Today is the day we leave Khasab. Nice and early! So we just take a quick look outside again, pack our bags, and go on our merry way. Hopefully everything is okay, because look at this water!

Well, we get our airport shuttle from the hotel, and what we could see from our room looks a lot worse from down here… At least we talked to our receptionist at the hotel and she said that she thought the plane wouldn’t have any problems because the weather was fine.

Well… when we were almost at the airport we got a call from the hotel that they hadn’t charged my partner the right amount for the hotel stay, but “there’s still time sir, the plane hasn’t landed yet”. Okay, so we turn around, drive back to the hotel, pay the mistake, and then go back to the airport. We arrived at 8:45 am. That’s the time that boarding is set to start… Well… supposed to start. Nothing has been moving yet. And, as mentioned last time, the airport is tiny, so there isn’t enough space for everyone to sit, so we stand and wait

Time goes by, and time goes by. No one knows anything. We aren’t allowed to check in yet because they’re not sure where the plane is. So we just keep standing there.

Eventually, about two hours or so after the plane should have taken off… “the plane has been cancelled”……………. Again. This time there are more tourists there with us, and they are not impressed. Oman Air doesn’t have a representative at the airport, and there is only one airport representative who doesn’t have any answers. People start to get desperate to make connecting flights and start to ask how they can drive to Muscat. Eventually one family finds a drive to Muscat… How much are they charged for getting driven about 7 hours and crossing two international borders? 500 USD. Crazy, that’s more than our flight costs. Another family agrees to the same thing. Both expect Oman Air to compensate them for the drive, we don’t think that happened, but who knows? Another lady is infuriated because she says that this always happens and she has a hospital appointment tomorrow.

By this point… we know there’s no point in arguing or discussing with anyone at the airport, so we just ask for help to call the hotel we had stayed at. They get us the call and we ask for the driver to come back for us. We get picked up, check back into the hotel, and then try changing our flight for tomorrow to leave Oman. Well… guess what. Because Oman Air took so long to decide that the flight would be cancelled, and didn’t rebook for later that same day, our flight tomorrow is within 24 hours. Why is that important? Because to rebook our flight we lose 100% of the value. So we cancel and receive the taxes back… We won’t rebook until we can leave Khasab. These flights have created quite the headache for my partner. SO, our free tip, if you want to come to visit Khasab, do not fly. It may work well sometimes, but it is obviously not fool proof. 100% invest a lot of time trying to track down the ferry or, easier yet, fly into Dubai and rent a car to come visit Khasab. Or, if you absolutely must fly in, only book one step at a time and be ready for delays upon delays (we had to book our flight out of Oman for visa purposes). And we were flexible without month long plans either. However, we still recommend you come visit for the beautiful landscapes though.

So, at the airport we were told we would be rebooked for tomorrow or the day after. We just have to wait and see…

Well, nothing else we can do about it now. Once we have our flight cancelled for tomorrow, we head back out toward the beach. What else are we going to do?

So, we’re just making time at this point. Too late to go anywhere else, so we just walk a bit further along the road to see if we can see the inlet to the next community we could see from our hike the other day. We couldn’t see the community, but we did see the bay. And we saw some people spear fishing in the area! So cool! And the fish they had were pretty big!

And then we just walked back along the main road to the hypermarket. A nice walk. And now we understand that it’s not sooooo dry to not have all these flowers along the road.

And as we were passing by the castle we noticed something we hadn’t noticed before. Weird since we had passed by the castle so many times. There are parrots! You can’t really tell from the pictures, but they are there. And we include a close up of the door for the castle because the other day we had read that the doors were created to have a tiny door inset in them so that anyone coming in would have to bend over to enter, therefore making entry by invading soldiers even harder. And! Inside the door from the outer wall is offset from the door on the inner wall so that it isn’t a straight line for any invading army. Intelligent design principles.

Well that’s the end of our day and we might as well make the best of it. We stop at another Yemeni restaurant and get a half charcoal chicken for supper. Might as well eat well! The food was so, so much, but very good. We wouldn’t say worth staying in Khasab another night… but it is what it is.

And as we make it back to our hotel, you can see that there is still a lot of rain damage remaining.

Now… we don’t know what the issue was today for the flight, but today was fine during the majority of the day in Khasab. Not sure why they didn’t just reschedule for later or something. I’m sure everyone wouldn’t have minded waiting if we could have at least taken off today… But maybe the problem was in Muscat..? Who knows at this point. And when we made it back to the hotel at night we had not one, not two, but three emails from Oman air, all within a few seconds of each other, telling us that we had been rescheduled to tomorrow’s flight. The first email? At 9:30 am, same as today. The second? At 9:30 am, same as today. The third? At 1:40 pm. What is going on…? We check our online booking and it is 1:40 pm. So… I guess that that’s when we will leave Khasab, maybe. We don’t really understand since the website only had two flights a day, and not every day. A flight out of Khasab at 9:30 am and a flight into Khasab that arrives at 4:30 pm (the one we took in to Khasab). At this point, we may want to consider living in Khasab with this weather and these cancellations… Let’s see what tomorrow brings! Goodnight from Khasab! Fingers crossed for tomorrow!