To the Desert in my Z4

On my first venture out of Doha and into the desert ... Qatar is entirely desert even though it doesn't always look like it in Doha where there are palm trees and grass ... throw enough money at it and you can even conquer Mother Nature. On the drive out there, I passed road signs that were like our deer crossing signs, only they are camel and ostrich crossing signs. In Doha, instead of pedestrian crossing signs, they depict a person wearing a thobe ... so we call them thobe crossings. Attempting to cross any road without these signs is taking your life in your hands, because pedestrians are really just potential road-kill here.

On a fine Saturday morning, myself, Satish (a co-worker from India) and his 13-year old son drove out to Sealine Beach. Once out of Doha, you appreciate exactly what a desert really is ... totally barren. It's not all sand like I thought, but more like hard-packed clay-like dirt the colour of sand. Once you get to Sealine, however, you see massive sand dunes that the locals love to challenge with their Land Cruisers (the most popular vehicle by far in Qatar). Just to show you that my comments about what the Qataris drive like in my previous post are carried over to desert driving, catch this video of them in the sand dunes ... insane! And if that doesn't convince you check this one out ... That'll leave a mark!

This is a view of the Sealine beach area from atop a large sand dune ... damn near killed me climbing it. As you can tell it was near the end of a kind of a hazy and overcast day.

Oddly enough, Satish's son doesn't swim (neither does Satish) and they come from Kerala, India, which is by the ocean. Eventually, though he went in the water after climbing the sand dunes ... after all it was 40 degrees C, and I think the sand was more like 140 degrees.