Liwa desert camping

Go a little past the town of Madinat Zayed, past the last homely house, and you'll be in dune country. 

We followed our (more intrepid) friends there this weekend, driving into the desert in search of a quiet, empty place to camp. Steerforth was game.

Nick was pretty game, too. 

With significant coaching, he made it up to our campsite....

...on the third...

...or fourth try.

We didn't count too carefully. 

Relieved, we set up our tents (check out our fancy green sand tent!), and discovered that we had the dunes to ourselves.



Liwa is tremendous. Alone in the dunes, a few hundred meters away from our campsite, the desert was ours, and it was empty. We lay in the sand as it cooled down, and watched sun set and the stars pop out of the sky.

We've never seen so many. 

Desert Island Adventure

Yesterday morning, we bicycled by several male giraffes -- very slowly. I shudder to think what we would have done if they'd startled. A few minutes later (before some "technical" mountain biking that unseated both of us) we paused, breathless, twenty feet away from a napping cheetah. No fence between us. And then a field of running oryx. A leaping Indian gazelle crossed our path. She was stunning.



We went to Sir Bani Yas Island last weekend for an adventure - not our usual sort of adventure, since we rarely visit parks stuffed with dubiously assorted exotic animals. But an adventure we got.








Sir Bani Yas, about a three hour drive from Abu Dhabi, used to be connected to the mainland, and is now divided from the Emirate by a thin stretch of shallow water. It's covered in volcanic rock and barren sand formations -- a bit inhospitable, it would seem, but it's been settled for quite some time. On one end of the island, there are ruins of a Christian monastery from 600 AD under excavation.


Now the island is part of the UAE greening project, which pumps a mind-boggling amount of desalinated water all over the emirate. Most of Sir Bani Yas is irrigated, and trees (including orange, olive, and date palm, which grow produce served in the hotel's restaurants) grow in neat rows. There is even a faux savannah area, where the grass grows in long tufts.

The hotel is in between the ocean, and a large, shallow pond dotted with mangroves, and (much to Nick's delight) flamingos.



Apparently the lesser flamingo (the sort at Bani Yas) get pink in proportion to the amount of shrimp they eat! Ours looked pretty happy.

Sand gazelle and mountain gazelle roam the island. (As does the hydrex, closest living relative of the elephant, and eerily similar to the Ewok. We spotted trees full of them on our morning runs, but have no pictures to prove it.)

We interrupted a huge herd of sand gazelles peacefully munching on our first morning run.



Peacocks also run around, making noises that reminded us uncomfortably of the cheetahs we'd read about.



We would see the cheetahs in good time. In the interior of the island lies a huge, fenced park, where five cheetahs live, along with many herds of sand gazelle and other tasty cheetah-treats.

On our first morning, we went for a drive through the park in almost comical safari vans.

We forgot about how silly we felt in the van when we arrived at a large area where sand gazelle, Indian bucks with funny, twisty horns, oryx, and various birds (Egyptian geese, African crowned crane, more peacocks).

We saw a male ostrich strutting....

...another one motionless, all by himself, in the middle of the desert...


























...a crazy looking bird called a crowned crane...



...and giraffes fighting, swinging their necks at each other.

And oryx, which used to be all but extinct in the wild. Breeding programs in the UAE have restored the oryx population significantly. (Our guide who brought us so close to the sleeping cheetah said he was more afraid of oryx than anything else in the park - apparently they are pretty grumpy.)

Very importantly, we saw a breed of Moroccan sheep that we think might do very well in in St. Meinrad. These guys can stand up to fight, and to eat leaves from the trees.

On our way back, baby reef sharks were playing in the shallows. They were quite visible (and terrifyingly many!) when we took this picture - you can pick out three at the bottom right.

It was lovely exploring the island.

As usual in Abu Dhabi, we were confronted by a peculiar mix of good intentions, curious result, and massive expenditure. The irrigation alone must have stunning logistics...and cost...behind it. Animals don't all belong together, and they aren't all from the Arabian peninsula. Some are gifts from other nations (we wish someone would give the park some camels!), brought in by helicopter or military plane. (Transporting a giraffe somewhere is incredibly hard, apparently, because they have such high blood pressure that putting their heads down is quite risky.) As usual, we find these antics comical, endearing, and eyebrow-raising all at once.

But we enjoyed the rocks, the beach, and the sunset with unadulterated pleasure.

Coconut Island Kayak

Nick has a crush on an island. It is a little, almost uninhabited island that was dredged from the Gulf. (This is a frequent practice here - Bahrain has expanded by 10% via dredging - and an environmental problem, as it's bad for the corals in the Gulf, which have been shrinking drastically in the last few decades). 

Almost uninhabited. There is one mansion there, amid the undeveloped sand.

The island was supposed to be a luxury resort, we learned via "the Google." But the Internets haven't quite kept up to speed on why the luxury resort hasn't happened yet. What we have found are articles from 2008, 2009, and 2010 that gleefully proclaim the island's completion by 2010. We also found claims that the island is "rightfully named so because it has many coconut palms." False. 

And there is no Ritz Carlton Luxury Hotel, and no discernible labor is going on. So the poor man on the island must be very lonely. This is his view:

And this is his rubble-strewn beach. Yes, we kayaked there, despite our fears that a man living alone on an island in Abu Dhabi might be a little xenophobic, and possibly well-armed. We didn't land on his dock, at least. 

If you come to Abu Dhabi, we probably will not take you to Coconut Island. But we will take you where we ate afterwards - the Lebanese Flower, where banana smoothies are to die for, and the falafel sandwich costs a little more than a dollar. 

In which we paddle board and make a curious acquaintance

"What? You moved from San Francisco to here?!! Excuse me, but I have to go to the bathroom..." the guy we met at the Hilton bar spluttered. He has lived in AD for 30 years - but somehow, our move was beyond belief. He had similarly required a good deal of explanation to process our paddleboarding attempts, so I suppose his skepticism was par for the course.

Paddle boarding is a thing here. Amid a sea of jet skis, paddle sports are doing quite well. Helpfully, there are areas where motors aren't allowed (many of which are full of jet skis anyway, but some of which, like the mangroves, are blissfully empty).

We rented boards from Watercooled at the Hilton Beach Club, where there's also sailing and windsurfing and kayaking. It will be a short walk across the street from our new apartment (more on that pending). Paddleboarding was pretty easy at first.

 We paddled.   We did a little yoga.

We approached the shore dangerously closely.

And then our yoga poses got rather ambitious, and the falling began.

 Apparently, standing on one foot is hard on a paddle board.

And that is how we made friends with people at the bar, who (unbeknownst to us) were greatly entertained by our antics. Our skeptical friend had two cold beers waiting for us on the patio - our first drinks in AD!