Exploring Doha

Went for our first big road exploration today. Headed out and the roads were rather quiet... so sort of just kept on going.

First we headed off down Salwa Rd to Ramada Junction to have McDonalds for lunch. Remember what I said previously about fast food, naturally this took a while because we had to wait for it to open at noon, plus the usual s-l-o-w service.
After that we drove up and down the full length of the Al-Corniche and stopped to have a little walk beside the sea… the first time we had done this. Very nice warm sea breezes coming off warm waters, and all really just what you would expect. It has definitively cooled down quite a lot since we got stuck when we couldn’t get a taxi.

We have also finally worked out what happened to Palm Tree Island. It used to be a popular little Palm covered island in the middle of Doha Bay that you would take a short Dhow ride to. Believe it or not they knocked it down in July… now I am not exactly sure how you knock down an island, but here anything is possible. There have been rumours in the paper saying there is going to be a big fountain on it before the games… but now the former Palm Tree Island looks like a big sand bar with 1 or 2 palms on it in the middle of the bay (you can kind of see it in the background).

We then drove around West Bay past the Sheraton past City Centre, then up towards the West Bay Lagoon area where The Pearl is being built passed the Intercontinental and Aladdin’s Kingdom (the local amusement park). The area where The Pearl is being developed is huge as I guess it should be when you decide to build an island that is supposed to house about 40,000 people. Along with the actually island is the Zig Zag Towers, Ritz Carlton Hotel (which is already open), and what looks like a very big canal development.

Drove out of that area and took the wrong turn, so started heading north on the major highway. Very big, fast, straight road and actually had to drive all the way up to Losail MotoGP track until there was a place to turn around (about 10 klms). The highways have huge barriers between the two-way traffic and large fences at the sides of the road.

From what we can work out, these are camel fences, because as soon as you turn off the major road there are very large cattle-type grids across the roads between the fences. Naturally these were not cattle grids, but camel grids (although we didn’t see any camels). Also the land to the north of Doha is very flat, dusty, and probably mostly limestone… no sand dunes, which I think are mostly to the south and west (we shall have to investigate as what is a visit to Qatar without the sand dunes).

Headed back towards the middle of town pass the Doha Golf Club and Qatar University (which looks much bigger than I thought it would). Then decided to have a walk around Al-Bidda Park in daylight and get some touristy photos. Apparently come the cooler months it will be the place to be with boats and amusement rides of some sort (…who knows).

Finally we decided to end our day with an exploration of Toys’R’us. It actually seemed pretty small once we got inside, but as far as large scale toy stores in Doha, we think this is it. Still an experience where we bought the obligatory cars of course!