So Grace and I are off backpacking again, the plan was to start in Sri Lanka, but looking at flights the only affordable ones seemed to have a 18 hour stop over in Dohar Qatar, after some digging I found out that the Qatar government, in an attempt to encourage tourism, will pay for you to stay in a 4* hotel if you leave the airport and stay in Dohar city. I had a Google to make sure it was safe and there were actually things to do and decided why not make it two days? Several months later, here we are, jet lagged in a hotel in Dohar.
Our first night was spent getting to the hotel and then eating tacos the size of plates in an American hotel bar, which wasn’t a super Qatar experience. We could have been anywhere in the world except for a sign on the door that said Qatar women weren’t allowed in unattended and not at all after 5pm, which felt very surreal.
The next morning after a long sleep we went out and saw some of Dohar. We started by walking around Souq Waqif, a market for traditional clothing, handicrafts, spices & perfumes. It was pleasant to walk around and have a nose in all of the shops, we probably would have ended up buying some of the pretty hand made bits if we didn’t have to carry them around with us for the next 3 months. We also saw the very popular sculpture of a massive thumb, which seemed to have a crowd of people having photos giving a thumbs up infront of it.
One cool thing we also stumbled upon which is probably quite unique to Qatar, was people selling falcons. Apparently hunting with falcons here is still very popular and was saw several shops selling them, one let me get a photo holding one for $1.
Next we wandered along Al Corniche, the promenade by the sea front, and saw lots of wooden boats and the football world cup photo point, we also said hello to some camels in stables… or whatever the camel equivalent of a stable is…
Next we visited the museum of islamic art, which had a lot of cool textiles, pottery and books and the most flash diamond necklace I’ve ever seen.
After we finished in the museum we headed back to Souq Waqif for lunch, we were seated on a table next to three Qatari men in their thirties. They ordered huge amounts of food and one of them fed some extra to a cat and then suddenly we were surrounded by about 5 cats and me and Grace were laughing at them trying to shoo the cats away. We ended up chatting to them and asking about the dishes they were eating and they offered to order us some, we said we wouldn’t eat it all so they just offered us some of theirs and we offered them back some of ours, a mushy meat spread on bread. We continued chatting and they seem surprised we were just visiting Dohar and wasn’t here for work and we’re asking us about the UK and what we did for work etc, one of them was an Arabic teacher and taught us how to say hello (As-salamu alaykum) and thank you (Shukran) in Arabic. We were talking for around 20mins mostly in broken English then at one point on of the men rang a friend who spoke good English and his friend translated for us that they had a very nice time talking to us and we’re glad we liked Qatar and that they were paying for our lunch. We were slightly apprehensive about this, wondering if we had misjudged the situation and been over friendly and if we were about to owe them something in return. But when they had finished they paid our bill despite our protests, wished us a pleasant stay in Qatar and left. They had just been kind and paid for us with no strings attached, and they say there is no such thing as a free lunch!
It started to get warm in the afternoon, despite being winter and the coldest season in Qatar it was still 27°c (I’m glad we’re here in winter as it gets up to 50°c in summer!) shops close between 1-3pm so we headed back to our hotel and started doing some planning for our time in Sri Lanka.
In the evening we headed to Dohar food festival a it was the last day of a huge week long event in one of the parks in the new part of town, it was cool to see all the sky scrapers there.
There were stalls with food from all over the world but we headed for the middle eastern section and tried several dishes. First was a dish called Majboos, which was flavoured pilau rice with fried chicken on top covered with a spicy sauce.
Next up was some Palestinian tacos, which we did get explained to us but I now can’t remember what they were composed of, they were nice but nothing special. But the hibiscus drink we had with them was very nice.
Disappointingly we were already quite full after these dishes so the plan was to just get some water from a very quiet vegetarian stall and then head home. However, after a slight misunderstanding when pointing to water, we ended up with some samosas that were situated next to the water. Luckily these ended up being the tastiest dish of the night.
Our second day in Qatar was a lot less packed, we had a bit of a lay in and we went for breakfast in the market at 11am but this was way past breakfast according to our waiter so we ended up panic ordering a curry and bread off of the lunch menu. It’s not like we’re going to spend the next three weeks in Sri Lanka eating curry.
it was very tasty though, we only ordered one as the portions here are so big, we still had leftovers even through we were sharing it! It only cost £4.13 for the meal and two drinks!
After our early lunch had a walk round the market to try and find some post cards, at this point my body decided to try and reignite its favourite pastime while we’re traveling of making me puke in beautiful places. Luckily I managed to hold it together around the market, although there were some close calls in some very smelly parts where mice, rabbits and birds were being sold in cages. But on the walk back a strong waft of heated urine proofed to much for me to hold it in and I puked in a bush. I thought being in a country for just two days would mean I would be safe from having vomited there but apparently my body is keen to make sure no new land goes unclaimed, god I hate having Crohn’s Disease sometimes.
We made a hasty retreat back to the hotel scared about being arrested under public indecency charges of some sort.
Once my stomach had stoped cramping we decided to make the most of our last afternoon here by going to a pool bar. This also didn’t quite go to plan, we didn’t realise until we entered the pool bar that it was attached to the Ritz hotel and we had to pay £20 per person to use the sun loungers. But we paid up and found a nice spot facing the sea, only for the sun to disappear and the wind to pick up 5 minutes later. So the rest of the afternoon we spent under towels to keep warm, refusing to leave the beds we had just paid a day’s budget for. At least we got to finish most of our Sri Lanka planning!
For our last evening we headed back to the market and picked up some post cards to send home and then shared a chicken shawarma.
Tomorrow were up early to catch out flight to Sri Lanka, I’ll tell you more about it soon.
Lots of love,
Alice x