most of the day | 9 nights | from $3,480 per person
The Oman Vacation Package With Real Gaps In It
Nine nights in Oman with one driver-guide, wadis and a desert camp. This Oman vacation package decides about seven hours of your day and leaves the rest alone. It is unbearable from May to August and we do not run it then.
What most of the day means here
- Hours already spoken for
- About seven hours of an average day are committed: the drive out, two or three stops with the guide, and the run to that night's bed. Two of the nine days stretch closer to ten.
- The earliest you must be somewhere
- Two mornings you are in the vehicle at 5:30 am: once for the mountain road before the heat, once for the coast. The other seven start at 8:00 am or later, and two of those at 9:30 am.
- The longest stretch that is yours
- Roughly 26 hours at the end, from midday on the eighth night until the airport transfer. Nobody calls you, nothing is booked, and the room is held through it.
- Who chooses where you eat
- The guide picks the route and the lunch stop on the seven touring days, mostly because there is one road and one place to eat on it. Dinner is yours every night except the four covered ones, where there is a single kitchen.
- What happens if you skip a day
- Say so the night before and the guide collects you the next morning instead. Nothing comes back from the trip price, because the vehicle and the beds are held for all nine nights; unused entry fees, $8 to $15 for that day, are handed back in cash at the end.
- Who this shape of day does not suit
- Anyone who wants to decide at breakfast where they will be at noon. It also suits nobody who cannot sit in a vehicle for three to four hours on consecutive days, or who wants to walk out of a lobby into a city at night: six of the nine beds are an hour or more from anything open after dark.
The last row costs this company bookings and stays on the page anyway. A shape of day that does not suit you is far cheaper to find out about here than on the third morning.
What the $3,480 pays for
- The same driver-guide for all seven touring days, in a four wheel drive vehicle with two spare seats. One person handles the whole road, so nothing has to be explained twice.
- Nine nights on two sharing: two in Muscat, two in the mountains at about 6,500 feet, one in a desert camp, two on the coast near Sur, two back in Muscat.
- Breakfast daily, plus dinner on the four nights where the next kitchen is more than 30 minutes away.
- Entry fees at four forts, two wadis and the coastal turtle reserve, about $61 a person across the nine nights.
- A stop of three hours or longer with nothing planned inside it, on five of the seven touring days.
- Airport pickup and drop, and a cooler in the vehicle refilled with water and fruit every morning.
Costs that sit outside that figure
- Flights into Muscat and home again: from $890 round trip from the US east coast, from $1,150 from the west. We book those once your dates are set, on their own invoice.
- Lunches on touring days, $6 to $14 a head at the roadside places the guide pulls into.
- Four dinners in Muscat, chosen and paid by you.
- Tips, customarily $15 to $25 a day between two of you.
- A room to yourself if you are not sharing: $760 on top.
- Medical cover, cancellation protection and entry paperwork. We arrange none of the three and sell none of them.
What it costs
from $3,480 per person
- Covering
- 9 nights, a guided drive with gaps left in the day.
- Assuming
- Two people to a room, unless the six rows above say otherwise for your case.
- Pushed up by
- The month, the grade of room, how late you leave it, and how many of the hours you want somebody else to hold.
- Fixed when
- An operator puts it in writing with its own name on it. Until then it marks the bottom of a range that genuinely happened.
You settle with the operator, through whatever system they run. This site gathers nothing and no card ever arrives at this company.
The months that hold up, and the ones that do not
November through March is the whole of it. Inland afternoons sit between 75F and 88F, the mountain nights drop near 50F, and the wadi water is cold enough to be a shock. February is the steadiest of the four.
April and October are edges. Some years April stays reasonable to about the 12th, some years it does not, and by late October the desert camp is still hot after dark. We will book either, but we say plainly which way the odds run.
May to August is out. Afternoons pass 113F, the wadi pools go warm and shallow, and the camp closes. Two other stretches we would talk you out of: the last week of December into the first days of January, when the mountain road runs as one long queue and camp rates roughly double, and the four days around the national holiday in late November, when every fort car park is full by nine in the morning.
What is still open at confirmation
Four things on this Oman vacation package stay unsettled until we confirm. Whether the second mountain night becomes a third night on the coast. Whether the desert camp is the canvas-walled tent or the solid room at $120 more per person. Whether day six is the four hour canyon walk or the slower coastal drive with three stops. And what time the guide arrives on day one, which we set only after your flight number exists, because a 6:00 am landing and a 9:00 pm landing make different first days.