[MUSANDAM PENINSULA, OMAN] — Here’s my review of Six Senses Zighy Bay adventure hotel on the coast of Oman. One of the best luxury hotels in Oman. A stunning beach resort that you can paraglide into Check-In. ____________________________ When you land in crazy Dubai, the Six Senses driver is there to great you. A kind Indian man from Kerala (as seemingly every helpful service person in this region is), dressed in a nice black suit and tie. As you weave your way through Dubai’s twenty lane highways, the skyscrapers disappear, the highway gets successively narrower, the gigantic 200 foot-long real estate billboards become faded and empty. Sand dunes start to appear. Camels start to pop up, randomly, in the dunes on the side of the road.
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[GÈDRE, FRANCE] — I always wanted to go on some great hikes in the French Pyrénées, but I could never figure out where. As I finally figured out after all these years, the Pyrénées aren’t just a single group of mountains, but a bunch of groups of Pyrénées spread all along the French/Spanish border. So when you think, as I stupidly did, “Oh I’ll just go hike in the Pyrénées” you’re instantly in over your head when you finally try to Google it and figure out where to go. There’s the Pyrénées-Orientales in French Catalonia (which I wrote briefly about in another earlier post), the Pyrénées-Atlantiques in Basque country near San Sebastian, the Midi-Pyrénées in Languedoc-Roussillion, the Haute-Pyrénées and several other sub-parts. And then there’s the complementary Spanish Pyrénées on the very other