COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / SURPRISINGLY COOL CAFE NEAR HORMUZ STRAIT

 

There are places where coffee is the point, and places where coffee happens to be the excuse. At Al Mizy Cafe, near the port city of Khasab on Oman’s Musandam Peninsula overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, it is quietly both. 

It is not where you expect to find a café that cares about extraction ratios. Yet there it is. 

Off to the left of photo above, the water carries the on again-off again movement of tankers slipping through one of the most watched corridors on earth. 

 En route to the port of Khasab, the road out there is a newly paved upgrade from  an afterthought—dust, low traffic, a few government curbs painted in bright black and yellow. Behind the cafe stone ridges rise in blunt, sunburned folds. 

Over the hills to the Northwest is Persian Gulf and Iran

Clean lines, white walls, a touch of blue that nods to the sea without advertising it. No grand statement, no attempt to “brand” the experience. Just a small, deliberate space that looks like someone meant it. Khasab, for its part, plays host to a modest but steady stream of cruise traffic when regional tensions allow. 

Ships typically originate from Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and occasionally longer Gulf itineraries looping out of Doha or even Mumbai. Lines such as Silversea, Seabourn, MSC Cruises, and Royal Caribbean include Khasab as a port of call, often as a scenic counterpoint to the larger urban stops. The ships do not linger long in Khasab or Al Mizy Cafe. Most tie up for a half-day to a full day—long enough for passengers to board traditional dhow cruises, tour the fjord-like inlets (called the Norway of the Middle East) , or simply step ashore and take in the stark geography. 

During those windows of tourist activity, the town sees a noticeable pulse of life. Cafés like Al Mizy benefit from the quiet influx—travelers looking less for spectacle and more for a place to sit, recalibrate, and watch the strait at work. Inside, the room is calm in the way good places are calm—not designed for photographs so much as for use. 

A few tables, some soft light, shelves that hold what they need to hold. You can sit without being hurried. You can think without being noticed. The coffee is handled with restraint. A pour-over arrives properly done, which is rarer than it should be. No over-extraction, no bitterness hiding behind theatrics. Just a clean cup with enough brightness to hold your attention and enough balance to let it go. The latte is equally straightforward, with milk that supports rather than smothers. The food follows the same line. Simple pastries, neatly made. A light breakfast plate that looks assembled rather than engineered. Nothing here is trying to surprise you. 

What makes Al Mizy worth noting is not that it is exceptional in any single category. It is that it exists at all, in a place where it doesn’t need to. Most establishments in locations like this lean on convenience or novelty. This one leans on care. Outside, the ships keep moving through the strait—oil, cargo, politics in motion. Occasionally, a cruise vessel sits at port, its presence brief but consequential. Inside, someone is rinsing a filter, measuring grounds, pouring water in a slow, practiced circle. 

That is the appeal. Not a destination café, not a statement piece. Just a well-run oasis at the edge of something much larger, doing its job without fuss. In the current coffee economy, that may be the most honest thing going. 

"Sahha!"

Center peninsula tip is an Omani enclave directly in the crosshairs
focused on the Strait of Hormuz.  The port city of Khasab home to Al Mizy Cafe is on the right side of the tip (imagine akin cape to Cabo San Lucas, Baja).

RETRO FILES / WWII JOURNALIST ERNIE PYLE IS KILLED

The Last Column of Ernie Pyle 

By the spring of 1945, Americans knew Ernie Pyle as the plain-spoken voice of the ordinary soldier. From the foxholes of North Africa to the hedgerows of Normandy, his dispatches made the GI’s daily grind real to the families back home. 

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his frontline reporting, but it was the intimacy of his words — the dirt, the cigarettes, the small mercies of survival — that earned him trust. 

On April 18, 1945, Pyle was on a tiny island off Okinawa called Ie Shima, riding in a jeep with officers of the 77th Infantry Division. Japanese machine guns opened fire. Pyle and Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge threw themselves into a roadside ditch. Coolidge later recalled: “A burst hit the road ahead of us. We all jumped out of the jeep and dived into the ditch. A little later, Pyle and I raised up to look around. Another burst hit the road. I looked at Ernie and saw he had been hit.” 

Ernie Pyle (helmetless) is shown offering a cigarette to one of the American soldiers he was imbedded with during WW2.

The bullet struck his temple. He died instantly. His fellow soldiers fashioned a wooden cross for his grave that read: “At this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.” 

Days later, in his pocket, they found the draft of what would be his last column. Written aboard a ship bound for Okinawa, it was never finished. In it, Pyle confessed his regret at not being in Europe when the war ended: “Now that it’s all over, my one regret is that I was not with them when it ended. I would have given anything to have been there. And yet I know that I am fortunate to be out here in the Pacific, because it looks as if the Pacific war is going to collapse a lot sooner than any of us had anticipated.” 

Those words — broken off mid-thought — became his farewell. Pyle’s body was later re-interred in Honolulu at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. 

Today, visitors to Ie Shima still find a simple stone marker honoring the man who wrote for “the guys who are doing the dying.” 

Eight decades later, Ernie Pyle remains what he always was: the soldier’s friend, a witness with a notebook, and a reminder that the best reporting doesn’t come from press tents but from the mud beside the men who carried the war.