Video Record- Our Sri Lankan Trip

A video record of our trip to Sri Lanka.

Road scenes,The Kandyan Dancers and elephants bathing with photos of scenes of trips to different sites in the region.

Sri Lankan Holiday 4

Final Days in Kandy

28th December- Kandy:

Joy and I decided to take the day quietly so walked down from the hostel, past the President’s residence, the Municipal Chambers and local school, into town. We ambled our way around the lake admiring the bird life and, as we got nearer the Shrine of the Sacred Tooth, dodging beggars and touts advertising the Kandyan dance troupe until we came back into the bustling noise of town and air heavy with exhaust smoke and damp.

Joy managed to find a piece of local batik that suited her taste at a stall along the Queen’s Hotel arcade as a souvnier of Sri Lanka before we headed back to Forest Glen to prepare for our train trip back to Colombo in the morning.

29-30 December: Kandy to Colombo and on to Muscat:

Today was the time to try the Sri Lankan rail system so we headed down to the rail station and booked our 2nd class tickets to Colombo Fort.

The ticket office gave off an air of a tired Nineteenth century English station with the cardboard tickets plucked from little station labelled pigeon holes and punched with the date on a hand operated punch mounted on the issue desk but despite this all passengers were issued tickets quickly and allowed to hustle along the platform to find their seats on the battered carriages that made up the 2nd & 3rd class Kandy to Colombo train. The sign stencilled on the wall of the rail carriage confirmed the impression that the 19th century had been preserved.

The mid morning trip was reputed to be not so popular as the 6.30am rapid transit trip so we were expecting to have some space on the train as we rattled down from the hills to the coast. However, the rumours of an uncrowded train proved to be false as, within minutes, our carriage filled up with travellers heading to stations along the line. There were those, like us, going all the way through, other tourists doing the trip as a photographic expedition and families of Sri Lankans ready to be dropped off at any one of the little stations dotted along the line. At one stage, according to a Dutch back-packer we’d met at the booking office, the four seats behind us held 30 travellers perched on one another’s knees, squatting in the space between the seats, squeezed onto the edges of the seats and standing pressed against the window frame or seat back. We were, at least, fortunate to have only seven passengers seated in our four seat space.

The train rattled out of Kandy, past over grown abandoned rail carriages and squatter huts of tired concrete blocks, rusted roofing iron, battered boards and sacking that hugged the hillsides beside the tracks along a rail line that snaked through cuttings carved through rocks and hammered through tunnels that oozed water and then appeared to cling to the hillsides more by good fortune and the protection of any number of gods as at times the red clay looked as though it could easily slide off the hillside and take the track down onto the valley floor several metres below.

Occasionally the track burst into a clearing where, among banana and coconut palms, cows and water buffalo were tied to graze the hillsides while locals washed their clothes in the streams that cascaded into the clearing and then left the washing to dry draped across the rocks and sleepers alongside the track.

Inside the carriage passengers stared into space, drifted into fitful sleep or gazed through their camera lenses at the mist shrouded hills and jungle until the train jolted to a brief stop to pick up more passengers or drop sugar sack wrapped packages off to porters who stacked them at random in the middle of the platform.

As we got nearer to Colombo the water in the streams and rivers changed from churning brown to slow oily black, the number of rubbish shrouded shacks increased in density, and the number of rail carriages being jungle reclaimed grew until we drew to a halt in the chaos of the Colombo Fort Station


Colombo Fort Station was as crowded and noisy as any station in India as passengers headed for the narrow exit gate where two guards collected and checked the tickets before throwing them into a large cardboard box balanced on a concrete column between them. No doubt some railway apprentice would be given the job of sorting and counting them to satisfy some Lankan Rail accountant after the final passenger had been disgorged onto the Colombo streets.

