Obsession of the Week: Black, White, & Perfect All Overby Randi / August 31, 2013
Related Posts
Eating Vegan in Kyiv: Decent Food Around Town as Veganism Grows
Arriving in Kyiv (that’s the proper way to say Kiev, Ukraine; remember?), I was nervous about the food since my travels as a vegan through other parts of Eastern Europe have been less than thrilling. Luckily, that’s all in the past, it seems, because Kyiv’s vegan game was off the chizzy! Okay no it isn’t off the chizzy – wait till we get to Warsaw and Berlin! THOSE are off the chizzy – but Kyiv at least made a convincing argument that it knows the chizzy exists. It is fully aware of and in close proximity to the chizzy! (Chizzy means chain.) We had a good amount of time to explore the vegan options and traverse the whole range from delicious to disappointing and back again.
The first order of business was to go to Bessarabsky Market. This is a centrally located indoor market full of stalls, farmers stands, and larger restaurant constructions all in a tidy square space (not to be confused with Square Space, the company who has recently acquired this here blogging platform!). There are several vegan options in this market, and so, considering how hangry I was on arrival (remember we were waiting for our room to be ready after getting off another overnight train ughhh) I figured going to this one-stop shop for all things food would be my best bet. It was still early in the morning when we got there and lots of stuff wasn’t open. In fact, we had to wait for the two all-vegan spots in the Bessarabsky Market to get cracking. But it wasn’t a bad wait – because we saw the best sign known to (non-celiac) man:
Georgian bread may be the best on earth, and we are obsessed. So obsessed that just last week we returned from a trip to Georgia, I don’t want to say entirely planned because we wanted that good bread but it kind of was. This stall in the Bessarabsky Market lived up to its dern good name. We watched the bakers ease balls of dough into the giant stone cauldron-like oven, perfect for this witchcraft, and just a few minutes later retrieve gorgeous loaves ready for me to attack.
The handles on these loaves make it easy to hold and fun to pull apart. #breadfacts
So delicious! We ate our amazing bread and explored the just-waking-up market as we waited for the vegan places to open so I could look upon their treasures and see which I wanted. There’s also a natural shoppe in this building, called Eco Chic, which has organic produce and a small selection of supplies. It was closed of course but the vegan options abound here!
Finally the two places I came for opened – Green 13 Vegan Kitchen and Sumasbrod. These two all vegan joints were RIGHT NEXT to each other in the market! It was like the vegan sandwich showdown or something equally awesome. I felt a little awkward going back and forth between the two in order to investigate the menus and make informed decisions, like I would feel bad for whoever’s wares I didn’t purchase first. They don’t care. They’re used to it. I tried Green 13 first but we ended up going back to Bessarabsky several times over our stay so we tried both places several times. Let’s talk about errthang.
As you can see in the picture above, the two vegan places were kind of like buildings within the larger building. You order and get your food inside and then there is general shared seating in the open market space. The seating was actually nice, with cute pillows tossed hither and thither. Save for when we arrived that first day before it opened, the whole place was always crowded with vegan food lovers, which is awesome, and if I wasn’t so socially awkward and/or tired at this point in our trip (not to mention without a word of Ukrainian to my name) maybe I would have talked to some of them. But honestly come on there was eating to do, not talking! We tried a good deal of what Green 13 had to offer, including wraps and burgers – what it primarily does and does well – as well as salads because of my salad obsession.
English menu yassssss
On my first visit, I had to try the grilled tofu wrap. It was AMAZING. Like really amazing. Maybe I just had gone so long without proper delicious vegan food or maybe I had been soyless since China or maybe I was just so magoo from the overnight train and the lack of shower yet that day but man alive this wrap was so good I might cry because I want it now. (I may also just be remembering it in such high esteem because I am hungry.) First of all the wrapping seemed gigantic and poufy so that was fun, and the grilled tofu was nice. Filled with cabbage and parsley and carrot and tomato, the wrap would have checked all my boxes as is, but the sauce on it took it to another level. They call it ‘tartar sauce’ on the menu but that does not do it justice. It was a really delicious white sauce that was like…really good. I might not know what tartar sauce is. Anyway it was fantastic and probably my favorite thing I ate in Kyiv.
