Base Qatar

18.10.2019 - 19.10.2019 35 °C
View Urban Reverie Late 2019 on urbanreverie's travel map.

Qatar Airways has been judged the world's best airline by Skytrax five times, and I concur with their judgment. The seats are comfortable, the service was professional, the interior was decorated in tasteful maroons and restrained creams, nothing went wrong. I can certainly recommend flying with Qatar.

One thing surprised me though - just how generic and international Qatar Airways is. I knew that a large proportion of their crew were expatriates, but I wasn't expecting all of them to be. Asians, Africans, Europeans, Australians - but not a single Arab was to be seen among the cabin crew. Much the same can be said for the menu - penne pasta with Mediterranean vegetables, omelettes, focaccias, chocolate mousse, sausages; all decent enough but scarcely a window into Qatari culture. I admire how many airlines are essentially an introduction to their country's culture. Think of AirAsia's nasi lemak or Asiana's bulgogi or Qantas's Aboriginal dot-painting uniforms or KLM's safety video produced using stop motion photography of Delft blue chinaware.

As pleasant as Qatar Airways' A380 was, fifteen and a half hours is far too long to sit in one seat. I am jealous of people who sleep easily on aeroplanes; I only got about three and a half hours of extremely interrupted sleep. I was hoping that I would sleep far longer as I only got about three hours sleep the night before with my eye trouble.

It was with great relief that I left the plane at Hamad International Airport shortly before six in the morning, a very nice and nearly brand new airport. Even though there were only five people in front of me at my immigration counter, I still had to wait forever. It wasn't because the immigration officers were lazy and inefficient, but because they are extremely strict and thorough. As an Australian citizen I had it easy but they still demanded to know every last detail of my stay and I had to show my hotel booking. In front of me were some Chinese citizens and the officer was putting them in the star chamber.

I withdrew some Qatari riyals from an ATM and caught a nearly empty bus to my hotel. You need to buy a fare smart card for ten riyals (note: one riyal equals forty Australian cents) and add as many more riyals for a balance to pay your fare (in my case, the fare was three riyals). Luckily there is a smart card purchasing machine in the airport bus terminal.

While I was waiting for my route 747 bus (747 bus? To the airport? Geddit? Hahaha), I saw an unusual pedestrian crossing sign. It featured a woman wearing a long dress. I've never seen women represented on road signs before. I never knew that Qatar was such a paragon of gender inclusiveness. I took a photo and a security guard went crazy, he said all photography was strictly forbidden. He didn't make me delete it, so you get to see it for your enjoyment.

I was hoping that the Concorde Hotel would give me an early check-in at eight o'clock, but no such joy. I had to come back after two. This is probably a good thing - if I had gone to sleep at eight, my body clock would be out of whack for days afterward. So I started exploring. My hotel is right next to al-Doha al-Jadeda station on the brand new Doha Metro, the most bizarre public transport system I have ever encountered.

There are significant similarities betwen the Sydney Metro and the Doha Metro. They both opened in May 2019 (though Doha's is eighteen days older) and they both consist of driverless trains operating along a single partially completed line.

That's where the similarities end. So how bizarre is the Doha Metro? Let's see. There are three classes of travel - Gold, Family and Standard. Three classes for a metro line with only thirteen stations. At most stations the railway staff outnumbered the passengers by orders of magnitude. I know it's a Saturday but it was uncanny just how empty the trains and stations were. The entire system stank of hospital-grade disinfectant, the kind of stuff the World Health Organisation would use at a field hospital in the Congo after an Ebola outbreak. The security was extremely officious and intrusive, and they are everywhere. At one station I was feeling a little hungry and I saw a nearly empty vending machine in an alcove in a distant corner. I walked over to the vending machine and a security guard intercepted me to ask what I was doing. I said I wanted to buy a snack and he insisted on standing with me and watching like a hawk as I decided to decline to buy a pack of peanuts, the only product on offer.

The trains are tiny little three-car things, but the stations are six cars long so provision has been made for the day when people actually use the trains. Of the three carriages, two carriages are Standard class, half of one carriage is Family (for families and lone women only) and the other half is Gold class. I bought a 30 riyal daily Gold class ticket and I was the only Gold passenger on every train I took. The station staff are so numerous and so bored that all you have to do is look slightly puzzled and you will have a crowd of polite yet smothering employees asking if they can help you.