Spare Parts Stall - Colombo

We emerged from the station to a road that reminded us of Dehli without the control that a few strolling cows, a bullock drawn cart, a few hazard braving cyclists and squad of rickshaws gives to a melee of tuk-tuks, thundering trucks, bellowing buses and hurrying pedestrians. Joy and I decided that there was no sense in us attempting to do any sight seeing in such a scrum, especially while towing our suitcases, so took a taxi, through the tangle of vehicles and shouting, whistling police fighting to impose order of drivers who appear to follow only one rule - “If it’s bigger than me I can squeeze in front if my horn is loud enough” - when they head in any direction on the roads, out to the airport in search of lunch and calm while we waited for our midnight check in and the overnight flight to Muscat.

At the airport we were ushered through a security check point before the terminal where our driver’s ID and licence was checked and then into the terminal where we were frisked and our baggage x rayed before being allowed into the waiting area before customs and the check-in counters.

Here, there was yet another check point, this time checking passports and tickets and then we were allowed access to the check -in and yet another baggage x-ray before the transit lounge and the wait till the 3.00am flight.

Our Sri Lankan experience at an end... and now the count down till the end of January and our leaving Muscat and the isolation of Nizwa to another adventure once CfBT get around to making decisions about when I end the contract and letting me know flights and exit provisions as we’ve had no effective contact with the Muscat office since I gave notice back in November.

Sri Lanka Holiday 3

Tea Factories & Holy Sites

26th December.

With many of our dinner companions having drifted off to explore other parts of Sri Lanka Joy and I decided that we should learn a little about the history of the tea industry in the island so we booked a car and driver and headed off to a local tea factory to see how the various teas are created from the tea leaves and to sample one of the local brews.

The Embilmeegama tea factory was an unpretentious building on the outskirts of Kandy with a narrow store frontage displaying teas to tables of imbibers all of whom had been ushered through the two floors of workers, machinery and boxes that was the factory. Here we learnt that there are eight different classes of tea decided on by a combination of type of bush, type of leaf and fineness of the crushed, dried leaf - from the fine dust that ends up in the tea bag through to the coarse leaf of Joy’s favourite - Green tea.

Our curiousity pricked we decided to visit the Kandy Tea museum at Hantane high on the Uduwela hill above the city. Here, in an old tea factory the Sri Lankan Tea Board and Planters’ Association have set up a “monument to the pioneers of Ceylon’s tea industry.” The buildings contain examples of the machinery that was used to create the many blends of tea that Victorian England demanded and from which the fortunes of Lipton and others like him had come.

The museum has not yet become an established place on the local tourist map despite it being operating since 2001 so it had that dim shadowy feel to it as the huge floors echoed to our solitary footsteps. We were shown 100 year old machines like the “Little Giant” hand operated tea roller, the first tea drier using a venetian heating system, a 56 year old packet of Ceylon tea, and copies of old reference books used by the plantation owners in their quest for the “perfect” blend of tea.

The history display on the second floor did give us some of the information our visit to the tea factory hadn’t such as that the industry had grown from the collapse, from a “coffee blight”, of an earlier coffee industry in 1869 and owed much to the activity of a James Taylor who had planted tea in the country in 1867 and the entrepuenerial skills of Thomas Lipton whose marketing moved tea from the realm of the affluent to that of the working class in Britain.

After scanning the hills of the Knuckle range, the site of yet more tea plantations, through the mist we headed back into town to plan our activities for the next day.

27th December: Day trip to Sigiriya and Dambulla.

After some searching we discovered a travel agency that offered day trips from Kandy as well as more extensive trips across central Sri Lanka. We took the advice of our fellow travellers from the hostel and opted to visit Dambulla and Sigiriya which are archeologically sacred sites for Buddhism.

We were told that the trip to Dambulla would take about two hours and that to Sigiriya about 30 minutes with the return journey taking maybe three hours as driving in Sri Lanka is not to be conducted at speed as, apart from the numerous stalls, villages and townships to be navigated through there are the additional road hazards of pedestrians ambling along, lines of tuk-tuks laden with passengers and merchandise, cars, vans and trucks laden with logs or gravel and the battered buses with their diesel spewing exhausts either stopping at random to pick up passengers or deciding to race each other to the next township along the few straight lengths of road, so a distance that on the map would indicate a 30 minute drive takes at least three times as long.

