The new Muscat Expressway connects Al Khoudh to Al Qurum. In the future, the expressway will connect to Sohar, stretching nearly 150 km and helping to ease the burden of traffic on the Sultan Qaboos Highway along the coast in both the Batinah and Muscat provinces. The head engineers of this project must certainly have been fans of the original Star Trek series, for the road cuts through dynamited patches of limestone and sandstone small mountains. Neatly carved rocky facades with rock slide-deterring paint jobs sandwich the road, giving a sense that, perhaps, Neil Armstrong's mission to the moon did in fact take place in a Hollywood basement called Oman.
On the small stretch of highway west of the airport turnoff and nearing the Al Muwaleh exit, the bean pole street lights stand, like pegs in a cribbage board, casting down what light they can to drivers. The beautiful thing about these lights in particular is that they have a shared beating heart. It hasn't yet been determined what causes a slow, yet slight, dimming and brightening of light on these twenty or more poles. Maybe the Knowledge Oasis university complex acts as a consumption competitor, drawing too much power out in the desert along that part of the expressway. Or maybe the wiring is faulty. Or maybe someone didn't pay the electric bill. Or maybe this display of a luminating electrical pulse is God's way of asking us to slow down on our rushed journey.
On the small stretch of highway west of the airport turnoff and nearing the Al Muwaleh exit, the bean pole street lights stand, like pegs in a cribbage board, casting down what light they can to drivers. The beautiful thing about these lights in particular is that they have a shared beating heart. It hasn't yet been determined what causes a slow, yet slight, dimming and brightening of light on these twenty or more poles. Maybe the Knowledge Oasis university complex acts as a consumption competitor, drawing too much power out in the desert along that part of the expressway. Or maybe the wiring is faulty. Or maybe someone didn't pay the electric bill. Or maybe this display of a luminating electrical pulse is God's way of asking us to slow down on our rushed journey.
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