We went dune bashing! And camel riding! And played in bedouin-style tents! And had really tasty food! And saw Saudi Arabia across the
Inland Sea! And absolutely nothing went wrong! Were we really in Doha?
We wanted to use some Christmas money to do something we wouldn't otherwise spend our money on, so we decided to splurge on a desert safari trip with some friends from work through a company called
Gulf Adventures Tours. Our driver, a friendly and laid-back 25-ish-year-old Palestinian named Gazi whose uncle owns the company, picked us up at our villa promptly at 2:00 in a 4-wheel-drive SUV.
We talked and drove for over an hour down past Mesaieed to
Sealine, the kids in car-seats in the back seat with Rachel, and me up front with Gazi. The kids talked / jabbered and fell asleep just as we pulled out off the road onto the sand to let some air out of our tires and take a stretch break. Then we started dune bashing.
Gazi assured us that as he was the lead driver, and he knew almost every car had kids in it, he would take it easy and so would the other drivers. But he said he wouldn't have to hold back much, because people always overestimate how bumpy it'll be. And off we went! There were several times in the first ten minutes of him driving right up to the edge of some really steep dunes that I thought he was just going to drive right over. And then after the first ten minutes, he started doing so, and I was frankly convinced that we were going to roll right over. He kept turning the car sideways or diagonal as we slid down these dunes, but we never once came close to tipping. He knew what he was doing, and we soon became convinced of that and had a lot of fun. We never went airborne or anything, and sliding around on the dunes on those soft tires felt really smooth. Elliott's face was priceless, and Amelia slept through most of it. Here are the in-car reactions. Warning: don't watch these if you get motion-sickness from shaky videos.
At one point, one of the other drivers didn't follow Gazi and got stuck as a result.
Here's one of the dunes we had just come down.
Here's a YouTube video of what our dune bashing was like. Mute it first because of the irritating music. Then imagine only 4 cars in sight, all of them in a line in our group, following us in the lead car. And then ignore everything after the 2:00 minute mark. The weekends are apparently frequently like this video down in Sealine where we were, which is why we went mid-week.
We stopped after a bit to look across the Inland Sea to Saudi Arabia and drink Rani, a canned pineapple juice with bits of crushed pineapple in it. While there, my cell phone only picked up the Saudi towers, so I got a bunch of texts welcoming me to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I'll be saving those, as I don't think I'm ever likely to visit. That's Saudi Arabia over there.
This is us at a large tide pool / ground-water pond with just one set of tire-tracks running through it, not our own.
At the end of about an hour of dune bashing, we arrived at the camp, a site with about 15 tents, each about 20ft x 40 ft.
There was a volleyball net set up, though we didn't use it, and it would have been a nice place to swim if it hadn't been 70 degrees out.
There were cushions set around the edges of the tents, as well as around low tables out on the sand where we'd be eating dinner.
The nice cool sand had been raked flat over the whole site, so even Amelia found it easy to walk and crawl.
There were porta-potties, which was nice. They had a snowboard for sand-skiing, and I was the only one who tried that. I took one or two runs trying to use it as a snowboard, and it went about as well as my one and only attempt at snowboarding (read: badly). So after that I just rode down it on my bum, once with Elliott, who didn't want to do it again, and once on my own to see how fast I could go (answer: much faster than even on snow! Though it was a pretty steep dune.)
Rachel rode a camel for the first time and seemed to relish the experience. I'd ridden one in Egypt, so I didn't feel the need to this time. Elliott didn't want to, and Rachel needed both hands to hold on as the camel stood up and sat down, so we didn't send Amelia with her.
But she was glad to get her mommy back.
Elliott was in heaven playing with his friends the whole time. I'm glad we went with the group rather than just alone, which we could have done.
It was a nice, peaceful, restful evening, and we all decided to go home a little early since it was a bit chilly there on the windy shore. We were home at 10:00.
All in all, I would recommend this trip to pretty much anyone. To rent all the seats in one car costs QR 1750, which is about $480, and it seats six. We couldn't find another couple to go with us on short notice, so we just paid the price. Hence the use of the Christmas money. Everything else on the trip was included in the price except the camel ride, but that was just QR 25. Many people we know here scoff at the fact that we paid for the trip when you can just go drive around like that on your own in any car any time. But what we paid for was the assurance that it would go well and be done right, we'd have an experienced driver, and our own rickety old car wouldn't get damaged, and all that was worth the price given how things usually go in Doha.
