Arabia's Magic Kingdom

By DEAN FISCHER MUSCAT

The sun rises like a fiery red ball from the blue-black depths of the Arabian Sea. As darkness retreats across the Hajar mountains, the barren landscape changes from gray-brown to beige and copper. It is the birth of a new day in the Sultanate of Oman, a legendary home of Sinbad the Sailor and fabled source of frankincense for the Queen of Sheba. In this New Mexico-size nation, located on the cutting edge of the Arabian Peninsula, the dawn light- and-shadow show is a spectacular curtain raiser to a host of attractions + that have made it one of the world's newest and most unusual tourist destinations.

Known as the Magic Kingdom, Oman (estimated pop. 2 million) is a land of exceptional beauty and diversity. A 1,000-mile coastline arcs southward from the limestone cliffs of Musandam to the powdery beaches of Salalah, a major trading town in the monsoon-brushed province of Dhofar. Southwest of the former slave-trading port of Sur lies a 5,000-sq.-mi. sea of sand whose dune ridges rise as high as 350 ft. above the Wahiba desert floor. To the north, the Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain) anchors the Hajar range. Mud-brick houses cling to its steep slopes, and fortresses whose foundations precede the age of Islam guard entry to its valleys.

Before 1987 the country was off limits to tourists. When he deposed his father in 1970, Sultan Qaboos bin Said took over one of the world's most primitive nations. With revenues from oil, first discovered in 1954, the Sultan superimposed the infrastructure of a modern state on Oman's tribal society. In 1985, celebrating 15 years on the throne, Qaboos hosted a meeting of Arab rulers at the Al Bustan Palace Hotel, a marble-and-tile monument to Arabian opulence on a mountain-ringed bay near Muscat. It was a sort of coming-out party, signaling the end of Oman's virtual isolation from the outside world.

In 1987 Qaboos cautiously opened the doors of the sultanate to tourists -- but on a highly selective basis. "We don't want to see hippies with long hair and dirty jeans in any part of the sultanate," said Commerce Minister Salim bin Abdullah al-Ghazali. "We do not want tourism that will destroy our dignity, our habits, our traditions." The government designated local hotels and tour operators as sponsoring agents for tourists and held them responsible for their clients' behavior. To obtain a visa valid for up to three months, a hotel or travel agency must submit a tourist's application to the Department of Immigration.

During the 1987-88 November through March season, 900 tourists came to Oman. This season an estimated 6,000 have visited. (Tourism virtually ceases from April to October, when temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees F.) Nearly three-fourths of Oman's tourists are Swiss, with the remainder divided among Germans, Belgians, French and other Europeans. For Japanese and American travelers, the sultanate still awaits discovery -- a consequence of lack of promotion, long-distance travel and substantial expense. The preponderance of Swiss largely reflects the promotion of Oman as a holiday mecca by Kuoni Travel, a Zurich-based agency that flies more than 100 tourists each winter week to Muscat via Balair charter.

It is not a cheap trip. For a seven-day, bed-and-breakfast stay at the Al Bustan, the Kuoni round-trip tour from Zurich costs $1,900 for one person and $3,400 a couple. Such prices effectively exclude the unwanted backpack brigade. The mostly middle-age European tourists who pay the fare are delighted with the warm winter sunshine, pure air, clean beaches, good food and wine, and comfortable accommodations at the Al Bustan, its sister hotel the Muscat Inter-Continental, or one of the other six major hotels in the Omani capital.

Most tourists spend their time swimming and sunbathing, interspersed with taking coach trips to restored Omani forts and to traditional suqs (bazaars) in once remote trading centers. There they bargain over silver ankle bracelets or khanjars, the curved daggers in silver scabbards that bearded Omani tribesmen belt around their hips as symbols of their virility.

The country's diversity also offers opportunities for camel trekking in the Wahiba dunes, rock climbing in the Musandam peninsula, skin diving and deep- sea fishing in the Indian Ocean, spelunking in the limestone caves that honeycomb the Hajar mountains and bird watching in the Dhofari salt marshes. But perhaps the country's greatest attraction is the scarcity of other tourists -- an advantage that is, ironically, likely to disappear as Oman's charms become better known.