Secret Kingdom

“Where?” is almost everyone’s response when I say I have just returned from Oman. The ignorance is not surprising – Oman has been until recently one of the world’s most secluded nations, cut off from its adjoining neighbours, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, by a belt of barren mountains and treacherous desert, and lost to the modern world for most of the twentieth century because of political instability and lack of economic development. It is the most traditional of the Arabic nations, one of only two countries in the world still ruled by a Sultan (Brunei is the other), where the men are required to wear ankle-length robes called dish-dashas and the women for the most part wear black gowns and veils, some of them heavily jewelled. There are no high-rise buildings in the country (banned by the Sultan’s decree) and no shopping malls containing designer boutiques. It is only a 45-minute flight from Dubai, the new Mecca of modern consumerism, and yet, as soon as you venture outside the airport in Muscat, the capital, you feel you have stepped smack-bang into a page from The Arabian Nights."

...That was the first paragraph of my story on the Sultanate of Oman and the splendid Al Husn hotel in the Shangri La's Barr Al Jissah resort complex which appears in the April issue of Vogue Australia. On sale now.