About two weeks ago, I went with a Meetup.com group to Qatar’s Inland Sea (Khor al Adaid or Khawr al Udayd). It is located at the border of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and there are no paved roads to get there. A Qatari gentleman was our driver, which was good and bad. It was good because he knew exactly where to go and didn’t get stuck (and got several people unstuck)! Bad because he kept want to go off steep dunes! Scared me to death. You go south from Doha until the road ends at the Sealine Resort and then you take off into the beige beyond. Hopefully you are with someone who has been many times or has a GPS because there are very few landmarks to guide your way. You drive past tall dunes and cell phone towers till eventually you see a large dune shaped like a pyramid. This is call the “Sheraton” because it looks like the Sheraton hotel in Doha. This is the spot our group had chosen to camp at for the day. After taking some pictures before sun down, I changed into my swimsuit and got in the water. Warm and very salty bathwater greeted me, but I didn’t care. It was water! It’s an unusual experience as it is saltier than the ocean but much calmer and has a strange bottom that has sudden drop offs and shallow parts. This is due to the influx of water coming every day. When we left later, the tide was coming in and several people had to move their cars.
“The Sheraton”