Our driver arrived at 8.15 and we headed off, in the company of Nicole, our Dutch photographer acquaintance, to Dambulla. The trip took us through villages that straggled along the river bank and huddled over the roadway and through paddy fields cut from the jungle to the shrines of Dambulla.

Dambulla, which houses the oldest and largest religious painting in South Asia, sits on the top of a hill, some 600 feet above the roadway, and consists of a series of caves filled with representations of Buddha in the different sacred positions carved from the sandstone of the caves. The site has had some sort of monastic and sacred activity going on since about the 3rd century AD and had been patronised by Sri Lankan rulers till the 18th century. The construction of the images of Buddha were credited to a 12th Century ruler, King Nissanka Malla of Polonnaruwa while the 25,000 square feet of religious paintings that cover the walls and ceiling of the cave are the work of generations of artists.

Joy took one look at the climb and joined Nicole to wander around the visitors’ centre taking photographs while leaving the expedition to me. The steps to the summit were flanked by preening monkeys and hucksters selling moonstones and plastic baubles to the pilgrims clambering up the stairs. Once at the top admission is granted only on production of the ticket and receipt purchased at the bottom of the hill and I, as I had given Joy her ticket and the receipt to attempt to get a refund on her unused ticket, had only the ticket was told to descend the stairs, find Joy, collect the original receipt, climb back up, present both ticket and receipt and then I could be admitted. Fortunately this diplomatic impasse was averted when an American couple offered me their father’s ticket and receipt as he, like Joy, had baulked at the long climb.

Inside the complex the lines of over a 120 statues of Buddha and his supporters along with occasional representations of Vishnu, a Hindu god, fill the caves showing devotees the life of Buddha and the spiritual journey towards nirvana. The journey being indicated by the positions of the Buddha’s hands and the spacing of the toes on the reclining body. ... with the toes together Buddha is asleep but with the gap between the toes being open Buddha is reaching nirvana.
Back at the car-park the reception committee interrogated me about the time I took to reach the top, check out the site and head back down again as they had seen others, after me, go up and come down again at a far more rapid pace that me so, therefore, I was dawdling!!!???

We left the car-park with its bus loads of orange clad monks and headed to Sigiriya. Our driver dropped Nicole off at the local bus station for her to continue her journeying while Joy and I lunched at small Hotel restaurant to gather our energies for Sigiriya.

The 1500 year old citadel of Sigiriya was yet another 600 foot climb. This time not as “gentle” as the gradient to Dambulla as the site is at the top of a vertically sided rock in the middle of the rainforest. Joy, once again, took the option of waiting at ground level in the full expectation that I’d only be gone an hour or ninety minutes at the most. So vertigo severely kept in hand I headed off from the car-park, through the remains of the gardens that had surrounded the citadel city and 20 minutes later began the climb up the stairs and steps that led to the summit.

The citadel, which has been likened to a French Chateau dropped on top of Ayers Rock, had been built as a defensive position by King Kassapa who had deposed his father and then had to resist his brother’s, Moggallana, attempts to regain the throne between 447 and 495 AD and, after the decline of his kingdom, had become a refuge for forest dwelling monks until it had been rediscovered by a couple of English explorers who had climbed the rock in 1853.

The rock is famous for its frescoed wall half way up the climb to the top. Here, along the walkway, artists had painted pairs of women engaged in various activities from admiring flowers to applying make up. The women, presumed to be royalty with their maids, are depicted, bare breasted, in seductive poses waiting to worship at the feet of Buddha or the King Kassapa. The walkway above the frescoes runs along the cliff face with the climbers sheltered from the drop by a wall that, in the past had been polished to present a mirror, along this earlier passers by had recorded, in sanskrit, their impressions of the images below.

