allowed to sell it you usually have to head to a limited number of supermarkets that supply it. Once inside you go into a special room next to the 'normal' meat counter that has a warning above the door stating 'Not For Muslims'. It really can make you laugh when you first see it. That's enough background for now.

I had finished work for the weekend on a Wednesday and decided to go shopping in the supermarket underneath my office. This supermarket is luckily the only brand that sells pork in Oman (it's called Al Fair) so it's nice and handy for me. A bacon butty would be a nice way to kick off the weekend tomorrow morning I thought. My jaw literally hit the floor when I saw how much a pack of bacon was! £15 (9.5 Rials)......YES, read it again, £15!!!! For a pack of bacon??? I thought pork was expensive in the UAE, but it's nothing compared to Oman. I am told this is because of a 100% import tax the government imply on it, but still, £15?!! That's just a joke. It even makes the £15 full English breakfast in McGettigans pub in Dubai seem cheap.

So what is the solution to this pork dilemma? Boot leg it from Dubai of course! The week prior to me travelling to Dubai for the weekend I was flooded with pork requests from fellow colleagues. I discovered pork (in all it's varieties!) really does take up a lot of space in a regular shoulder bag when you have roughly 5 kg's of it!! I don't charge a fee for this service as yet, but a simple dinner invite from the receivers is as good of a payment as any.

Around half of the pig order

Taxi's in Muscat

I flew back to Dubai last weekend (to attend a chairty ball I bought a ticket for before I moved to Muscat) and planned to drive my 'Dubai' car back to Muscat, so I left my hire car at work. This meant that on Saturday morning I had to have my first Muscat taxi experience to get back to work to pick up the hire car.

Taxi's in Muscat aren't that convenient and can be a little hard to figure out at first. Here's some basic information on the taxis here:

• They are white and orange in colour.
• They are driven by Omani's who own the taxi themselves as a small business.
• There's no central number to call if you want one so you have to flag one down or know the phone number of an actual driver.
• They don't have a meter, so you have to agree a price before you set off.

I soon discovered that flagging a taxi down on a morning is hard work, I just couldn't get any of them to stop. If it was the middle of summer I'd of been sweating my ass off in no time because I ended up having to walk for roughly 15 minutes to a taxi rank I drive past every day on the way to work. Just as I was approaching the taxi rank a taxi pulled up next to me, he already had a passenger inside, but I told him where I wanted to go and he signaled for me to get in. I had been told to always agree a price before you get in because they try to charge you 5 Rial (about £8) no matter how short the journey is. Seeing as my office is only a ten minute journey I offered him 3 Rial, but we eventually agreed on 4 Rial. Maybe I should have offered 2 to begin with!

The taxi driver was very old and small, with a grey beard. A lot like the fisherman I encountered at the fish market actually! He spoke very little English, but he tried to ask me how I was.........at least I think that's what he was asking.



If you squint you can just about see his beard!



I'd been in the taxi a couple of minutes when we dropped the other guy off (who had been relegated to sitting on the roof because as you can see, it only had 2 seats!). The driver then started going in the opposite direction to where my office is. Brilliant! It appears he mis-understood my description of 'the Al Fair supermarket on 18th of November Street' (Yes, I know, bit of a stupid name for a road isn't it?). Instead, he was taking me to a place called Al Faheer, or that's what he kept repeating anyway. He eventually understood where I wanted to go when I told him my offce is in an area called Azaiba.

Upon arrival I gave him the 4 Rial and he offered his hand to shake mine. I said 'Shukran', which is 'Thank you' in Arabic. He said 'Shukran' back and gave me a huge smile, one that was definitely big enough to suggested I had over-paid! Or he was possibly just another very friendly Omani. Still, taxi's here aren't expensive compared to most parts of the world, but they could do with some imporovement on how to come across them and how much to charge.

Beach Running

A boring subject you might think and one I wouldn't normally be inspired to write about, but my first trip to the beach for a run this weekend was a memorable one.

