Last Stops
Last Stops
We travelled southwest along the Garafat Al Rayyan and Dukhan Highway until we saw the first indication of a turnoff to the little town of Zekreet. As I described earlier, there were supposed to be old forts and ruins near Zekreet and all of us were quite interested in finding them. So we headed down this dusty road off of the highway and went quite a ways before we saw any indication of, well anything. The picture at the top of the page is something like a dune-mesa, a sort of limestone sand dune. We saw it as we drove along this road. We finally say a sign, it was a sign for a nature reserve. As you can see, we should have seen ostriches and gazelles whose eggs we were not supposed to mess with.
On the way out of this little village, I spied some sign lying at the edge of the road and had to stop to look. It was a camel-crossing sign that had clearly been knocked over by what, a stampede of camels I presume. I had to take a picture which my traveling companions caught by taking a picture of me.
On to Dukhan...
Dukhan is one of Qatar’s main oil and gas producing cities. Qatar Petroleum has one of its main production facilities there.
We were actually looking forward to seeing just how big a city Dukhan was; and I have to tell you I was sort of disappointed. There was not much to the city except a short strip mall and an entrance to QP that we were not allowed into. We saw obvious signs of petrochemical plants on the way into town.
All said and done, Zekreet and Dukhan were disappointments, but then we may not have known where to look for interesting things. As we left Dukhan, we headed east across the peninsula that is Qatar, back to our home base of Doha. The road trip took us about 8 hours and it was certainly interesting. We must have covered almost all there is to see in Qatar, north of Doha. Now we need to explore south towards Saudi Arabia next.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Zekreet and Dukhan?