The motorway from the airport is smooth, well made and largely empty, and the car radio is playing bagpipe music as we sweep through the desert. The landscape is as featureless as along any airport expressway, but the driver’s turban, a blue and grey pashmina wrap, the bagpipes and the jagged, ochre mountains in the distance place you immediately. There is no country quite like Oman.

“Beauty has an address”, Oman’s tourism slogan goes, and it does not take long in the country to discover why. The rest of the Arabian peninsula has done a groundbreaking job in the creation of ugliness: Dubai’s skyscrapers, Kuwait’s skyline, the visual desecration of Mecca – these could all win prizes in a festival of horrors. Oman has gone