Deadlines

licenses obtained, tax forms posted, work deadlines accomplished. Still 4 hours left to find my diving license and insurance card and… Croatia, here we come!!

Sea you in 2 weeks :-p

A quick bird’s eye

The following images are taken from Google Earth, where several QuickBird images have been combined and overlaid into jpegs. Although useless for scientific purposes, they are amazingly impressive. I’ve been at all of these places, feel free to ask for ground pictures!

The huge Sultan Qaboos Mosque between the airport and Muscat	Fertilizer plant under construction; note the intake and exhaust pipelines visible under water; do you remember the position of the violent exhaust air leak I showed a couple of months ago?	Mutrah, the fish souq and the harbor, a Royal Navy ship and the Naseem hotel – my usual base camp, the third (narrow) building under the roundabout close to the sea… And a rare cloud.
The Marine Science and Fisheries Center in Muscat and the BlueZone diving center in the marina	The Ministry of Regional Municipalities, Environment and Water Resources; a bit of a shame the parallax offset on this picture is to the left, otherwise the magnificent front wall would have been clearly visible.	Oman’s shame: Bandar Jissah resort (under construction), a 6* decadent luxury hotel complex built right on valuable coral communities at the edge of the Capital Area
Dibab Sinkhole and the new 6-lane highway connecting Muscat and Sur under construction	Eagle Bay, “Hoons Bay” and Aquarium Bay near Mirbat, under calm conditions during winter monsoon (note the bare rocks, individually recognizable)	Mirbat, with the fishing harbor in the SW corner and our hotel with the little blue swimming pool in the N of the picture; note the individually recognizable umbrellas on the terrace!
5* Al Bustan Palace hotel near Muscat, sadly covered by a hazy sky. Al Bustan means “the garden”, as you can see. A whole village was moved to build the hotel on the best beach.	The mangrove forest and beach of Quriyat, a lovely village between Muscat and Sur	Salalah, zoomed out to about 10m resolution, showing its khawrs (brackish water wetlands at the end of wadis), banana plantations (square fields) and pivot-irrigated circle fields
Sur and its magnificent tidal bay	Tawi Atair sinkhole (200m in diameter) and the nearby village of the same name, clearly visible on the arid plateau of the Dhofari mountains	Wadi Tiwi, paradise on earth with the most peaceful villages hidden in it
The former aspect of Wadi Tiwi; these days, the six-lane Muscat-Sur highway crosses the wadi over an immense bridge just south of the village	Wreck bay near Mirbat on a calm winter day with extremely clear waters	Yiti, a popular cozy week-end beach village (both for locals as for expats), just outside the Capital Area and now right next to the 6* Bandar Jissah hotel
Shana (with leaving and arriving ferries to Masirah Island), surrounded by tidal seagrass and salt plains, with a 30m resolution; note the red color of the salt, caused by halophilic bacteria. The immense tidal currents create amazing patterns in the silty substrate	high resolution zoom on Shana, surrounded by seagrasses, the road ending on the mooring jetties with the ferries (read as: miraculously floating rusty iron platforms, overly loaded with cars and trucks)	Hilf on Masirah, the other ferry terminal. Hilf has a military airbase, used for civil flights, but it is a standard western air strike base during Gulf wars
Cape Ra’s al Had (“the head of the head”), clearly dividing the Arabian Sea (on the right) and the Gulf of Oman (on top). Plans are made to convert the air strips into a true air field (while the village itself still doesn’t have its own regular fuel station).	Turtle beach resort at the bay of Ra’s al Had. We always go to the resort (upper left) to have a decent meal and then sleep under the stars on the rocky plateau with sea view just to the north – much cheaper and cozier. The turtle beach is in the NE corner.	Ra’s al Jinz, a protected turtle nesting beach with an ecological beach tourist camp. You can actually distinguish the hundreds of turtle nests on the beach (note the bumpy aspect)
	Siddah, a secluded fishermen’s village in a crevice with a sheltered bay, a village where a western visitor is the attraction of the day

Summer start on the Ourthe

9 days late, but then again, better late than never:

Board!	Hot action
Looking for rare insects during lunch break		A White-legged Damselfly; not exactly rare but the only one I managed to photograph
Obstacles ahead		Find the differences with the previous picture