(Aside - did I mention that we got a honkin' big SUV? Now that the weather is getting so nice, we wanted to do some exploring in the desert and that means 4WD. It's handy, too, while the grands are in town so we can move the whole group in one vehicle. And there's something kind of surreal about trucking around a Middle Eastern city in a big-a** TrailBlazer with Johnny Cash playing on the stereo. Add that to the list of "never thought I'd...")
Back to the beach. Sealine is about an hour's drive Doha, going south through the desert. Photos don't serve a purpose in most of Qatar's desert areas because there's absolutely nothing to look at. It's tabletop flat and the ground isn't really sandy but rocky, hard-packed dust and widely scattered scrub. Occasionally you see a group of camels but they stay pretty far away from the road. Most of the coastline is the same thing: packed dust turned to mud flats by the tide. So you have to know where to look for a decent beach.
After driving through that for an hour, going past oil refineries and a massive power plant, you get to the sand dunes and a nice, long sandy beach. Sealine is a resort on the beach, and for 50 QR per person you can go use their facilities and enjoy the beach and pool. We were not the only ones to have this idea. The pool was crazy.
I need to get my rant about Sealine out of the way so I can move on... the pool water was cloudy, the facilities were barely a step up from what you would expect at a public beach, and there were hardly any umbrellas or chairs on the beach. But what made me crazy was the trash - I picked up plastic bags, bottles, paper cups, even broken glass. What people do makes me sick.
OK, now I'm going to move on and show what a day at the beach looks like in Qatar: a lot of it is like any beach. We had a strong offshore breeze, so no body surfing today. We get bigger waves in Northern Michigan.
Mother and son bonding time.
But I haven't ever seen camel rides offered along the beach at Mullett Lake. Key tip: sit behind the hump. I'm not sure why they don't just slide right off the hind end, but I guess that's what the saddle is for.
Nor do you see groups of women in abayas on the beach at Walloon Lake.
Maybe it's that the heat has broken, maybe I'm acclimating to the culture, maybe I'm being brainwashed. But the abayas don't look particularly restrictive to me anymore. These women don't look oppressed to me. Their abayas are detailed and ornate with rhinestones and embroidery. They're wearing jeans or whatever they want underneath, walking with sandals or barefoot along the beach, drinking a soda, talking and laughing. As far as I can tell, in Qatar the black robe (abaya) and head scarf (shella) are pretty much obligatory for Muslim women, but further covering is up to the individual. And it's not so discriminatory when you realize that the men wear full robes and head coverings as well. I don't really get why women have to wear black, but what woman doesn't have a little black dress in her wardrobe?
Sorry for all the tangents... Here you can see the dunes in the distance. The tiny bumps on top of the dunes are SUVs - dune bashing is a big sport here. There are ATV rental places lining the road that leads to the dunes...
All in all, it was a good day, and it was helpful to be able to use Sealine's facilities. We're hoping to get out of Doha a lot more often now that we have an appropriate vehicle for the desert. I have a long list of places I want to see...
