Luxury and lunch at Muscat's most magnificent ministry....well, hotel, palace and temple

Our taxi slowed respectfully as it passed though the elegant entrance of the Al Bustan Palace Hotel.

The lawns rolled and stretched away on either side and the palm trees bowed in welcome as we slowed before the magnificent edifice before us - The Al Bustan Palace Hotel.

It was built as a palace and it remains a palace, the hotel having merely moved quietly and discretely into the vast and airy canopy and its adjacent wings without disturbing its serene cloisters and princely passages.

Inside, we almost genuflect - it is a temple too, a vast dome soars up and shafts of divine light slice through the fragranced atmosphere.

If you've been having a tough time of it, and you need a break, this is the place to come. The staff are razor sharp on every doubt and potential need, solicitous without being in the slightest bit oleaginous or Uriah Heep.

We were welcomed by Mara Isono, EAM Secretary, who introduced us immediately to Mohammed, sitting with his friends who immediately become our friends, and served us Arabian coffee and dates.

We were overawed by the infinite sense of indulgence promised in every stone and every friendly glance.

Mara led us into the gardens, which must have been sculpted by the same landscape gardeners responsible for the Elysian Fields and The Garden of Eden, with maybe a contribution from the Augustus golf course in Atlanta.

Lunch was a buffet, but that term is inadaquate to the task of conveying the exquisite range of texture and flavour that we were treated to and the genuine attentiveness of our waiter.

 The great philosopher Wittgenstein said, 'Whereoff you cannot speak, thereoff you must remain silent'.

He also said that somethings cannot be said, they can only be shown.

Until today, I didn't really know what he meant by either of these statements.

I do now.

By bus to Dubai from Muscat, the world's tallest building and biggest shopping mall loom up from the dunes..........

The bus from Muscat is a bone shaker from the 1970's - we were travelling with the people, well, a couple of Indians and an Omani woman or two. The conductor was exhausted by his labours of checking the passengers' tickets and soon fell asleep, abandoning his main job of keeping the driver awake with conversation.

The Omani desert and scrubscape is littered with half started motorway projects and half finished houses.

An embryonic freeway flyover stands starkly over an intersection, its angry steel support joints snarling at the indignity of being left naked and useless, with no sign of its connecting companions.

Oman aims to tarmac the desert and recreate Los Angeles' in the Arabian Peninsular. They will get there in the end as they seem to be as determined as los Angeleans to create a car based world of lonely isolation in which every human feeling is mediated on four wheels and all the public spaces are roads.
We fall asleep as the bus grinds and growls forward on the eight hour trip.

When we awake, we are in Dallas, Texas, or Houston, but as our eyes find their focus we realise our mistake - an easy one to make - we are in Dubai, which is Dallas or Houston or any number of US cities, transplanted to these Arabian sands. Maybe it's all the oil, but the Emir must be suffering from the same sort of affliction that has blighted America - Giantism, or mine is bigger than yours syndrome.
But we must concede - in its gleaming glass erectile style, it has an eirie beauty and efficiency that is a pleasure to experience.
The taxi's arrive as swiftly as yellow cabs in New York City, but they are cleaner and the drivers' are polite.

We arrive at the world's biggest shopping mall and, despite ourselves, we are seduced immediately, even buying a jumper for Elena, and a bag of souvenirs in a gift shop.

The fountain display comes up like a ballet and we eat a delicious spaghetti pesto and miso soup in a strange hybrid restaurant of Japanese and Italian food.

From the top of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, we are humbled by the engineering involved and the almost impious achievement of this recreation of the west as an oasis for global trade in the middle east. This is globalism, and it's for making money. It represents an Arabian vision and was realised by a global collaboration, which itself must be a hopeful sign.

Here comes everyone, you might think, and they are all well dressed and well off. But globalism floats on a sea of human struggle as men and women are separated from families by the necessity to find work thousands of miles away from home. Pockets of unemployment and poverty drive millions across the skies to staff the service army recruited by Dubai and other pockets of posperity in the Middle East and around the world.

Our waiter Leo Bonillo is a charming young man from Manilla, where there is no work. His children are at home with his mother. And this story can be found over and over again, in Shanghai or Dubai, London or Moscow, New York or Mumbai. If home is where the heart is, there is a lot of heartache in Dubai.

The Red Arrows over the hot blue skies of Muscat, musings on Machiavelli and The Sultan, happiness and where it comes from....

Elena and I take a taxi from our hosts' suburban Muscat home to The Intercontinental Hotel, from where we will crane our necks up towards the dizzying blue above to catch sight of The Red Arrows jets beginning their precipitous formation dives down to earth, or just above it.

