My experience traveling to Oman was pretty crappy, overall. I had booked a trip with three different legs, from Charlotte to D.C. to Dubai and finally, to Muscat. It was a total of about 15 hours of flying, plus two short layovers, leaving North Carolina at 7pm and landing in Muscat at 9pm, the following day.
However, my flight from Charlotte to D.C. was delayed several hours, due to thunderstorms at Dulles airport, which prevented our plane from coming to North Carolina so we could get on it. Many other passengers, like me, had itineraries that would be ruined by a domino effect of missed connections. We all waited in line while the three slowest people in the universe looked up information about our flights.
My choices were:
1. Call my parents to pick me back up and reschedule all my flights for the next day, which would put me 24 hours behind. Oh, and also, the airport was “expecting weather” the following day, which might cause my new flights to be delayed.
2. Take my delayed flight to D.C. anyway. If a miracle occurred, my second flight might be delayed as well. However, it seemed increasingly unlikely, since my D.C. to Dubai flight stopped boarding at 10:05 and my Charlotte flight was due to arrive at Dulles at 10:55. If I missed my flight, I would have to spend 24 hours in Dulles airport, waiting for United’s once-daily flight from Dulles to Dubai.
By the way, United refused to pay change fees if I, for example, wanted to take the 10am Dulles-to-Dubai flight offered by a different airline. They said this was because they weren’t responsible for the thunderstorm.
Anyway, I gambled and got on the massively delayed plane to Dulles, hoping storms (or whatever) might delay my next flight just by 30 minutes or so. Then, a miracle occurred: I got to Dulles, ran to my next gate, and found a ton of people milling around, waiting for my delayed flight to Dubai! This was mostly a good thing, except it meant the flight, originally scheduled to take off at 10:30, did not take off until 1:45am or so. Also, this still meant I would miss my third flight, from Dubai to Muscat.
After 13 hours on a plane with a screaming baby, we arrived at the Dubai airport, having basically missed an entire day, due to time zone changes. It was about 9pm there, and United had rebooked me onto a 10:22 flight to Muscat However, it didn’t leave until 11:30 or so, with no explanation for this delay or acknowledgement that the delay was happening.
Finally, around 1am, I arrived in Muscat. I bought a visa and went to baggage claim, from which my luggage failed to arrive. I filled out a report with baggage enquiries and went through customs. With my original 9pm arrival time, I would have been picked up by a representative from the language center, given a cellphone to use, and driven to my housing. However, they don’t make pickups after midnight, so I had to buy a SIM card myself (the rental cellphone was waiting for me at my housing) and get a taxi. My language center had sent clear instructions, which mostly were very helpful. However, they made it seem like “Oh, just tell a taxi driver to go to this area and then direct him with these steps” when in fact, the guy at the airport taxi stand had no idea what area I was talking about. I guess they don’t use house and street numbers much in Oman to find places–this also makes deliveries hard.
Luckily, I had saved a Google map image of my housing on my tablet. The taxi driver took a look at it and understood where we needed to go. He held my tablet with one hand, while driving with the other; but wild driving is pretty typical in Oman.
After poking around on the street, looking for the correct villa, we arrived and I got into my housing with no problems. I found the keys and paperwork they had left for me and my room was very nice. I was exhausted, but also really wound up and found it difficult to get to sleep; I probably only slept for 2-4 hours that night.
So, that was my crappy travel experience to Oman!
