Putting Oman on the map

Last November, Anne Malin walked out onto one of the breakwaters at Jumeirah Open Beach, exploring a part of Dubai to see what had changed since her last visit.

For Malin, a British woman who has lived in Oman for more than 30 years, observant walks like these are second nature, the product of years of walking and 
driving Oman’s streets to produce the country’s first tourist maps.

Malin and her family moved to Muscat in 1978 with her husband and three children, leaving the country inn they owned in the UK for the Arabic fishing village of 
Al Qurum.

They came for what they thought would be a short stay. Malin and her daughter took Arabic lessons from a local professor. She did make-up for several of the local women before their weddings, taking five hours to complete the snake-like sequined patterns on the face of the first one. She started doing make-up for Oman TV, a position which opened up opportunities for Malin to read the nightly news broadcast for 20 years. Her work in TV also led to working with Egyptian movie stars Laila Tahr, Yusef Shabaan and Amina Rizk while they filmed Sindbad in Oman.

As Malin and her family became more integrated with local culture, Oman was opening itself up to the world.

She and her now late husband saw an opportunity.

“Oman had been our secret paradise, closed to the outside world. I remember being shocked to see the first tourist coach in Old Muscat in 1985.” The tourists needed to get around, and the Malins had produced Leisure Maps in the UK. They thought Oman could use similar maps.

With support from the department of tourism and several other ministries, they created Oman’s first tourist map, hand cutting and pasting the components together. Produced in 1989, that tourist map would change the way Malin and her husband spent their time.

“We then took on our biggest challenge to date — the compiling of the Muscat Street Guide.” A comprehensive guide to the streets in an as yet unmapped city required six surveyors and countless hours exploring the city and its side streets. The couple encountered several challenges, among them, differences in the way the streets were named.

The municipality and the National Survey Authority have a different system for naming the streets: the 
national survey authority translated the Arabic names into what they thought were the closest match in English; the municipality merely writes the Arabic pronunciation in Roman letters, without translating the word for meaning.

Then another challenge arose. Malin’s husband fell ill and lost his vision. She worked in their bedroom, the maps covering the floor, to be close to him. While she was at her daughter’s wedding in the Shetland Isles, her husband passed away in Oman.

Even years later, Malin talks about her late husband as her greatest source of support, calling him “an accomplished writer and broadcaster who taught and encouraged me to no end” in her own writing career. After his death, she was faced with a decision: complete the project on her own or give it up.

“I went to the minister of commerce and industry. I put the map down, all 300 pages. At the end, he said: ‘You’ve go to to finish this; this is a service to the nation’,” she recalls the minister saying.

“Help came from all directions, especially from the government.” Encouraged by the support, Malin threw herself back into the project. “I walked up and down every track and road of Muscat, checking the work the surveyors had done, updating and adding more details.”

She finished it, and continued to make other maps. Her books are now sold all over Oman, at Magrudy’s, Jashanmal and at the airport in Dubai, and — now that Oman really does attract tourists from all over — as far away as Stanford’s Bookshop in the UK.

As she continues updating the maps and working on new projects such as a large wall map, Malin continues exploring the country she speaks so highly of, calling it a “nature lover’s paradise.”

One of Oman’s more unique areas, Umm Al Samim is the home of quicksands and vast stretches of otherworldly scenery. “As you approach, it looks like a turquoise lagoon in places, mixed with a lot of salt and that produces this beautiful scene.” In the late 1990s, government officials, asked for the name Umm al Samim — which means mother of poison in Arabic — to be changed but haven’t picked a new one yet. 
Now the place, which Wilfred Thesiger wrote about, appears unnamed.

Thesiger, the storied British traveller, explorer and prolific writer, was in Oman several times, and Malin met him twice. “He was a very austere, aristocratic 
looking man and certainly someone you’d have great respect for.”

While Malin is one of the country’s biggest cheerleaders — continually extolling its virtues — and her livelihood as a tourist mapmaker depends on an influx of guests, she sometimes falls into yearning for the days when Muscat and Salalah weren’t flooded annually by tourists fleeing oppressive Gulf heat.

“We did enjoy having Oman to ourselves all those years ago,” she says. “My view has changed, and I think that when people go on holiday they really want to go some place safe; Oman has been ranked as one of the safest places.”

She then reverts back to speaking glowingly about her time in the country, recounting her first scuba diving experience to write a story. “Not only did I see a lemon shark, but when I popped up who should pop up beside me but a huge turtle? I had so many people calling to congratulate me.

“You just don’t know how lucky you are.”