Destination: Oman : Sandcastles and Skyscrapers : Old Traditions Linger in This Persian Gulf Sultanate, Which Has Leaped Into the 21st Century After a Long, Xenophobic Isolation

With its oil wealth, the little Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman has taken a bold leap into the 21st Century during the past two decades, but old Arab traditions linger. As I departed the Holiday Inn in Salalah, on the nation’s southern coast, I was escorted to a corner of the lobby where exquisite rugs and pillows had been arranged as if in a Bedouin tent. There I was seated and served a basket of fresh, sweet Omani dates and a cup of kahwa, a strong aromatic coffee laced with cardamom powder, saffron and rose water that had been brewed over an ornate charcoal brazier. The scent of frankincense, which Oman has exported for centuries, perfumed the air.

It was an odd moment, this ancient ritual of hospitality played out slowly and graciously within full view of the bustling registration desk of a big American chain hotel. But no more odd, I suppose, than countless similar clashes of old and new I witnessed in this exotic country--the legendary homeland of Sinbad the Sailor--which until 1970 had been trapped for decades in a grim, xenophobic isolation that shunned even the most modest of 20th-Century advances. There were few schools, a single electrical power plant, no newspapers, no radio or television--and only a few miles of paved roads. Oman was, as government officials concede, one of the most backward nations in the Arab world.

This has all changed now, and Muscat, the capital--draped across a dramatic landscape of desert, mountain and sea--is a gleamingly up-to-date city of grand, landscaped boulevards, new office high-rises, swank beach-front hotels, blooming gardens, modern hospitals and schools as well as ornately embellished mosques and a lavish new seaside palace for visiting dignitaries. The absolute monarch, British-educated Sultan Zaboos bin Said al-Said, launched his people on their pell-mell race to progress after deposing his father in a bloodless coup in 1970. So intent is he on polishing the nation’s image that Omani motorists, many of them driving Mercedes limousines, can be ticketed if their cars are too dirty.

And yet for all Muscat’s dazzling freshness--indeed, the many huge homes in the city’s lushly landscaped desert terrain reminded me of posh Palm Springs--Oman’s ancient Arab heritage as an adventurous seafaring and trading empire has not been abandoned entirely. Most men in the capital and elsewhere still wear carefully wrapped turbans and the sleek, white ankle-length tunics called dishdashas, and the women, whose faces generally remain uncovered, are wrapped in a riot of color that invariably includes a scarf across the head and lots of dangling silver and gold jewelry. To my Western eye, the sight of Omanis in their traditional garb, men and women alike, seemed curiously out of place in Muscat’s modern, computer-furnished offices. As I was learning, the old and the new in today’s Oman are intricately entwined.

You don’t have to go far into the desert outside Muscat to spot a herd of camels, but they are now kept mostly for their milk or for camel racing rather than transportation. Fishermen on the Arabian Sea still pull sardine-heavy nets ashore by hand--although when the water is rough they may hook the net to the bumper of a pickup truck and let it do the muscle work. And a visit to the tangled streets of the Muscat souk, the city’s open-air marketplace, continues to be a journey into the past--even if many of the old stalls sell fancy luggage, mechanical toys and practically anything else you might find in your local Kmart. Tucked in odd corners, however, are stalls offering fresh spices, frankincense burners and hand-worked silver jewelry.

I flew to Oman via London in late October, a 22-hour journey that proved exhausting. But I dismissed the drawback as a modest price for the chance to see a new and very different land undergoing rapid change. I toured Oman for five days, not nearly enough time to do it justice.

I scrambled through ancient mud forts; waded in warm surf on beautiful empty beaches on the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea; bounced in a Land Rover through an intimidating bleak and empty desert to visit the ruins of the fabled city of Ubar; witnessed the busy morning fish market in Muscat; admired good examples of Arabic architecture old and new; was mobbed by youngsters eager to have their photos snapped; nibbled more dates than I’ve ever eaten in all my life, and dined quite nicely on such Omani specialties as viazi va nazi, which my English menu described as braised beef and potatoes layered and simmered in a coconut sauce and served with rice. And I met unfailingly friendly and courteous people, many of whom spoke English fluently.

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As an independent traveler, I found Oman reasonably easy to explore. Almost every sign, whether it is a road marker or a shop marquee, appears in both Arabic and English. Detailed guidebooks and maps in English abound in hotel bookstores. Even the license tags on Omani autos are in both languages. Good paved roads extend to much of Oman, although four-wheel drive is recommended for unpaved roads into the desert and mountains. Outside the city core, traffic is nonexistent--as, apparently, are speed limits.

I ventured into the countryside on two half-day trips, one from Muscat and another from the southern seaside city of Salalah, accompanied by a guide whom the Ministry of Information had provided me as a foreign journalist. But both excursions can be duplicated by joining a commercial tour--brochures are available in most hotels--or renting a car. I had been warned about the summer heat and humidity of the Persian Gulf area, but by late October the worst heat had abated, and I was fairly comfortable--although drenched in sweat whenever I toured on foot.

As desolate as this rugged land may seem, it nevertheless displays a wild beauty, like the Badlands of the American Dakotas, and I found the scenery fascinating. The red sand dunes looming on the horizon make a vivid splash of color against the deep blue sky, where I never saw a cloud during the entire week of my trip.

