Weekend: Nizwa and Yiti beach

Another weekend is over (time really flies here!) and we have had a busy weekend with lovely memories behind us. On Thursday we went to Nizwa, to the former capital of Oman, that is situated about 150 km from Muscat. When arriving at Nizwa we first visited Nizwa Fort. We could climb to the watch tower, look around in different rooms of the fort and there were also many interesting exhibitions about the history, culture and religion. Sadly with small kids it was impossible to read all the stories but we got a quick overview anyway. By the way, in the fort there we met several European tourists and we started to talk to a nice couple from Barcelona, Spain who we ran into two times more during the day – world is small, heh heh! After the fort's visit we wandered around in souq (market) area but as it was middle of the day it was extremely quiet there. We were almost only people walking around in these streets that get probably extremely busy in the early mornings and in the late evenings. We were lucky to find one restaurant that was open and where we could eat our lunch, we had simple yet tasty rice and chicken meal. Many restaurants here usually open at dusk, this is when the locals start to have dinner. After lunch we headed to Bahla where another fort of the area (it is also UNESCO World Heritage Site) is situated. But we did not have luck, the fort was under renovation and we could not visit it. We still had a short walk around in Bahla's streets before we drove on to Jabrin, hoping to visit a fort there. Again – no luck – it was already 5pm and closed. The Spanish couple who we met again said they had luck to convince to see the fort half an hour ago (it actually closed at 4pm) but by the time we arrived the door was “eternally” closed. There was nothing else to do than start driving back to Muscat. We decided to take a road over the mountains that seemed easy having a GPS and knowing there are usually good road signs. After driving for more than 50 kilometres it became weird (and it was already dark, of course), the GPS had let us down and we finally discovered ourselves close to Ibri that meant we had not driven to north direction but to west direction. We could not think out anything wiser to do than just drive back, it seemed to be the safest and easiest to do. So we lost 1,5 hours just driving around:(, at least we could enjoy some lovely views before it got dark. At last we were back in Nizwa where we wanted to have a nice dinner but we ended up eating fast food again:( After dinner we headed back to Muscat along the highway.

Yesterday, on Friday, we decided to have a lazy beach day. Any day here is a perfect beach day with bright sunshine and clear blue sky (though, last Thursday morning we even got very few raindrops!). We decided to find the Yiti beach, around 25 km from Muscat, that we had read about and that was told to be one of the nicest beaches in Oman. The road led us over the mountains and the views were wonderful! From here and there in between the mountains we could see the blue watered sea on the background and I do not have enough words to describe how breathtaking it was! One of the most beautiful surroundings I have ever seen in my life! On the way we met lots of goats and there were also some donkeys (that Andres did not see, so he blamed me for seeing some “ghost donkeys” that nobody else but me saw but finally Andres saw one donkey as well – heh heh). We got a bit lost again but nothing serious (and the views we could enjoy were worth of getting lost!) and finally we had found a right way to Yiti beach: a beach with clear blue sea water with white waves and soft sand and mountains in background – like a paradise! There were more people on the beach (also many tourists but it was not overcrowded at all) and many of them had picnic. We had only water with us, so we had to leave when we were started to starve. Though, we spent several hours in the beach, enjoying warm water and bright sunshine. We want to go there again!