MUSCAT - Organisers of the sultanate’s biggest cultural and entertainment extravaganza — the Muscat Festival — said on Monday they expected the 29-day annual event to attract more than two million visitors this year.
Although there will be only two main venues, compared to four and more in the past, new additions such as a food festival, a fashion show and The Extreme Sailing series, as well as the return of the Tour of Oman Cycle Race, are set to be major crowd-pullers, key officials of Muscat Municipality said.
Other highlights will include live concerts by Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan and an Indian evening featuring singer Sonu Nigam and actress Lara Datta.
The venues for all events of the festival, from January 27, will be the Qurum Natural Park and the Naseem Garden. The programmes will begin at 4pm every day at both places, ending at 11pm, with the entry fee fixed as 200 baisa for adults and 100 baisa for children.
Muscat Municipality Chairman Sultan bin Hamdoon Al Harthi stressed the festival was being promoted as a celebration of Oman’s culture and heritage, but promised there would be plenty of fun and excitement for the entire family.
“This festival is an important celebration of our heritage as well as a showcase of our ability to host major international events of world-class standards,” Harthi told a news conference.
“We expect over two million visitors this year,” he said, adding that the activities had been “specifically chosen to exhilarate every sector of our society with events, exhibitions and lectures ranging across a number of fields including sport, culture, food, music, fashion, heritage and literature.”
The Tour of Oman bike race will take place between February 15 and 20, with 128 of the world’s greatest cyclists racing through Muscat, Sur, up the Jebel Al Akhdhar and through the Batinah and Sharqiyah regions. Racing will start at 2pm on all six days.
“After the success of the inaugural competition last year, places for this year have been highly contested and the successful sixteen teams make up some of the world’s greatest cyclists,” Harthi said. There will be two Omani teams taking part.
The legendary cyclist Eddy Merckx, who is the organiser of Tour of Oman and also five times winner of Tour de France, will also host bike rides with children before two of the Tour stages.
The Shah Rukh Khan show is set for February 17 and the Indian Night’ with Nigam and Datta for February 10.
Kuwaiti play
A Kuwaiti play in Arabic, called Bakhet and Bakhetah, to be staged on February 23 and 24, will be among other major attractions.
The water off Muscat will be playing host to the first leg of the 2011 Extreme Sailing Series from February 22 to 24.
Over ten top professional teams representing eight nations will tackle a unique mix of open water races and high-octane ‘stadium’ showdowns.
The ‘Oman Food Festival’, from February 5 to 15, will focus on Omani and international cuisine, while the Muscat Fashion Week, from February 22 and the final event of the festival, will feature designs from top fashion houses, “putting Muscat at the cutting edge of what’s hot in the world of Arabic styled fashion,” Harthi said. He added both events would now be a part of Muscat Festival every year.
The Oman Heritage and Culture Village at the Qurum Park, a star attraction every year, will provide visitors an opportunity to learn some of the key techniques used in traditional crafts including how to weave baskets of date palm leaves, used in most Omani villages both to store and collect dates.
Meanwhile, an ‘International Festival for Arts, Heritage and Creativity’, also at Qurum, will be a meeting ground for craftspeople from more than 25 countries around the world. The exhibition will include artisans at work, a bazaar and a show of albums, catalogues and books on arts and handicrafts.
Major events taking place at the Naseem Garden will include fun fairs, electronic games, a consumer exhibition with nearly 500 companies from 30 countries taking part, children’s entertainment shows and an ‘Education Village’.
There will be daily laser shows at Qurum at 8.30pm and firework displays at Naseem.
The Royal Oman Police (ROP), in the meantime, said the newly-opened Muscat Expressway was expected to significantly reduce traffic bottlenecks during the festival. It pointed out that motorists, especially those coming from the Batinah region, could now use the new road to reach Naseem and Qurum and avoid the highly congested Sultan Qaboos Street.
ravindranath@khaleejtimes.com
Source: http://www.khaleejtimes.com/darticlen.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2011/January/middleeast_January157.xml§ion=middleeast&col=
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