Tuesday, February 3rd.
Today I took a full day tour to the north and west of Qatar. I had a driver and was joined by three young people from Italy. The country is quite small, with Doha on the east side, the sand dunes and inland sea on the south, the rock desert and UNESCO World Heritage site of Al Zubarah on the north. Our first stop was at a mangrove swamp on the edge of the desert. Then we visited a fish market by the seaside port of Al Khor, which was smaller than the one in Saudi but sparkling clean and efficient. We visited an abandoned pearl diving town and then Al Zubarah Fort, both of which are being restored by UNESCO as pearl diving was a very lucrative and dangerous way to make a living in the 1800’s until about 1930. The divers made 8 to 10 dives per day holding their breath for 90 seconds or more while they swam down up to 20 metres or more, gathered as many oysters as they could in a basket and when they signaled they were hauled back up by the rope attached to their waist by their assistant on the boat. Divers suffered from eye stress from the salt, cold from the depths and some died from the bends or drowning. They made good money but their families were paid in advance in case the diver didn’t survive. They hauled up thousands of oysters per day and apparently on average found one pearl per 1000. They left them in piles to die in the sun before they pried them open, I’ll bet that was smelly. In the 1930’s the Japanese created cultured pearls and the pearl diving industry in Qatar and elsewhere collapsed. That combined with the Great Depression devasted the Qatari economy. The country had no other major resource until the 1950’s when oil was discovered here and then vast fields of natural gas in their international waters of the Arabian Sea. Since then the economy has exploded and it is now one of the richest in the world.
Then we drove to some interesting rock formations created by the wind sculpting the limestone rock. Next up was an unusual ‘art’ display in the Brouq Nature Reserve, created by Richard Serra titled ‘East to West/West to East’. The sculptural work spans over a kilometre and comprises four steel plates in perfect alignment, each over fourteen metres tall. They mark the border between east and west Qatar, the rising and setting sun, and the depth of the sea at this spot years ago. I wouldn’t call it art, I’d call it engineering. I preferred nature’s sculpting. Finally we drove to the camel racing market. As soon as we got there we saw hundreds of camels with riders walking a very long track beside the road. On the other side of the road was the actual 8km racing track and other camels were being trained there. It was amazing, I’ve never seen so many camels with riders, none of whom are Qataris by the way, they are all expats from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. Incredible sight. I got some great videos. Shortly after I was dropped back at my hotel. I went to get a quick bite at a little restaurant here in the hotel. The food was Middle Eastern and I didn’t know what anything was so I asked the only customer, a middle aged man.What’s good? We talked for a bit, he recommended something and I ordered it. Turns out he is Lebanese and we agreed that the food was good and that we both hate Trump; and because of that he paid for mine, saying we’re buddies! Back to the room to catch up on the blog.
