Salalah, Oman

We awoke early this morning and had breakfast in the Lido Café. The café was fairly crowed as some passenger’s were booked on shore excursions so they were up early in preparation for their excursions. After we had breakfast we went over to the Fitness Center for our morning workout. Anne Marie worked out on the treadmill and Keith worked out on the elliptical machine. Keith continues to feel better and is almost back to normal.

The ship docked in Salalah, Oman about 8:00 this morning. We did not book a shore excursion in this port of call. Unlike the other port that the ship visited in Oman before our stop in Dubai, this port of call did not look very interesting to us so we decided to pass on taking an excursion

We did walk off the ship for a few minutes but there was very little to see at the pier. Normally, Crystal will provide a complimentary shuttle to the closest town but due to local transportation regulations they were unable to do so. We suspect that this regulation is in place so that those who want to go into town will have to use the local taxis. Given that the local town is about fifteen miles from port and that we didn’t think there would be much to see, we decided not to go into the town. Instead, we decided to enjoy the ship during this port day recognizing that we have full day excursions coming up later in this segment of the World Cruise in places such as Jordan where we plan to see Petra and in Israel where we will be touring Jerusalem and we will have a partial day tour in one of the Egyptian ports that we will also be visiting. We believe the major reason why the ship stopped in this port is to break up the number of consecutive sea days since it took us two sea days to get here and after we leave this port of call we will be at sea three more days until we reach our first port of call in Egypt.

We took care of some other errands this morning before having lunch in the main dining room. For lunch we enjoyed a wonderfully prepared seafood salad entrée. After lunch we walked around the ship to talk with some fellow passenger’s and to take some pictures of the surrounding area.

This afternoon we saw a movie in the Hollywood Theatre titled Flags of our Fathers. The movie is based on the bestselling book by James Bradley and Ron Powers. This movie tells the stories of the six men who raised the American flag in the famous photo at Iwo Jima. The film deals with the mental and emotional struggle that affected the survivors of this battle, which was a turning point in World War 2. For us the movie contained a number of important lessons and themes and we are glad that we had the opportunity to see the movie.

This evening we dined at the Silk Road Japanese Specialty Restaurant. As has been the case each time we have dined at Silk Road, we enjoyed the outstanding food, service and ambience of this restaurant.

Tomorrow will be the first of three sea days as we sail to Safaga, Egypt.

Keith & Anne Marie