I started beside The Chedi (a fancy hotel on the beach front in Muscat) and proceeded to run up towards the airport. I ran for about 25-30 minutes until I reached a ton of people kite surfing. I then sat down for a much needed rest and to watch the kite surfers for a bit. When I set off to run back again I soon realised I had got a bit carried away with myself with the outward bound leg. There was a decent wind that day, hence all the kit surfers, and my return leg was running straight into it. I think I lasted about 10 minutes when my unfit legs, the wind, and the sun had got the better of me. So I started to walk the remaining distance.

After about half an hour I could sense I wasn't too far from where I had parked my car, another 5 minutes or so, when I saw a group of 4 Indian men walking towards me. This isn't unusual in the Middle East. They are usually building site labourers who come to the beach to either perve on any unsuspecting women in bikinis or to swim in their underpants! I noticed one of them was taking everything out of his pockets and giving it to one of the others. I could then see he had started to alter his direction to meet me coming the opposite way. Now, for a split second the thought went through my mind that there was no one else within a good kilometre of me and this guy (backed up by his buddies) was about to deck me for my iPhone. I then remembered I was in a pretty friendly country in the Middle East where there is almost zero crime so his intentions were probably friendly. As he got closer he smiled and held out his hand. He said hello, shook my hand and asked me how I was. His next words were 'Can I have a picture?' I said of course and went to the guy holding the camera to get it from him, thinking that he was asking me to take a picture of the 4 of them. Nope, he wasn't, I had clearly got the wrong end of the stick here. The guy with the camera was waving his hands at me as if to tell me to move back, so I turned to the one who had greeted me and laughed 'of me?' So there I was in between two of them, posing for a picture.

Who knows what use or enjoyment they'll get from a picture with me, but if this happens again.......... I'm asking for a fee.

The kite surfers



Fishing boats on the beach with The Chedi in the distance

The Fish Market

Fish is a massively popular thing here. Obviously that's with it being on the coast, but also the variety of stuff the fishermen can catch in the Gulf of Oman on a daily basis appears to be huge.

I arose at 7am on Thursday, damn early for the weekend (especially after being in the pub until late watching the Champions League) and made my way to Ali's house to pick him up. He's a colleague of mine who I use to work with in Dubai a couple of years ago. He was occasionally a social friend too in Dubai so I can see us becoming quite good friends now we're both in this much smaller town. His wife has just given birth the their first baby though so he's not exactly going to be able to play out all the time. There were two specific reasons for picking Ali up; 1. he knew exactly what to do at the fish market and 2. he was having a barbecue that night so he wanted some stuff himself.

My small old man with big grey beard along with his 'stall'

We parked up close by to the market (which is in a place called Mutrah) and walked up an old dodgy looking road which didn't look like it lead to anything. It did though of course and we were soon under a large metal canopy, full of Omani fisherman with all their catch of the morning laid out on a big tiled plinth in front of them. I was quite shocked that it didn't really smell, but I'm told fresh fish doesn't or shouldn't really have that fishy smell you'd expect. There was all sorts of wild and wonderful fish there that I'd never even seen before, but I did recognise the tuna and the easy things like prawns. Ali found a guy that had the type and size of fish he was looking for. He bought 4 hammour (a type of white fish like a grouper), 3 sherry fish and a kilo of tiger prawns from the guy next to him. I was wandering around on my own at this point, which is generally dangerous when I have money to spend in my pocket! I'd say I was like a kid in a sweet shop, but I think a kid would of had a much better idea of what he was doing. I had my sights set on a tuna; 1. because I knew what they looked like and 2. because I knew it would taste awesome on the barbie later. Most of them must have weighed more than me, but I eventually found a small old man with a big grey beard who had a few barbecue sized ones. He looked like he didn't quite have the strength to catch the larger ones these days. The tuna I chose was the smallest he had and it came to almost 3kg on the scales. I was now just stood waiting for him to tell me the highly inflated price and readying myself to bargain. I was shocked when he said '3 Riyals please'. I did a rough conversion in my head...... £5. For a 3kg tuna I thought I wouldn't argue with that and I just paid him. In reality this probably was inflated and a local would get things at a much cheaper price, but I left a happy man and I'm sure he did too. 

