Alrighty, the blog is back! Normally I fly over the Pacific to get to Cambodia but I thought I’d switch things up and fly over the Atlantic this time around. I booked a Qatar Airlines flight to Dubai with a two night layover in Doha. With plans to visit Abu Dhabi as well and then Oman.
After a 13 hour flight with purposely no sleep, I landed in Doha around 6pm, a bit after the sunset. I didn’t realize how early the sun sets in the gulf states, around 5:30 or 5:45, so it was already mostly dark when I landed.
Everything was very smooth, the flight was on time, immigration was easy, I was in and out of the airport very quickly. The airport is connected to the metro, and it was super easy to buy a metro ticket, it’s a flat price no matter how far you’re going, which makes things easy, no worrying about trying to find your exact stop or anything like that. And it’s like $1. There’s also the option for a day pass, which is great, maybe $3. I can’t imagine they make any money from their metro, but a country with a jillion dollars in natural gas reserves can subsidize a few things! The airport train comes every 8 minutes. You just have to make sure you don’t go into the ladies only section of the metro, but no worries, there were very people around anyway. About 30 minutes of train, which included one quick transfer, and then 10 minutes of walking and I was at my hotel. About as seamless as it gets! Well without taking a taxi of course. But overall a nice first impression.
The nice thing about Qatar Airlines is they let you choose how many days stopover you’d like in Doha and your stopover includes discounted hotel prices with affiliated hotels, so two nights seemed about right (nobody raves about all the cool things to do in Doha) and the hotel I was staying at was $40 per night instead of $75. The first thing that struck me walking to the hotel was just how quiet the area was. There were a few other hotels around, a few convenience stores and casual Indian/Pakistani restaurants, but there was hardly anyone walking on the streets, few cars, lots of parking spaces, just an empty kind of feeling. It didn’t feel like much of a residential area, just a hotel zone.
Check in was easy, I put my stuff down, and then basically headed right back out to check out a bit of the city. I knew I’d only have a few hours before the adrenaline of getting into a completely new place wore off and I’d crash pretty hard, after over 24 hours of no sleep. The closest interesting place to my hotel was the Mina District, kind of a bougie, artsy place, with traditional clay/adobe brickwork transformed into a very modern and fashionable outdoor shopping and eating area. A pretty popular area for native Qataris.
The view walking to the Mina District
Almost nobody around one way there
One of the most interesting things about Qatar is that locals are only about 12% of the population, and the rest are mostly foreign workers. The standard of living for Qataris is pretty high, their GDP per capita is the highest of all the Gulf countries, followed closely bye UAE, so with all their all oil and gas reserves they can afford to bring in such a cheap labor force. And their government seems to take care of them very well.
But as a tourist in your day to day routine that mostly involves talking to hotel staff, cleaners, restaurant workers, any type of retail workers, you’re probably not actually going to meet many actual Qataris. Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Nepalese, Egyptians, you name it, you will come into contact with. But as a tourist, I’m not sure if even talked to anyone from Qatar the entire time I was there. Quite the strange dynamic. My first meal was some Turkish? kebabs at a place run a by some Bangladeshi guys. Tasty!
The country also faced some very heavy criticism for how they treated their foreign worker population in the lead up to the World Cup in 2022, where workers were forced to work in blazing hot conditions all day, and many ended up dying of heat stroke or exhaustion. So needless to say the Qatari government isn’t exactly great on human rights abuses and the spending money in the country does come with an ethical dilemma, but being from the US and seeing what’s going on with our government, well people in glass houses can’t throw stones. My general stance is that most governments suck and my money is mostly going to the people of the country, not the government. Plus its only 2 days. But suffice to say that the leverage Qataris can hold over the foreign workers is certainly ripe for exploitation from bad actors.
So walking around you’ll quickly notice that Qatari men usually wear the full length, white garments called the dishdasha, and women usually wear full black dress called an abaya, usually with a head covering as well, called a shayla. Although it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re from Qatar, as they could be from one of the neighboring gulf countries as well. Other foreign male workers generally wear long pants and button downs, as they’d normally wear in their own countries, foreign women usually wear pants and a blouse or a full length dress, and I was quite happy to be sporting shorts and a t-shirt.
As a white guy and obvious tourist I felt no obligation whatsoever to wear pants in the desert. I hate wearing pants. Nobody really cares what you wear around town, as long as it’s not a holy place. Although being a pretty conservative place, western girls will definitely get some looks with short shorts and shoulders exposed. White guys get a pass for everything.
Anyway, the Mina District was a nice walk around, lots of pretty buildings and artisanal shops, definitely a place where you could spend some coin (I didn’t) and you do get some very nice views of the downtown area of Doha, lit up all nicely, right across the bay. I stopped in a more cheap, local kebab place on the walk home, and then couldn’t resist the shisha café I passed, and then after that it was straight to bed, out by 10pm.
the entrance looking back to the downtown
nice coffeeshop on the water, $8 cappucino
random
Doha just has an emptiness about it
So the Mina District was fun for taking some photos, and then walking back there was also a little area on the waterfront that had a bunch of shops and restaurants made from shipping containers, which was kinda neat, as they were constructed very nicely and very colorful. Every area designed for public use in Doha is nice!
notice the security guard in the yellow vest, these guys are everywhere
One of many marinas
If you can’t tell, I like the lamps they have around here
So after a solid sleep I was wide awake at 5:30am. I was supposed to sleep longer than this! But I knew there was no going back at this point, so it seemed like a nice opportunity to go for a very early morning jog along the Corniche, the waterfront path that leads all along the bay to the downtown, maybe 5 miles away. Excellent running weather too, upper 50’s or low 60’s.
It was an excellent run, watching the sun come up and watching the buildings slowly get closer and taller. The corniche is gorgeous juxtaposition with the traditional wooden boats (called Dhows) docked near the shore, with the tall modern skycrapers off in the hazy background. I did stop my run many many times to take iphone photos. I kinda wished I took my big camera along, I have a hangup about seeing nice photos in my head but not being able to photograph with my DSLR. Fortunately cell phone camera technology is almost there anyway. But it was really really nice way to start the day. So here’s the photo dump…
You can see the art museum on the right
there is it! about 6:30am
As you can tell you, you just can’t have enough dhow photos!
Wide angle lens distortion is a real bitch on phone photos! So that was my early morning on Doha’s Corniche, very nice! I was already glad I made the stopover here.