Once past the mirror wall one climbs along the cliff face to the plateau of the Lion’s Paws before venturing up along a spindly series of steps and open walk ways to the summit. At this point, after ninety minutes of climbing and admiring the drawings and remaining buildings, I heeded the advice of the guide book which said “vertigo suffers are advised not to look down on this climb” and decided that the summit could do without my admiring presence and began the climb down.

Fifty minutes later, back in the car park I was met by Joy and the driver with a barrage of “what took you so long” questions and we headed back, through the melee of buses, tuk-tuks, wandering dogs and cows, pedestrians and beckoning stall holders, to Kandy.

Sri Lankan Holiday 2

Dinner Companions - Christmas Dinner

24th December - Christmas Eve:

Leaving Joy asleep, I wandered down for a pre-breakfast coffee around 8.00 and fell into conversation with the only other breakfasters, a couple of young women who proved to be on vastly different holiday experiences. One was a Dutch professional photographer based in Vietnam on a photographic tour and the other, an Austrian, a Yoga teacher on a trip that took her to meditation sites in between sight-seeing.

They had been in Sri Lanka for several weeks criss-crossing each others journeys several times and were now swapping stories of the sights and sounds they had experienced since their last meeting.

Joy joined us, along with a young couple from Australia who were heading off, overland via India and Nepal, to Europe and the UK, and we breakfasted and picked up advice on places to see in Kandy from them and our hostess.

The rain had, by then, become a light drizzle with the promise of sunlight relief later in the morning so Joy and I headed off into central Kandy in a local tuk-tuk. We were dropped off at the Kandy City Centre “mall” from where we commenced our wanderings around the city. The centre of the city is Kandy Lake, an artificial lake created by the last Kandyan King in the early years of the nineteenth century as a pleasure piece for his palace and harem despite being advised against it by his advisors who found out what he thought of their advice when they were all impaled on the island in the new lake’s centre.

We wandered along the lake front, past the remains of the royal bath-house (now the central police station) towards the Temple of the Sacred Tooth (Dalada Maligawa) where a tooth from the jaw of Buddha is reputedly kept enshrined and venerated by Buddhists the world over. The temple grounds were bustling with the faithful and tourists whose clothing did not offend the eyes of god. I, to Joy’s great humour (a payback for her banishment from the Milan Cathedral for a similar transgression), soon discovered that my knee length shorts were not accepted as decent and that I was banned from the precincts.

Undeterred, we headed towards the Royal Palace and the harem which now house the archeological remains of the Kandyan dynasty. The walk there took us past a sand-bagged security post, a reminder that the country has not long recovered from civil war, and the Temple elephant bathing yard and along a clay path to the beckoning custodian. The threat of the security post was, however, somewhat undermined by a large board that rose above the sandbags and machine gun, advertising Marmite that made up one wall.

The museum housed, in darkened cabinets and musty light, a miscellany of carved stone frontages, wooden door and window frames and remnants from the British rule over the island. We browsed our way along the cabinets admiring carvings of nubile women dancing, weapons, dusty ceremonial costumes and fading proclamations from nineteenth century English Governors announcing either that some local dignatory had been given greater status or that a local insurrection was to be put down and the conspirators were to be exiled from the province on pain of death until, exhausted, we emerged into the drizzle of the afternoon.

We meandered our way back through the alleys and lanes where we stumbled, down a side street, on a Hindu- Buddhist temple which invited passersby in to view the different stations of the gods and to be blessed, wishing us all good luck for 2011, by the resident Buddhist monk who, after waving the air around me with his fan, asking me to hold a sacred ball of orange thread in my hands, and chanting a prayer over me, tied an orange string around my wrist and advised me not to take it off for three weeks to guarantee good luck.
(The efficacy of that blessing remains to be seen.)

We’d bought tickets for a Dance Performance at the Kandyan Cultural Centre for later in the afternoon so headed along the lake front to the hall which was filling up with other tourists looking to discover Kandyan dance.