To tour the mud fort at Nakhal, which dates back before the 9th Century, I set out one morning with a Portuguese political writer and an Omani government guide for the half-day drive into the mountains southwest of Muscat. Nakhal’s is one of numerous Omani forts that are being preserved. As our driver sped out of Muscat on an express highway, I heard a pinging sound in our Land Rover--a warning, I soon learned, required in all Omani cars to alert motorists that they are exceeding 75 m.p.h. The bell didn’t faze our driver; we pinged almost our entire way to Nakhal and back.

Restored in 1990, the fort is well worth the trip. Ringed with high walls, it is perched on the rocks above the village, and mountains tower in the background. Inside, stair-step passageways lead to six cylindrical towers and several rooms furnished comfortably with rugs, pillows and ceramics as they might have been when the fort was in use. In one large room, the wood beams of the ceiling were colorfully painted with quotes from the Koran--a traditional form of Omani home decoration. From the parapets, I could see the village below, where dozens of schoolchildren played at recess. The boys were dressed in youthful versions of the dishdasha, and girls wore bright scarves on their heads.

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To visit Salalah at the southern tip of Oman, where the sultan maintains a summer palace, I could have taken one of the daily air-conditioned buses that cover the desert route in 12 hours over the new paved highway linking the two cities. But my time was short, so I flew on Oman Air (about $130 round trip), which makes the flight with 737 jets in just over an hour. The lures of Salalah were its magnificent, miles-long white-sand beach, acres of frankincense trees growing wild and the archeological ruins of Ubar.

The road to Ubar climbs steeply through the hills north of Salalah, where herds of free-roaming cattle and goats graze on the thick grass, which turns brown at the end of the monsoon season. Suddenly our driver made a left turn on a barely discernible path across the desert floor. For more than another hour, we bounced over the hard-packed sand in the direction of the Rub al-Khali, the infamous Empty Quarter on the Saudi Arabian border. I have never seen a more desolate landscape. The terrain was almost perfectly flat, except for an occasional rocky lump in the distance, and barely a blade of grass was visible anywhere. Sand devils whipped across the horizon. Twice on our excursion, our guide stopped for a few minutes of private prayer.

Ubar is celebrated in the Koran as a profitable center for the frankincense trade, I was informed, dating back as early as 3000 BC. According to legend, it was a wealthy and powerful fortress city. But the stone city was mistakenly built above a limestone cavern, so the theory goes, and one day the cavern collapsed from the weight, swallowing Ubar like “the Atlantis of the sands”--as T. E. Lawrence, the Lawrence of Arabia, dubbed it. Last year, it was announced that a team of California archeologists, using high-tech satellite imagery, had rediscovered Ubar buried beneath the sand.

In truth, there is not much yet to see there, except for a few crumbling walls and a deep sinkhole. I was just as intrigued by the adjacent oasis and the new village constructed nearby for archeological workers. Each small home, encircled by a wall, looks like a miniature fort--as do dwellings and other structures in Oman.

For perhaps 5,000 years, as the Ubar site suggests, Oman has traded in frankincense, shipped by sea and camel caravan to markets in India, the Middle East and Europe. Since it is produced only in southern Oman and nearby Somalia, this famous gift may have originated from near Salalah. There in the souk, I bought a small, locally made incense burner of painted pottery, and the shopkeeper, an old woman seated barefoot on a rug, filled it free with frankincense.

In Oman, frankincense is burned in charcoal after coffee or after a meal, signaling that it is time for guests to leave. Men waft the aroma into their beards and hair and women perfume their skirts. In the departing coffee ceremony to which I was treated at my Salalah hotel, the aroma of burning frankincense filled the lobby. In much the traditional way, I too was enveloped in the fragrance and carried it away with me as I left Oman.

GUIDEBOOK: Venturing to Oman

Getting there: The best connecting service from Los Angeles to Muscat, Oman, is through London on United Airlines or British Air, or through Frankfurt on Delta; current best round-trip fare is about $3,060 until the end of May, then about $3,320 until October. However, you may be able to trim that fare by $1,000 or more (depending on departure date) if you are flexible in your travel plans and make use of a consolidator offering off-price tickets. For consolidator fares, consult a travel agent.

Because of Omani immigration rules, if you fly into Oman you must fly out of that country; you cannot fly into Oman and travel overland, for example, to the neighboring United Arab Emirates.

American citizens must carry a passport and obtain visas in advance to visit Oman.

Where to stay: Oman offers a choice of excellent hotels ranging from moderately priced to expensive.

In Muscat, I stayed at the Muscat Inter-Continental, a splendid high-rise on the beach, where a room was about $110 a night. At the Al Bustan Palace hotel, another Inter-Continental beach-front property and one of the Persian Gulf’s most luxurious hotels, a room is about $260 a night. In Salalah, on Oman’s southern coast, the principal hotel is the beach-front Holiday Inn, where a room is about $90 a night.

Where to eat: Visitors should have little problem finding excellent, moderately priced restaurants in Oman. Every menu I was handed carried an English translation. Choices range from Middle Eastern, Persian and Indian cuisines--which I favored--to European menus, pizza and American fast food. Locally caught fish and locally grown fruit and vegetables are plentiful. I paid $18-$23 for a full dinner in each of my hotels and about $12 for a filling buffet breakfast.

For more information: Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman, 2535 Belmont Road NW, Washington, D.C. 20008; tel. (202) 387-1980.