It has started to get a little cooler, so we thought it was time to go exploring on a beach. This beach is near Wakra which is a small town about half way on the drive from Doha to Messaid, to the jobsite. Doha is of course like a thumb sticking out into the ocean so you dont have to go very far to find a beach. As you can see, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. You did see other cars going along - but everyone spreads out, so you have lots of room. There are no facilities of any kind - just water and sand - oh and quite a bit of garbage. I think it all washes up on shore from the ocean. There are huge garbage containers back from the beach, so I think that there must be an effort to clean the beaches.

Now, I have seen lots of footprints on a beach before, people, birds, crabs etc. but never before have I seen camel footprints!

The idea of driving to this particular area was that there were mangrove swamps not too far away and there was supposed to be great birdwatching there. We did in fact see lots of birds, ones we had never seen before. I will put some pictures on the blog tomorrow of some we saw.

Ah! these were where the footprints came from! They were just sauntering along in a line when you looked away from the beach, back in the direction of the main road. There are no real roads there, you take a reasonably well travelled looking track off the main road in Wakra, and just head out in the direction of the ocean. There are many tracks just heading along the sea shore and you just stop anywhere you think looks interesting. There were certain places where the sand was quite soft and you had to be careful not to get stuck, but generally it was fairly hard packed and was made up of tiny shells and pieces of shells. I will put some more pictures up tomorrow.