We were promised a programme of eight dances, (described as: a Pooja Dance paying homage to the deities, a Panteru, a cobra dance, a mask dance, a peacock dance, a Raban and a Ves dance ) the Sri Lankan National anthem and a demonstration of fire walking from local devotees of the local fire goddess, Paththini, and were not disappointed as the drummers, tambourinists, horn players and dancers gave a spirited display reminiscent of many amateur local centre Maori culture demonstrations we have experienced at home.

We made it back, through the drizzling dark and echoing buddhist chants to the Lodge and a Sri Lankan Christmas eve with our fellow guests- the young women from breakfast and an English couple on a twitching tour of Sri Lanka.

Indra served us a pleasantly eclectic Christmas eve meal, a cross over of Sri Lankan and European cooking that left us comfortably full and, with the pleasantries of conversation of mixed cultures feeling that we had prepared ourselves for Christmas.

25th December - Christmas Day:
Over breakfast we sounded out the others about places to explore and, with the Australian couple, decided to hire a van and head to the Elephant Orphanage Sanctuary at Pinnawala, to see the herd of local elephants the Sri Lankan Government is working to preserve.

We wound our way back down the hills, along the stall lined roads, through traffic jams of fume spewing buses, tuk-tuks, cars and ambling pedestrians and through the mist laden jungle to the sanctuary.

Here, the Government has built up a herd of over 70 elephants as part of a conservation exercise. The sanctuary is a popular tourist destination for Sri Lankans as well as foreigners all of us having come to get close to the elephants and to watch them eat and bathe as they stand and stare at us.

Thankfully the rain held off until late afternoon when we’d gotten back to the Hostel and settled down to conversation over dinner.

Sri Lanka Adventures (1)

Holidaying in Kandy - Sri Lanka 23-30 December 2010

Our trip to Sri Lanka was one unplanned on the spur of the Sultan’s decision to award a public holiday, a reward to the people to mark the end of the National Day celebrations that had begun on the 18th of November, at the end of December with one week’s notice.

With such short notice the choice of places to visit became somewhat smaller than usual... the Northern Hemisphere was out, being snowed in and flights curtailed, the Middle East and North Africa seemed to offer more of the Nizwa sameness and other interesting places required visas that needed to be processed through Muscat over several days which was out of the question as we’d never be able to connect with the Embassies during working hours. Hence we looked for somewhere exotic that did not require a pre-purchased visa and came recommended by friends and colleagues... So
Sri Lanka and Kandy it was.

A rapid check on the web revealed that our decision had been made just in time as the list of possible accommodation was getting shorter by the day and the flights in and out of Muscat were becoming fuller by the hour as well as more expensive.

We booked our flights, found a hostel in Kandy - The Forest-Glen -and prepared for somewhere different. The anticipation of lush green rainforest, of rain and the possibility of talk with fellow travelers giving us pleasure after the drab sameness and isolation of Nizwa.

Forest Glen lives up to its name.

23rd December:
We left Nizwa as soon as we could on the Wednesday and wandered around the Muscat City Centre getting those few essentials for travel we couldn’t pick up in Nizwa and headed for the airport in anticipation of waiting in some degree of comfort in the Oman Air-Emirates Lounge until our flight was called at 5.00am.

Unfortunately there was no such luck. We couldn’t access the lounge until after the boarding pass had been issued which wouldn’t be until 2.00am. So with a four hour wait in front of us we looked for comfort in the terminal but the Muscat Airport proved to be spartan and devoid of comfort.... even getting a coffee was impossible and the few seats available for waiting passengers to perch on were the targets of many other waiters’ eyes.

Anyhow, we survived and made it through into the comfort of the lounge, coffee, food and a chance to doze.

The trip to Dubai was quickly over. The transit wait was pleasant (at least we could stretch out in some comfort ) while we waited for our flight to be called.

