Holiday in Abu Dhabi

We stayed in the city of Abu Dhabi for 5 nights, which was a good chance to look around town. We really appreciated all of the parks and gardens, which were easily the best that we've seen in the Gulf. The extensive gardens along the city waterfront (corniche) were particularly good, with many different playgrounds to suit children of various ages.

Once again we took the opportunity to buy a lot of children's books at the various bookshops - primarily Magrudy's and Jashanmal. We talked to some locals who bemoaned the prices and limited range of books in Abu Dhabi, but it's still a world apart from the tragically small list of books that can be found in Saudi Arabia's main bookshop chain.

On the first official day of Eid we went on a day trip to Al Ain, which is an oasis city in the Abu Dhabi emirate about 150km from Abu Dhabi city. Al Ain is on the border with Oman and is clearly developing as a tourist destination. We really enjoyed the Al Ain Wildlife Park which is a modern zoo, with quite open and natural-style enclosures for most of the animals. It was extremely busy with groups of cheerful young men; clearly many construction companies had brought along all of their staff for an Eid outing.

While at Al Ain we also visited Jebel Hafeet, which is the prominent and stark peak that towers over the area. We also enjoyed Green Mubazzarah, which is a park on the lower slopes of Jebel Hafeet with many hot springs. Both of these locations also had huge crowds of day trippers which made for a very festive atmosphere.

On our last evening in Abu Dhabi we joined the Mainland Hash House Harriers for a run; this was a revelation for Liam, who hadn't been aware of the trail-finding nature of a HHH run. Liam and Peter finished the run, while Owen and Maree stayed back with the knitters and had some sociable chats.

The next day we drove about 250km from Abu Dhabi to Liwa Oasis, which is in the far south of the UAE. It's a long and narrow oasis on the edge of the Rub Al Khali (Empty Quarter) - the great and inhospitable sandy desert of the Arabian peninsula. We stayed in the Liwa Hotel in the centre of the Oasis, and there is a spectacular 25km drive out to Tal Moreb - a particularly steep and famous dune that is used for races each year. The sand dunes on that road are in colours from pale yellow to red, and range in height up to about 300m - a tantalising taste of the real desert.

We split up the drive home to Riyadh into two days: a 600km run to Hofuf, where we hunted out some of the famous old forts; and then a final 350km to Riyadh. The most eventful part of the trip was a strong cross-wind that picked up as we approached the UAE/Saudi border and continued until Hofuf - we had moderate blowing sand through all of the dune areas, which made for some very poor visibility and slower travel. We regularly see a lot of vehicles that have an ugly brown paint sprayed on the front to protect against sand damage, and on this day we also saw several vehicles that had dishwashing detergent smeared over them. We don't know if there is any value in these remedies, but so far our paintwork has escaped unharmed.