On the journey, there are Omani flags flying from the cars which also proudly display portraits of the handsome Sultan, his grey tinged beard (of formal cut) symbolising both vigour and the wisdom of age.
In the backs of cars, children smile and wave at us. Why?
They don't in London. And we would not dare to smile and wave back in London.

We take a photograph of two young men walking on the side of the road. They smile at us and wave. Why?
We have travelled widely in this whole wide world, but rarely have we encountered so much smiling. Why?
Perhaps they are pretending to be happy but we doubt that. It's not that they want anything, since we are not offering anything.

And then above us, as the red jets roar and scream around the submissive skies, we find the answer.

Love. All you need is love, as Britain's greatest musical export sang.
But this can only be one piece of the answer. If it's true that Omani's have more than their fair share of the elusive elixir of a happy life, where do they get it from?
Here is our theory: We must learn how to love from our Mother's milk and every moment of infancy upwards, by example and by precept, every single day. A long time ago, in the searing heat of the Omani desert, a tribal leader realised that the only way to survive in the barren and lifeless terrain around was to harness all the life force of all the people, and the strongest of these was love.
And so it began.

Niccolo Machiavelli, when he wrote his handbook for Princes in 1506, advised them that it is better to be feared than loved - if you cannot be both. Now nobody would pretend that Oman does not have problems and some consequential unhappiness. This is the real world, despite the almost unreal sea of good nature all around, and men still steal, cheat and thieve and the life of man would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' without the potential use of force. We believe The Sultan knows that he needs be feared and loved because the wisdom of the Sultan is not in doubt. He was very impressed as a young man by British freedoms and democracy but he wisely observed that they had been achieved over an 800 year period of evolution and struggle, including a violent revolution and a military dictatorship. Armed with this self observed insight, he began his careful work of introducing Oman to the responsiblity of freedom. We wish him well on his anniversary, and recommend Machiavelli to him. It's a dangerous world.

A modern medieval paradise of empty beaches and different degrees of freedom - Oman

Here in Oman, the laws of economics have been refuted convincingly. We observed it ourselves. Walking in the searing heat along a wide boulevard, we flagged down a taxi. We had no idea where we were or how to describe where we were going. The driver was patient and kindly. He slowed at every junction and landmark that we thought we recognised. Eventually, after about fifteen minutes of driving around in circles, we realised where we were and asked to be dropped off.
How much is that please? I asked.
No, I cannot charge you, he replied, it is my pleasure to help you, you are a guest in my country.
I could not persuade him otherwise.

According to all the laws of economics this should not have happened. Adam Smith said that it is not to the kindness of the baker or candlestick maker that we should look for our candlesticks and bread, but to their looking after their self interest.
What are we to make of a taxi driver who displays more kindness than self interest?
Perhaps culture is more important than economists have noticed.

And here the culture must have been at least partly formed by emptiness, the emptiness of everywhere. Vast stretches of beach, beautiful and deserted, stretch for miles and fringe the city of Muscat with a brocade of yellow sand and blue green sparkling sea. Beyond Muscat, empty square miles of flat scrub and desert with an occasional eruption of bright green palm trees and isolated villages. Behind this, a lunar landscape of slate coloured mountain, sharp and jagged, implacable and barely penetrable.
Of course, there are people, men in immaculate white and women in solid black, Indian migrants in clothes of many colours and westerners in their uniforms, but there is empty space between them all, even in the most populated of places. The space between them is respect, a different kind of mutual respect than we see in London because here it feels more gracious, polite and friendly.
Perhaps space itself is a form of prosperity. And prosperity provides the wherewithal of kindness, though not the motivation.

Elena and I have been spending our time on a deserted beach in Muscat. It's not completely empty. There are fishermen who wave at us and ask us how we are. There are occasionally young lads who swim in the mostly empty sea as we do, or cartwheel and cavort on the beach. And there are cars and trucks that drive along the beach, to our surprise, but most of them belong to the fishermen who use them to tow their boats up the beach.

Staring at the men pulling in their nets I could not but help thinking of Jesus approaching the disciples as they too pulled in their nets. Come with me, he said, and I shall make you fishers of men.
Perhaps, perhaps, the message of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, not he that came with a sword, but he that turned the other cheek, only really got through here in Muscat, where today the muezzin call all to prayer five times a day.
The citizens of Oman live with what we might think of as restrictions - drink and dress, for example, but they also live with a sort of freedom that we in the west have lost to the reduction of everything to impulse and instant gratification.
 How much can I respect you if I must have what I want now?