We also tried the burger with vegan bacon. If you look at the menu pictured above, you’ll see that the first detail about that burger is ‘loaf with barn’ and I will tell you that nonsense group of words is 80% responsible for why we ordered it. We had to see what loaf with barn meant. We still don’t know what they were going for but the burger was wonderful. Soy cutlet check, soy bacon check, tomato onion cucumber mayo sweet & sour sauce check checkity check check check. Such a great, classic burger! No wonder it has HIT written next to it on the menu. Less impressive was the Green 13 Burger, which obviously I ordered because it says it’s on a green spinach bun and I will never turn down wrongly colored breads. It sounds like it should have been aces with that grilled tofu and tartar sauce that I loved in the wrap but with added pesto and mushrooms and it was good, but not as great as the bacon burger. Not bad but it is third on the list.
As I said, I also tried the tofu ball salad because it’s a salad. It was okay, but I wish the balls were bigger and that there were more of them. Hehe balls. It was fine. I’m fine. Best of all, the staff at Green 13 was uniformly friendly and so helpful, even at my first visit when I was like ‘hey you’re not open but I’m here also what should I order???’ they were still all very nice. And you can see in the picture there’s a little fridge out front that says ‘molochko’ – they make their own nut milks and sell them in glass bottles. I had an almond milk that was pretty good for being unsweetened and not being used in cereal. All around, everything about Green 13 was great and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
You’re probably wondering at this point ‘hey where are all the pictures of the amazing food’. Sorries, but at Green 13 and Sumasbrod the food is packed to go as default (since there’s no seating inside their actual storefront) so everything was ugly with the expected takeaway smush. Even I have limits to what photos I share.
or do I
Moving on to Sumasbrod, a foot away from Green 13. I’ve mentioned their proximity several times now and I think it’s because my god man, if you are there, there’s no reason not to go to Green 13. I’m sorry Sumasbrod but you were disappointing in most aspects. The food was fine – when they had it. Every time I went to their counter, the (quite rude) staff would tell me that they only had this one wrap or this one soup available that day – even though the wraps are made hot for each order so I’m pretty sure they had most of the ingredients (considering they were all very similar). The salads were even more upsetting. See the above picture, how they have salads in plastic cups? Dude, it is NOT EASY to eat salad out of a plastic cup. First of all, that means the dressing (when it existed) fell on like, one piece of spinach and did not reach any of the other ingredients. And you couldn’t mix anything together. It is not a smart idea. And you’d think that if you were serving salad in a tall cup that maybe you should cut the ingredients up small so it would be easier to eat but instead the ingredients were like, extra larger than normal. One stupid long and thick strip of carrot took up half the cup. Also, the cup display salad situation meant that they only offered what was already made and displayed. When I first ordered a salad on the menu, the girl said they only had what was in the case – one option. It was right at lunchtime too but they didn’t have any plans to make anything more that day. I could see the rest of the staff was laughing and joking and eating back in the tiny kitchen instead of making more food for the big crowds but I guess they don’t care.
So the salad was too hard to eat and impossible to dress properly. As for the wraps, our conversation literally went like this: Can I have the tofu wrap? No we don’t have it. (They had tofu and the same veggies as everything else…so…) Can I have the Fishless wrap? No we don’t have it. What wraps do you have? The seitan sausage wrap. That’s it? Yes. Man aliiiive. Honestly considering that everything has basically the same ingredients, they make the wraps fresh for each order, and there was always staff just chilling and not working, I think it’s just down to lazy workers. Anyway, I had the seitan sausage wrap, and it was neither seitan nor sausage but more like pink ham half moons. It was decent, but small and with tiny amounts of fillings, so if you have the choice (and you do), always always get your food from next door. Green 13’s food is much better and the people are much more accommodating, even though on paper the Sumasbrod menu feels much more my style.
The only thing you should go to Sumasbrod for is the dessert.
In that display pictured above, Sumasbrod has those poorly conceived salad cups, but also chia pudding cups and mousses. The best thing they make is this Chocolate Cake Trifle and it was AMAZING. Truly. True I hadn’t had a proper dessert in many moons but Z agreed that this was fantastic and we got it several times. The chocolate cake was probably dry, as most places’ chocolate cake is (it’s not hard guys!) but it didn’t matter because it was covered and moisturized by chocolate mousse that was pretty damn fantastic. So definitely go next door for everything except dessert, and be sure to grab this. We got one for our train out of Kyiv too, and honestly nothing helps elevate an overnight train experience than a cup of chocolate cake trifle. Well except clean sheets and maybe a non-flooded bathroom but we aren’t talking pipe dreams here!
