Jacqui and Richard Abroad: Thursday, April 2nd - Julie's scuba diving, and driving to Dubai

Jacqui took Wednesday off and went for a boat ride while Julie was doing some scuba diving. Julie did two dives in the morning and Jacqui read her book in the boat! They went for the afternoon tea at the Ritz-Carlton afterwards and were back home around 4. They had a very nice day.

Thursday was our last day of work; we were done school at noon. Julie met us at a mall near the school and we hit the road from there. Being good canadians, we told Julie that we would meet her at Tim Horton's in the mall. Well, that section of the mall is under construction and the Tim Hortons is not there anymore (or blocked by a barricade - you can't see it). So it took a few minutes before we caught up to each other. We finally left around 1pm. According to Google, Muscat to Dubai is approximately 450 km and the driving time is about 4½ to 5 hours. They obviously never travelled with us! It was pretty windy when we left. Wind in the city is fine, but when you start driving in more deserted area (literrally), you end up driving in a sandstorm. Visibility was poor at times, as we could see maybe 200 feet in front of us. It is very much like driving in a snow squall, without the sand on the highway. There are basically three different roads that lead to Dubai. We decided to take the third one, the one that keeps us in Oman for the longest time. When we got to the UAE border, the agent at the booth told us that we hadn't been cleared to leave Oman as we didn't have an exit stamp in our passports. We therefore had to turn around, drive back to the Omani border (about 5 minutes drive) and get our passports stamped. We then headed back to the UAE border, where the agent directed us into a building. After waiting for about 1½ hours, we were told that there was a problem with Jacqui and I as we technically never left the UAE when we went in the fall. We have the stamp in our passports, but the info was never entered in the system. To fix the problem, we had to drive back to the same place that we had crossed the border in October; it couldn't be fixed from where we were. So we backtracked for about 30-40 minutes, got back into Oman (Julie had to get another visitors visa) and got back to the Hatta crossing, where they were very efficient. They had us out of there in about 15 minutes. But all that made our trip longer by about 4 hours. We got to the hotel at about 10 pm, and didn't even get lost. So 9 hours to travel 450 km on highways with speed limits of 120! We love driving to Dubai!!