The plane was rather full but we eventually had a good flight.
When arriving at Dubai international airport, located in the city, you fly over parts of the city itself. Once landed and when taxiing to the terminal we could see the huge Emirates hangars, several of their A380, and a fourth terminal being built
Arriving in terminal 1 we could see, what is eventually more a shopping mall than a terminal !

After waiting for more than 45 minutes for our luggage, we headed to the terminal exit to find the Costa Coffee where we were supposed to meet our guide. He actually spotted us before we did, and that's when we met Marco, our guide for the week.
We had some time to chat since we had to wait for the other members of the group. Some were supposed to land 45 minutes after us. But the bad news of the night was that three persons were on a 03:10 Qatar airways flight meaning us waiting for 5 hours in the terminal. And that's what we did!

Thus we had time to hang around in the terminal, to notice that in Dubai, flights never stop even in the middle of the night, to do some sound recordings with some noisy fans outside and a quiet terminal inside, to have a crunchy mango yoghurt at Starbucks, to chat with Marco and the other members of the group, to hang around again in the terminal ... until the last three persons arrived and we were all there!

The group was composed of 12 persons (women: C*, F*, I*, Ol*, S*, and V*; men: JM*, M*, P*, O* and B*) plus our guide Marco.
For the newcomers on this blog, in order to respect anonymity of people only the initials of first name followed by a * are used throughout the posts to refer to people. Only our guide gets his nickname mentioned.

We left Dubai airport in a minibus around 5h30 (on Sunday morning) for Khasab. We made a quick stop in the middle of nowhere to fill the tank and eventually we arrived at the UAE/Oman border in Thibat less than 2 hours later. The sun had already risen for some time ...
We paid the 35 dirhams each to get out UAE and the 200 dirhams each requested to get in Oman and we were on the road again heading to Khasab.