An Omani Fisherman about to butcher my tuna

I didn't know I had to do this next bit, but now it was time to take our fish to the far end of the market where there was a whole bunch of guys sat in little concrete bays, each armed with a huge knife and a blood soaked apron.  Their job of course was to chop all the guts out of your fish, clean it, then cut it as you liked. I asked the guy Ali had picked to do our business with if he could fillet my tuna. To my surprise he easily understood what I had asked and was done in about two minutes, all while nattering away in Arabic to his fellow fish choppers sat next to him. I was briefly splattered in the face by something while he was flinging my tuna around with all it's guts hanging out, but I just wiped it off while trying not to think about what it was. 

That night the barbecued tuna was the best I've ever tasted! Ali's prawns were immense too. I can see myself down the fish market quite often then, but for now, I've still got 1.5kg of tuna in my freezer to get through!!

Someone had bought a whopper!

Property Hunting

Property hunting takes far too much time and effort (unless you get lucky!). This is generally because most real estate agents in the Middle East like to show you things that are way over your budget or have been on their books since the dawn of time, i.e. they're a pile of sh*te. I wasn't shocked to discover that most agents in Muscat are the same then. Despite me being very specific on the phone (3 to 4 bed villa, walking distance to the beach, fairly modern and not too far from work) the first two agents I met took me to see the dregs of what was on their books. A 6 (yes, 6!!!) bed villa that was very old and a good 10 minute drive to the beach. A 5 bed villa which looked like it dated back to the stone age, but it was close to the beach so he got that right. Next was a 2 bed apartment. This was the point that I told the agent he was wasting my time and to call me if he actually had something that fit my very small list of requirements. Since that experience I've learnt to get details of the places they want to show me before they actual take me.

Some of you might be thinking '4 bed villa? on the beach? just for him? posh tw@t, rich b@stard' etc, etc. Please allow me to explain though before you judge. Firstly, rented accommodation here is CHEAP! Maybe not that cheap compared to the UK, but compared to Dubai it's brilliant. A 4 bed villa, by the beach (some even have a pool!) costs roughly the same as a 2 bed apartment in a nice area of Dubai. Secondly, I am planning to rent at least one of the rooms out to someone. No idea who yet, but possibly someone at work (there are new guys starting all the time). I found this works quite well judging on my experience in Dubai (yes Dom, that's a compliment, don't get a boner). I'm also expecting a few visitors. Mum and Dad haven't booked a date in yet, but I'm sure they will soon. All friends are welcome to book a visit of course to take advantage of the free digs and to explore a new city/country. Same condition as before though for the couples: no loud bedroom 'holiday activity' late at night if I have work the next day. So that's at least 3 bedrooms I need. The fourth could just be used for something else, a study, a gym, or just a Scalextric room!?! The reasons for being by the beach are: because it'll be cool and because I can.

Ignoring the pain of the first agent I have met some nice ones who have been very honest and up front with me. So far there are two villas I like. One is a 4 bed (tick), with a 500m walk to the beach (measured on Google Earth - tick), but is a bit lacking on the modern side when it comes to the bathrooms and kitchen, so I'd have to compromise there. The second place is a 5 bed (bit big, but tick), with a 1000m walk to the beach (semi-tick), a shared swimming pool with 5 other villas (not an initial requirement, but big tick)  and fairly modern throughout (tick). There's one big cross against the second place though, which I am going to have to go and explore at a certain time of day. Roughly 50m away is a small mosque. For those of you that haven't lived in the Middle East, this is by no means a good thing. Most notable is the call to prayer at around 4:30am every morning! Even though the current tenant told me it doesn't bother him I'll have to go back at one of the 5 prayer times throughout the day to see just how loud it is for myself.

For now, my search continues. I already have a couple of places to see tomorrow (luckily my boss has been very accommodating so far and is letting me check out all these places during work time!). So the next time I mention accommodation will probably be when the decision is made and I've moved in. When this happens I'll make sure to post a few pictures to tempt all you potential visitors!