this will be the one non-food related picture in this post so enjoy
Another mixed bag experience awaited us at Tri, an upscale restaurant definitely catering to the Gwynnie types of Kyiv. This place had rave reviews on HappyCow so I made sure it was at the top of our list. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the HappyCow reviewers just haven’t had good food before so they were like ‘oh I guess this is what good food is because it looks cute and is expensive so I’ll just give it five stars so I don’t look bad.’ No. Or maybe we went on a bad day for them, but it’s still unacceptable. The restaurant is lovely inside and clearly gives off a more fancy vibe than anywhere else in town. Some of the food was generally interesting but the service was horrendous. It literally took hours. A family who came a half hour after we did got their food first. I don’t want to hear that nonsense about ‘but you don’t know how long the kitchen needs for each dish!’ because we were the only patrons there and I ordered a salad. It would take AGES to find someone just to ask what was going on with our food – and like I said, there were only two tables in the giant room. It shouldn’t be that hard to find staff. What is this, the National Theatre?
Tartlets? Tartlets? Tartlets?
We started with the raw tarts with cashew hummus and microgreens. It was pretty good, but it was not hummus so much as a definite cashew cheese., tasting like like any other raw cafe’s dollop of raw cashew cheese. Fine, though, whatevers.
Then an hour went by.
Then my salad came. This was supposed to be a ‘guacamole, kale, and hemp seed’ salad.
Ahem. Does that look like kale to you? It is not. It is merely green curly lettuce. Plus sprouts and tomatoes instead of hemp seeds, which I really don’t understand as a substitution so it has to just be a mistake. There was indeed a lump of ‘guacamole’ in there – a very lemony mush of avocado – but come on, this is not what the menu says. It is a green salad though and it was fine tasting so I wasn’t going to send it back (also it took an hour??) but still, what’s going on in the Tri kitchen??
Then we ordered the polenta with grilled vegetables. This one took an extra hour after the incorrect salad. I wanted to leave and really almost did but we were in so deep and I was trying to be optimistic about my beloved polenta. Polenta is sooo good and I was picturing this lovely pile of it with all kinds of vegetables in like a sauce or something amazing.
I got this tiny little tower of terror instead. The polenta rounds were good because it is hard to screw up polenta but yes you’re right, those are discs of eggplant and tomato with it. JFC. I should have known it was going to be grilled eggplant. Even at a vegetarian restaurant I have no other choice! There was nothing else to it, no sauce or anything, just grilled Vegetable of the Summer and two 50p-coins-worths of polenta. Bahhhhh. I wish we could have dined and dashed, I really do for the first time ever, but by the time this came we were alone in that big white fancy room and they would have caught us. Maybe. Actually, maybe we could have slipped away considering how hard it was to find a waiter. Darn. Next time! Just kidding we’re not going back there. I really don’t understand all the glowing reviews, unless everything else is really that much better (doubtful) or maybe I’ve just been lucky enough to have something better to compare it to (literally every restaurant seems more functional).
Next we tried Nebos, the famous raw restaurant. Raw foodists (omg is there a worse word than foodist to describe a person? oh yeah foodie) all over the globe rave about this place, so after our trip to Chernobyl we checked it out. I figured eating a big meal of raw vegetables would undo some of the negative effects of radiation or something? No it’s just right at Independence Square where the tour left us. Anyway, like with Tri, the reviews online were almost embarrassingly effusive. People were going on and on about how this is the best raw restaurant in the world and ‘trust me I’ve tried them all’. Bitch please. I’ve tried them all. This is not the best. But it is fine. Too much of the food had that vibe that is common in raw restaurants of being too…warm and sludgy, like it had been sitting out. Raw restaurants should be better at that but alas. But a lot of the food was really good, so overall Nebos is a positive for me, with caveats on things to avoid.
I started with the Olivier salad. They had a really impressive salad section (I mean every raw restaurant should come on but this is one of the few) and it was hard to pass up things with broccoli and arugula, but Oliviers are so common in this part of the world that it’s required to try them when you have the chance. I had a vegan one before, I think at a Mongolian Loving Hut, I want to say? and it was great so I had to try again. Also, this was the one salad that the Nebos menu had starred as a customer favorite so I trusted the public at large even though you should never really do that about anything really. Luckily it was really good! It was a mix of carrot, cucumber, avocado, peas, peas, zucchini, microgreens, and of course ‘Olivier sauce’ and it was very enjoyable. I also adore how they always come in the same weird shape.