I rode the entire length of the red line and back, and then went to the Museum of Islamic Art. A bus took me part of the way from Msherieb metro station and I walked the rest of the way along the Corniche, a waterfront boulevard and parkland that hugs Doha Bay. It was hard work. It is extremely hot and humid here. Today was 35 °C. I was expecting it to be hot, Qatar is desert, but I was not expecting humidity. I have never heard of a humid desert before. I don't understand how the air can have so much moisture but it never falls as rain. There is no vegetation in Qatar at all; the view of the countryside from the outskirts of Doha presents a bleak prospect of nothing but bleached sand stretching to the horizon.

I had a good view while I was walking. The new Doha city centre, West Bay, is on the other side of the bay. I have never seen a more impressive skyline. Not even Singapore comes close. A collection of dozens of super-tall skyscrapers clustered along the bayfront as if they were competing against one another to be the tallest and most ostentatiously extravagant. I fail to see how a country with a population of two million can generate such an amazing skyline. Brisbane has a population of two million but doesn't have a skyline one tenth as dense.

The hard walk in the torrid heat was worth it. The Emir of Qatar is a keen art collector and has put part of his collection from the Muslim world into a museum open to the public. The museum is housed in a large octagonal palace jutting out into Doha Bay with tinkling fountains inside and out. It was a majestic building for a majestic collection. Calligraphy, jewellery, ceramics, utensils, scientific instruments, some over a thousand years old and showing the most exquisitely intricate handiwork. You couldn't buy jewellery half as good at Angus & Coote nowadays.

White nationalists and some conservatives claim that Islam is an inherently backward religion incapable of innovation. Let them come to Doha. Islamic civilisation gave the world a wealth of scientific knowledge. Modern psychiatry, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry owe a great deal of debt to the Islamic Golden Age.

By the time I finished with the museum, it was almost time for me to check into my hotel. It wasn't that far, about three kilometres, and by the time I found a bus stop and waited for a bus I could have walked there. The heat and humidity toned down a bit in the early afternoon so I resolved to leg it.

I set off on my way. After about a kilometre I reached a construction site that was blocking the footpath. So I crossed the busy four-lane arterial road but the other footpath was also blocked by a construction site. The road was too busy to walk on, so I walked along the median strip, only to find that the median strip was also blocked by a construction site a few hundred metres down the road. So I had to double back along the median and find a detour. Every detour was also blocked by construction. I ended up taking twice the time I expected to get back to my hotel.

I checked into the hotel, rested for a while and got hungry so I decided to head out in the early evening to grab a bite to eat. It is curiously difficult to find a place to eat in Doha. I had imagined that due to the presence of hundreds of thousands of South Asian expatriates that there would be yummy biryani restaurants on every street corner. Perhaps those places do exist, but they were hidden away, because on my travels through Doha so far places to eat are conspicuous through their absence.

I didn't feel like paying fifty Australian dollars at my hotel's restaurant so I headed for West Bay, Doha's brand new central business district north of the old city centre. I got off the metro at DECC station and found myself in a forest of skyscrapers lit up in a discotheque of dancing colours. There were plenty of people around, and people need to eat, so I reasoned that there must be restaurants in the area. I saw a shopping mall across a major multi-lane highway with a restaurant on an upper floor, but there was simply no way to cross the road. No pedestrian crossing, no traffic lights, no subway, no footbridge.

I decided to follow all the other people to see where they were going. Many were crossing this side street that led to a car park entrance. They were walking through the car park into another shopping mall. The City Centre mall was doing a roaring trade, every shop was still open at 7pm on a Saturday and the place echoed with the plaintive cries of hundreds of babies and toddlers being pushed around in strollers. So this is how Qatari families spend their spare time. I am rapidly reaching the conclusion that Doha is Desert Singapore.

I ended up buying dinner from Arby's, an American fast food chain that specialises in roast beef rolls of astounding blandness, and for dessert I tried disgustingly cloying doughnuts from Tim Horton's, a famous Canadian chain that thankfully has not yet reached Australia.

I left the City Centre mall by another entrance and got lost. I found myself on streets where it was impossible to cross the road. Footpaths would end forcing me to return the way I came or walk on busy highways. A couple of times I had to walk on garden beds. It is obvious that the huge numers of highly paid town planners and civil engineers who designed West Bay never stopped to consider that people might need to walk two blocks and cross the roads while doing so. At least I got to admire all the dizzying colourdd lights on all the buildings while I attempted to find my way back to the metro station so I could have a well-deserved sleep in my hotel.

The Forbidden Sign at the airport