The flight to Colombo was via Male in the Maldives where we were kept on the plane for two hours for refueling and the Maldives holidayers disembarked. The Sri Lanka bound passengers clambered on board and we taxied to the end of the runway. With the anticipatory hum of the engines and feeling of pre-launch surge the plane was readied for take off only to be interrupted by the Captain announcing that we were returning to the terminal as some passengers had not boarded the plane even though their luggage had. So, for security reasons, the luggage was to be found and off loaded before we could be cleared for take off.

We eventually heaved into the air three quarters of an hour later than scheduled to arrive in Colombo closer to 8.00pm than the scheduled 6.20pm.

Fortunately our driver was still waiting, patiently, for us clutching a sign for “JONE PAPPRILL” and our introduction to Sri Lankan transport. The van was redolent with the aroma of damp carpet and the evening dank with tropical drizzle as we headed out of Colombo towards the hills of central Sri Lanka.

We wound our way through narrow roads lined with battered shop fronts, cycling couples - the passengers holding a golf umbrella over the pedalling riders - battered buses, pedestrians ambling, package laden, into the shadows of the street and shrines to deities of many religions looming from lay-bys carved from rain forest up towards Kandy.

Even though it was late at night and, by now, raining steadily the little shops appeared to be determined to remain open, lit by a flickering lamp or trail of coloured lamp rope, until the last possible customer had passed and the final hope of selling the fruit or vegetables or providing a last minute haircut had disappeared into the night.

The porch - Forest Glen

The van ground its way up the hills, passing signs for businesses advertising “Hotels” that weren’t hotels but grocery stores offering a chance to buy a cup of tea and a snack, to reach Kandy around 11.00pm and to make our way up the rutted lanes into the forest park above the town along the imposingly named “Lady Gordon Drive” and the Forest-Glen Bed & Breakfast.

We collapsed into bed around midnight, after a coffee with our hostess, Indra, and fell asleep to the steady drip of rain on the trees outside our room.

Visits, trips and other decisions

Oman Sagas

Since our last blog, a more visual record than a commentary on our activities here in Oman, Joy and I have been busy hosting colleagues from Qatari Cognition days, doing a bit of touring and making decisions about our time in Oman.

The Nizwa contract has been professionally rewarding the isolation of the place has not made it an pleasant for us. Our contacts with local Omani have been rewarding and pleasant but the professional and collegial isolation has begun to tell on us both so, after much discussion and soul-searching, I decided that it was best if I resigned from the end of the semester and looked for work else-where. So, immediately after the Eid break, I tendered my resignation and prepared to complete as much to the teacher training contract as we’d planned by the end of January. The company offered me a position in Muscat but we decided that we’d be happier taking the gamble and looking for work outside of Oman.

We are now in the process of deciding what to do and where to go come the end of January. There are possibilities but they are, at present, merely possibilities than probabilities. If nothing comes up immediately we will make use of our Irish citizenship and head to the UK for a stint of relief teaching until the summer break.

In the meantime, in Oman over the UAE National day break our friends, Neville and Colin, from our time in Qatar, drove down from Abu Dhabi to explore the Dhakaliya region of Oman and, briefly, Peter and Lorraine Rocha, with their son, Johannes, from Otahuhu days dropped in on their way back from visiting Muscat and coastal Oman to Al Ain.

With Neville and Colin we explored Jabreen Castle, the Al Hoota cave complex, revisited the living museum at Al Hamra, attempted a drive up Jabel Shams and enjoyed, as you can see on the video, watching the local men perform traditional songs and dances in the Nizwa Fort courtyard.

Joy and I had attempted a visit to Jabreen Castle several weeks before only to find it closed so this time we were all greatly pleased to discover the doors wide open and the custodian ready to take our money and let us in to tour the complex.

The Castle is a fortified mansion house set in the middle of a wadi and date palms while giving the inhabitants a panoramic view of the gravel plains that make up the desert in the Bahla area. It was built by Ya’ruba Imam Bil’ arub bin Sultan in 1688 as a fortress residence for the Imam as well as a college of Islamic studies.
The castle has a second floor stable for the Imam’s favourite horse, dungeons, secret passages, false floors and escape routes as well as the Imam’s tomb.
The castle was besieged by the Imam’s brother, Saif bin Sultan, in 1692 and was largely ignored until 1822-24 when it was used as a headquarters during the civil war. It is now a popular tourist site.