Okay deciding on the Olivier wasn’t as hard as I made it out to be because we also got a Caesar salad! Double salad what a life! I was intrigued by the promise of cashew cheese sticks covered with pitta sauce in the Caesaw. It didn’t sound like a Caesar and it didn’t taste like one, but I really enjoyed it. Those cashew cheese croutony things are legit! They were so plentiful (look at that plate it is positively covered with them) and had a great sharp cheeziness with a z. It could have used more lettuce but it was pretty interesting. And really filling. Cashew cheeze is filling! I just jump back and forth between spelling raw vegan cheese like a normal person and an ass so don’t mind it.
Next was the tasting plate, with flax breaded cutlets (I don’t know either), falafel cutlets, and vegetable balls. I don’t know what the difference between all the different cutlets or balls were – they’re all made of the same nuts and vegetables – but they were all pretty good, and the three sauces they came with added some nice flavors. Approved!
Lastly was the thing I urge you not to order, even though like everything else I chose it is listed on the menu with a little thumbs up to show it’s a customer favorite. Well, the public is wrong so often so I was bound to get screwed listening to other people. Don’t listen to other people. (Well except me of course.)
The Dragon Roll. I’m actually starting to gag just remembering trying to eat this. I was soo excited for some raw vegan sushi – I hadn’t had sushi in ages, and it was even longer since I had good sushi. Well it would be a lot longer, I learned. The Dragon Roll promised epic tales of nori, avocado, cauliflower, cucumber, cheeze, something called ‘false flax seeds’ that I am sure is just lost in translation, sunflower mayo, and more ingredients that sound good but when you stop to really think about it you should think ‘wait how is all of this going to make a sushi roll’? Remember it’s raw, so without the structural integrity afforded by sticky rice, they were going to rely on minced cauliflower to hold all the gloppiness together. It didn’t. Forget Gwynnie’s website (how many times will this post mention her, I wonder), THIS is the real goop. The toppings blended in with the middle and it all mushed into one beige bland blob of oozing warm sludge and I tried to eat one and had that immediate reaction where if you eat any more of the thing you are going to be sick. Shaaaaaame. The consistency was so off-putting and so wrong, like when I try to eat mochi but 100x more. Sushi should not need to be eaten with a spoon! Bleh what a soft slimy mess. Bleh!
The rest of Nebos was decent though. Just never get the sushi.
The last of the vegan food I’m going to share might be my favorite in Kyiv. It’s not a restaurant, it’s more like a counter service. And the place is not vegan, or even vegetarian, but it has a few options. Now, what’s my favorite thing? If you follow my instagram (see link at top corner of page!) you probably know I make soup for dinner 90% of the time. Yes it’s because it’s a one-pot thing and that’s best for me but also because soup is amazing! Well, lords and ladies, Kyiv has a soup counter around town called Soup Culture! And best of all, they serve it in a BREAD CUP. Not a bread bowl, not those things that you don’t know really how to attack and you’re like wait so do i eat all the soup and then this bread but I want bread with the soup I’ll just take a little piece and ahhhh now there’s soup spilling everywhere! No, Soup Culture has perfected the bread container method by putting the soup in a much sturdier carbolicious cup, and so you drink the soup (I hate using the word ‘drink’ when discussing soup because it’s FOOD but here you kind of must because it’s a cup and you drink from a cup anyway) and chew the cup as you go down. It’s splendid.
They always have one or two vegan soups on the daily menu. We tried the lentil, which was delicious. And the bread cup is SO fun. Like I said, it’s sturdy so it retains its integrity as you take bites of it. SO FUN! There are a few locations around town so it’s a wonderful little lunch stop as you explore town.
Kyiv has a lot of vegan options – we barely scratched the surface! Even when we weren’t looking, we would chance upon vegan friendly places, like this place in a major underground food court/mall under Independence Square.
Hopefully, this roundup will help you make decisions about what to prioritize (go to Green 13; skip Tri; bring me back a bread cup). I have heard that even in the past few months, even more vegan food has popped up in Kyiv. I think the scene there is going to get better and better and it’s definitely a city to keep your eye on.
Wadi Shab is Gorges: My Favorite Place in Oman (+ Bimmah Sinkhole!)
