The drive to work

... is along this road.

Wadi Debab

Yeah, we swam here too.

Sink hole

This is a massive hole in the ground (there's a person in the bottom right corner for you to get the scale). The water is 50 metres deep and is fed from the sea via an underground waterway.

Weather

The temperature was 29C (84F) last night. This is the first time the temperature has got below 30C since we got here. It may be that the worst of the summer is behind us.

According to rumour everybody can stop work if the temperature goes above 50C (122F) and the official temperature never goes above 49C. A couple of weeks ago every day was above 50C for the whole week.

There has been a lot more cloud here than I was expecting - basically I was expecting hot sunny days every day - it has still been as hot as I thought it was going to be though. It hasn't rained here this year yet, though it did rain last year.

Everybody here says the weather during the winter is fantastic, the temperature will be in the 20s C (70s F). I'm looking forward to it.

My bike in Oman

Organ tour

We were shown around the inside of the organ today. Now I understand why it takes so long to tune. There were literally thousands of pipes inside - from small metal ones that had a diameter of 10mm up to the large wooden ones that were 9.6m long. It was fascinating to see.
To give some idea of the size, there were two sets of stairs inside to allow access to the 3 levels, six of us were inside the organ at the same time. There were wooden walls inside that moved to create baffles to change the sound of the notes being played.

Organ tuning

The organ is being tuned at the moment. We have been subjected to Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple, The Winner Takes It All by Abba and Downtown by Petula Clarke. it's all a bit surreal having an enourmous organ playing these tunes. Apparently organs take up to 3 months to be fully tuned, so I am expected a variety of tunes to be blasting around the auditorium in the coming few weeks.