Al Hoota caves were open after being closed for several months following heavy rain in February this year which meant that we were able to explore the huge limestone cavern under the Hajar mountains. The caves contain some spectacular formations along with cave adapted fish and insects - an interesting record of Oman’s geological history.

The village of Al Hamra has a semi occupied mud-brick traditional village that appears to be undergoing a planned restoration to give visitors an indication of how the village would have looked and felt like when it housed a population of over 17,000. The working museum, Bait Assfah, there is one of the high points of a visit to Oman. It is a 400 year old three storey mud brick house in which the owners have recreated the activities of traditional Omani family life with demonstrations of extracting oil from horse radish bulbs, weaving, bread making and coffee roasting, grinding and preparation well explained by an enthusiastic young guide and her school aged nephews.

From there we headed up the gorge to the Wadi Nakhr Gorge and Jebel Shams. Jebel Shams is the highest point in Oman at 3000 metres. To reach the peak entails a drive up a switchback road that winds its way up and around the mountain side and along ridges that, for an experienced driver of the route, would be a doddle but, for me, was a tense exercise in willing the van up the mountainside as my vertigo kept kicking in each time my peripheral vision picked up the drop off down the mountainside. I decided 2/3rds of the way up that I was pushing my luck driving any further so turned back to await the chance to get to the top with some one more knowledgeable of the road driving us up.
We had read of a rock covered with neolithic carvings on the outskirts of Al Hamra so, on the way home, we went looking for it.

If it hadn’t been for Neville’s sighting of a sign pointing into the scrub and across a wadi to Hasat bin Sult we would have missed finding it. We headed off in the direction the sin indicated and found the rock, identified by a sign saying it was an historic site, sitting below the cliff face. We prowled around the rock for several minutes looking for the carvings of men, women and children done by our neolithic ancestors the guide book had described. Uncertain of what we were looking for, or where-abouts on the rock they were we failed to recognise the carvings but did discover a scratched drawing of a man on a horse near the base of the rock.

Back in Nizwa we were able to watch, with Joy taking part as a drummer, the local men performing several dances complete with much sword waving and challenging in te court yard of the fort.

Neville and Colin survived the return to Abu Dhabi on the Sunday, apparently avoiding being hit by cars practising such safe driving techniques as overtaking on corners and competing for the passing the greatest number of cars and trucks on a straight competition that seems to be regarded as a necessary qualification on the road.

Joy and I heard, from a friend, that there would be a National celebration event at the Nizwa Stadium on the Tuesday night so we headed out to the stadium and discovered that the Ministry of Education was presenting a programme of tableaux by the local school children to honour the Sultan and the Sultanate. We survived the chaos of parking the van and headed into the stadium where the local school children were assembled clad in all sorts of multi-coloured costumes, traditional outfits with swords and khanjar, canes and elaborately created models of technological advances that have taken place over the past 40 years in Oman.

For us, in Oman, the Sultan declared that there would be a holiday to celebrate the Islamic New Year from Tuesday through till Sunday this week so Joy and I headed down to Muscat to explore more of the city and to take in the sights we had presumed to be either permanently closed, under restoration or that we couldn’t get to because we were under time constraints and had always missed on earlier visits.

We finally managed to visit the museums of old Muscat and get to see the Sultan Qaboos State mosque of Oman. The mosque boasts the largest chandelier in the world and magnificent examples of mosaic work from across the Islamic world set in a magnificent building of polished marble.

While we were in Muscat the Sultan also announced that Oman would celebrate the 40th year of the modern state with a holiday starting 23rd December and finishing on the 1st January so I have to restructure the planned course delivery for December in order to cope with the new holiday breaks and we are now planning, at short notice, where we could go for the nine days before getting back to work till the end of the semester and the end of the contract for me.