I can’t even begin to explain how nervous I was to trek into Wadi Shab. Before our Oman trip, we’d found a very detailed blog post from another travel blogger about how the hiking route through the cliffs to get to the wadi is completely unmarked and so they went the wrong way, and ended up at the top of super steep sheer cliff face that they had to, terrifyingly, scale down as people yelled at them to ‘go back!’ but there was no way back. I mean. I was pretty sure I was going to die, and all because of idiot other travel bloggers. (What have I BEEN SAYING about the quality of other travel bloggers. I am throwing so much shade right now my head hurts. SHAAAADE.) Seriously, this was one of the easiest hikes, and for the G-D LIFE of us, neither Z nor I could figure out how you could possibly take a wrong turn. These other travelers almost scared me away from my very favorite experience for no good reason. LE. SIGH.
Now that we’ve established that other people are the worst, let’s talk about the magical Wadi Shab, a place so beautiful and so fun that it’s one of the most popular attractions in Oman. It’s about a 90-minute drive from Muscat (which you learned all about yesterday), on really nice modern roads that were never crowded. You’re probably asking right now, “What is a wadi? Also what is a shab? Also what is a wadi shab?” A wadi is a valley, and sometimes it means a dry riverbed that fills with water during the rainy season. A shab, I don’t know, I think it’s simply the name of this wadi. A Wadi Shab is a magic land of gorges and canyons and caverns along a river that culminates in 3 freshwater pools in the middle of the canyon, and the last pool you swim to is inside a cave, and it has a waterfall. It’s magical wonderfulness. A cave of wonders, if you will. I’ll tell you everything you need to know!
Before you leave your hotel/house, pack a small backpack with snacks, water, sunscreen, a hat, sunglasses, and water shoes (which we happily picked up at the Dubai Mall!). Bring enough rial in cash to cover the boat fees (below) but not much more, because you’ll be leaving all your shit out in the open at one point (below too). WEAR A BATHING SUIT under your trekking clothes – there is no place to change – and wear sneakers or trekking shoes too. Leave a dry change of clothes in the car if you can.
NO NOT ME TO THE RIGHT OF ME!
okay I guess it’s technically Wadi al-Shab but everyone and everything calls it Wadi Shab so I am not a bad person
To get to Wadi Shab, you either rent a car (which honestly you should be doing anyway for sightseeing around Muscat or anywhere else in Oman, unless you’re staying the entire time inside a resort which like, why) or you can book a tour with a group, but that means other people and other people’s time frame which sounds terrible. There are road signs for it, and any GPS/google maps should know the way (yes our google maps finally started working the day after we arrived; it just wanted us to have that initial nighttime terror leaving the airport). Once you arrive, you park in the small parking lot along the riverbank.
Guess what they have in the parking lot area: TOILETS! HERCALEES HERCALEES!!!
Leave your change of clothes and any other money and any extra phones and cameras in your car! Bring your day pack with water and snacks and water shoes, your car keys, and one photo-taking device, just in case your shit gets stolen you don’t want to lose all your phones. (It won’t get stolen though; everyone leaves all their stuff by the pools it’s fine.)
Sitting on the bank will be a group of locals. They’re in charge of the river crossing. So, you park on this (left) side of the river, but the attraction part is on the right side of the river, the canyon hike and the magic pools, so they bring you across the river in a quick little boat ride (you can see the quick little boats in the picture). If I recall accurately (lol watch me be wrong and pulling a total Josh’s college girlfriend saying “um I think I recall Hamlet accurately” and BEING WRONG UGH), it was 1 Omani rial per person per way, and that’s all you pay for the whole shibang, there’s no ticket office or anything to go explore nature, so it was 4 rial total for this BEST DAY EVER. This parking side of the river has a food and drink stand with bottled drinks and snacks.
So you pet the dog, you say yo what up to the goat (you gotta read the captions), and you cross the river in the little boat. Oh we’ve got an action shot:
And then you’re on the other side (I’m on the east side, I’m on the west side!) ready to start the hike. It takes about 40 minutes to get to the interior canyon pools (do these phrases sound right), and the first 10 minutes or so are totally flat, just walking along the river and along the base part of the gorges. Then it starts to get freeeeakay! But in a completely doable way, not in a scary or difficult-to-maneuver way like inferior blogs would have you believe.
Despite the high numbers of tourists who also have this on their to-do list, it didn’t feel overly crowded at all. In fact, while all the visitors on the day you go will likely convene at the main swimming part at the same time (as you can spend however much time you want there), the hike to the interior of the valley plus parts of the swimming holes (“I call it my swimming hole” – Mindy St. Clair in Oman) were empty for us, which added to how incredible it all was.
