MUSIC FESTIVAL SMACK-DOWN: Bluesfest versus Jazz Fest

In the past 12 months I've had the very great fortune of attending two mega music events. And that's odd for me. You could count all the gigs I've ever been to on my fingers and toes, even if you include the school lunchtime concerts by Aussie acts in the 80s like Kids in the Kitchen, The Machinations, the Dynamic Hepnotics and The Cockroaches (who morphed into a little thing called The Wiggles in the 90s).

They must have been the oddest gigs for those bands. An all-boys school in the middle of the day, lunch bags rustling as a few hundred teens tucked into whatever Mum or Dad had packed that morning.

But I digress…

HUNTING OMANI HONEY

Even if you don't speak a word of the local language, you can tell when your tour guides are lost. There's something in the way questions are asked and replied, a tilt of the head, perhaps even a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders and a hopeful gaze off into the distance. You can just tell.

We were only a short drive out of Muscat but it felt like we were riding around on the Curiosity Rover such was the barrenness of our surroundings. This was dry. Really dry, dusty and very rocky. And in spite of it all being pretty much one colour (a sort of chocolatey grey) it was oddly beautiful.