Ar Rustaq and Nakhal

 My uncle and his wife arrived at Oman on Saturday night (they got inspiration for the trip from us:)) and since then we have had many lazy beach days with them and with the boys while Andres have been at work but also showed them around in Muscat. Today our last weekend in Oman started and we decided to drive out of Muscat like we use to do at weekends.

We headed to Ar Rustaq, also a former capital of Muscat. On the way we hoped to visit Al Hamr Fort but it was closed, so we could only walk around the castle and take the photos also from some old almost fallen apart clay houses. When we arrived at Ar Rustaq we first went to some hot springs near the town. Women can put only the feet into the hot spring water while men have private cabins for taking a bath in the hot spring water (or actually I am not sure it is so restricted, there are no signs but this is what we saw). We – women - took the chance and had a bath for our feet as well. The water was very hot, I actually could put my feet into the water for only some seconds, not more. Then we went to Ar Rustaq Fort but unfortunately we did not have any luck with that fort either, it was also closed for some renovation works. After light lunch in the town (we were lucky to find one restaurant that was open. I have probably mentioned before that most of the restaurants are closed on day time when it is the hottest outdoors) we drove on to Nakhal. The road was very scenery – lots of beautiful mountains around. We wanted to visit Nakhal Fort but since we could not find it at once we headed to another attraction nearby – hot spring near Nakhal town. The road was very narrow (but paved) and there was lots of greenery around: high palm tree “forests” on both sides. I really had not seen that much greenery in any other places in Oman so far. Finally we had arrived at big and busy parking lot and then we took a walk around. There were many local families having picnic in the area under the high palm trees, other people were taking a bath in the brook (or river?), some people had parked their car in the middle of the brook and washed it there! The water to the brook came from the hot spring that was a bit higher up and where the local boys/young men were having a bath. Me and the female colleague of Andres were wondering if we had jumped in as well what had they done – gone away or even more had joined us (ha ha, probably the last...) but we decided to not provide them that “pleasure”. We were anyway the only white tourists in the area and everybody looked at us anyway. It was really vivid, busy and merry place! With the help of GPS and a guide book we also found the Nakhal Fort (it was actually situated on the top of the rock but imagine that we did not see it before!) and finally we could visit one fort - half an hour before the closing time:) The fort was very impressive with many small stairs to climb and many lovely rooms with old furniture or pillows along the walls so that one could sit and relax there. We could also enjoy the view over the surrounding area and mountains.

Then we headed back to Muscat direction but decided to have beach stop at Barka, it was still light and everybody who wanted could have a swim in the sea. Tomorrow we will have a lazy beach day again. We have to gain sunshine and warmth before landing to cold and grey Estonia in some days, right?