Once the flat part of the hike through the canyons is over, you start climbing up and around the rocks, but none of it is very tricky or difficult if you are in average shape and don’t have mobility issues. The path is marked by painted black arrows on the larger rocks at times, but at other times the path is straightforward just by using common sense: “Hmm, there’s no arrow here. Do I go up this set of rocky stairs or DOWN INTO THE RAVINE?” Seriously there was never a moment where the right choice was unclear.
Because it’s a wadi, some of the walking path surrounds water, as it’s traveling to the main part of the river you start at. Oh a good rule of thumb is to follow the black pipes.
You do this climby rocky bit for about a half hour, and then, and then, and gentlemen and then, you are greeted with this:
You come around a rocky bend and voila! You’ve reached the magic swimming pools inside the gorge! After a mostly solitary hike, you’ll be like ‘oh HERE’S all the people!’ As you can see, they are all leaving their bags and shoes along these side rocks, and you do the same. There are enough people – and enough tour guides who do this everyday telling you it’s fine – that you shouldn’t really worry about your belongings. Leave your packs, your hiking shoes, and your clothes (you have your bathing suit on already right?? this is where’d you would have to change), put on your water shoes (you really want water shoes for the rocky bottoms of these pools) and get to swimming for however long you have!
Since this is where the swimming begins, this is where the photos end, sadly. You’ll have to go to see what it’s like in the rest of the pools and the cave! (Or find someone who wisely took a waterproof GoPro. I’ll get one someday okay.) This first pool is fairly deep, as you can see. You can stand for some of it but you do need to know how to swim to go any farther. The second pool is mostly walking through shallow water, which is why you want to bring those water shoes – it’s all tiny rocks which really hurt our soft Western feet (as a guide in Burma once told us we had. She wasn’t wrong.)
The third pool is the magic wonder shiz, though. It’s quite deep – you have to swim – but you are swimming to a cave! There’s a small hole that might be scary if you have claustrophobia or ya know any run of the mill fear of drowning, but you swim through the hole and then you are in the cave with a waterfall! It’s so freaking cool. There are some ledges and hanging rock bits around the cave to hang on to when you need a rest, so don’t worry about getting tired out. If you want the opposite of a rest, there are ropes hanging down the rocks of the waterfall, so some absolutely bonkers adventure seekers among you can try your best to climb up it, land on the slippery rocks up top with the water gushing over them, and jump off into the pool of the cave. Someone tried this while I was there and it seemed terrifying and painful, so, yeah. This guy also had his phone with him in a ziplock bag. Fun fact, he left Wadi Shab with a totally forked phone.
At one point, we were completely alone in that cave, which sounds kind of scary but we knew more people would be swimming in soon. But during that time, it was one of those ‘holy crap are we really here experiencing this?’ kinds of moments. It’s absolutely wonderful.
When you’re done (be mindful of the opening hours so you don’t miss the last boats!), you do it all in reverse, say goodbye to the animals, pee again, and – if you’ve planned your day properly – you drive a short distance to the next swimming adventure.
BIMMAH SINKHOLE
About a 20 minute drive from Wadi Shab is the Bimmah Sinkhole, a water-filled sinkhole by definition but a shimmering turquoise underground lake by mine. It’s back towards Muscat, which is perfect. It’s best to hit the sinkhole after Wadi Shab, on the way back to Muscat, since you’ll already be in your wet bathing suit, rather than on the way from Muscat, since if you swim in the sinkhole first you’ll have to do the Wadi Shab hike all wet both ways.
Fun fact: the Bimmah Sinkhole ALSO HAS A TOILET! What is this amazing new world! It’s also in a sort of park looking jawn, with children’s playground equipment randomly here and there. There is fencing around the top of the sinkhole so lots of people will be taking pictures of the swimmers below. When you’re ready, you leave all your stuff in the car this time (all of it; there’s really nowhere to put anything), climb down the stairs and get in that water! It’s such a beautiful place to swim.
The water was filled with those little biting fish which was funny, if weird. Despite being pretty well-known and touristed, the pool itself was never too crowded.There were all these little nooks and crannies in the rocks to explore, like little caves and enclaves. It was a lovely swim!
So that’s my favorite day in Oman! We got back to Muscat tired but happy, and ready for an amazing dinner at my favorite restaurant in Muscat: a falafel stand called Arax. More on that in the next travel post, all about the food and hotels in Muscat (including our own little resort stay! (yes I talked shit about staying in resorts but I mean ONLY staying in resorts, clearly we did all the things first!)).
