The Omani passport control officer said, “Twenty” and it did not register what he meant as my brain was still numb from driving from Dubai.

Must be the visa fees I thought and pulled out a Dh100 note. The officer, dressed smartly in khaki and a lot of gleaming buttons on his uniform, said, “Twenty” again, patiently.

“What?” said my brain in surprise. “Was it not just 5 Omani riyals a year ago when a friend and I crossed the Jebel Jais mountain range from Ras Al Khaimah into Oman to see dolphin pods in the fjords of Musandam?”

There is not much financial planning involved in our lives and that is why we have had to spend decades away from home and still end up with no savings to show for it. Much later it hit me that if I were to take the family for a quick trip to Musandam before we leave this region for good, that it would cost us nearly Dh1,000 in visa fees and petrol alone.

Oman quadrupled its visa fees to generate revenue from the hordes of weekend holiday-makers who come to the picturesque Arab Gulf sultanate.

Still, this was a much cheaper way of getting a UAE visit visa than taking a flight to Muscat airport, Bahrain or to the Iranian free zone island of Kish.

(It would have been a bad idea to go to Kish as I am persona non-grata with the top cop of the island. He rightly believed our journo group — a photographer, a videographer and me — got in pretending to be on a visa run, to do a story about stranded expatriates there).

My UAE residence visa had expired and getting it renewed would have cost me a bundle, including the cost of a health test again, and it was not an economical thing to do as we are leaving the Dubai emirate for good very soon.

Since some 45 nationalities are granted a visa on arrival, this was a better and cheaper way to get an extension of my stay in the UAE.

The only problem was the long two-hour drive to the border post of Mezyad from Dubai. It should have had been a cinch in my six-cylinder Chevy, except that the Google Maps Lady took me all over Al Ain and made me pass hundreds of roundabouts before bringing me to my destination.

She also took me over unmapped roads and at one point I was headed towards Jebel Hafeet mountain, that is touted as having one of the best driving roads in the world.

At the second checkpoint out of the UAE I did not realise that the border guard had not handed back my vehicle registration card, and drove on to the Oman border post. When I did not find the card in my wallet, I got flustered as you need the card to get Oman motor insurance.

I managed to get the Omani visa without the vehicle papers, and took the wrong way out of the border post.

What I should have done was get the visa, get in my car and drive around the border back towards Mezyad. But in my ditsy state I found I was on the highway to Salalah, the lush green capital of Dhofar province.

I took a U-turn after a couple of kilometres and the border guard took a cursory look at my passport and said, “It’s done, carry on.”

And that is how I have not been stamped out of Oman, and I am supposed to be still there somewhere. I hope that next time I go there I will not be like the character out of a movie, stuck at the border post for years as the computer network cannot find me.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi.