Camels and cats

These days it’s all about animals.

A couple of weeks ago we went to the camel racing. Mr A had been once before and knew that the most essential component of spectating camels is a 4x4 so off we went with our saloon-confined friends. The roadworks around the track had us momentarily confused – I had the bright idea of following the pick-up full of camels, but it turned out they were going somewhere else.

Once we found it, we ditched the saloon in the carpark, piled in to the 4x4 and headed into the throng. We watched the first race from the startline whilst we figured out what the hell was going on: lots of camels are brought out from the paddock by lots of men in white robes, they are held at the start line, the barrier is raised, the men quickly run out of the way of stampeding camels, the 4x4s speed off, everyone disappears into the dusty distance. Then you wait around at the start line for 15 minutes whilst everyone else is off around the track.

So Mr A was brave enough to participate in the next race and joined the extreme sport spectators. Basically, there are two tracks. One which the camels run round, and an adjacent one which cars drive around. Some are spectators who drive in order to keep an eye on the race. Others are owners/trainers who are controlling their camels – they used to be ridden by Pakistani boys who were malnourished to stay light but someone realised that might be cruel so now their riders are robots (who still wear colours because otherwise the camels get freaked out). The robots have whips that are controlled by the people in the cars; apparently they use the equivalent of car-key beepers to get the whip to whizz. This means that there will always be a couple of cars drifting around at the back of the race longing their camel on. Everyone else is trying to be at the front, treating their Landcruiser much like a cross-terrain bumper car. So, Mr A toddled along at the back of the car-herd and reported that it was do-able.

Next race, we all jumped in and Mr A pretended not to be nervous about driving our 6-months-pregnant-with-twins friend around. Meanwhile we ate sweets and listened to the special camel-racing radio station which commentated on which beautiful beast was winning, and how many foreigners had come to watch Qatari traditional sports (in Arabic).

Having done the circuit a couple of times, we decided to withdraw from the moving dust cloud and hung out at the finish line with all the tired camels, the blokes who look after them and their robots. We had a chat (‘where are you from?’, ‘Britain’, ‘but you speak Arabic…?’), found out they were all from Sudan, told them we’d been to Khartoum for Eid (causing significant surprise), admired their robots, and showed them photos of themselves on our cameras.

At which point we realised the last race was about to end but we had wandered away from the finish line, so we sprinted off and made all the camel guys laugh a lot. Then we almost got run over by the speeding spectator cars and realised that camels literally foam at the mouth when they race.

Moving on to smaller mammals, last weekend we went to pick up two little kittens. A friend of a friends cat had unexpectedly given birth and we (I) felt the time had come to have some dependents in the flat (i.e. tortoise substitutes). We headed off on Friday morning with the extremely large cat box I had purchased to find that the Mosque adjacent to the guys flat was obviously pretty popular and not large enough for all of the men who would like to pray in it, so they’d spread their prayer mats out across the road. We reversed, drove round the block, and found somewhere else to park. Not wildly keen on walking amongst prayer mats with aforementioned cat box, we attempted to approach from a different angle. One wrong building, significant perspiration and a lot of long lines of men praying later, we found the kittens. I gave their human dad muffins in exchange for two bundles of joy, and we emerged into the sunlight to find all of the praying men had moved on before prayers even started so we could have just parked outside. Doha has a split personality – wandering around that area is much like I imagine parts of Pakistan would be: everyone is from South Asia, living in crowded old housing, washing lines, lots of little shops, no pavements. Where we live is probably more like the (dustier) US: tower blocks, everyone driving 4x4s, shopping malls, 5* hotels…….

The kittens are utterly delightful – two brothers who are totally white and almost identical who are in the process of devastating our flat. One of them finally did a poo in the litter box yesterday which I celebrated A LOT. All subsequent excretions have been next to the litter tray, but compared to under our bed this is huge progress. Mr A can’t decide whether he’s totally freaked out by having kittens attacking his head as he watches TV, or enchanted by small animals that sit on his lap as he works. Certainly it seems I’m in charge of scooping poop.

A Qatari man we were talking to the evening that we got them suggested names which have stuck: Fahed (Panther) and Nimir (Tiger), although since Mr A is incapable of distinguishing between them their individual personalities are pretty academic. I have become predictably neurotic about their health. Apparently they can have their inoculations from 8 weeks old. They are 8 weeks old today so I’m taking them to the Vet this afternoon. You can never be too careful. I can pick up some overpriced cat accessories whilst I’m there. The only question is whether I really need one of those really ugly scratching posts. I’m guessing that since the boys can’t work out that the litter tray is the place to poop, they’re unlikely to realise the post is the place to scratch. They seem happy with our very expensive Syrian carpet anyway.

Right, I’m off to wash the bedsheets that seem to have got in the way of litter training progress….

Khartoum and Kayaking

So Eid was called on a Monday night – contrary to the expectations of several important Qatari astronomers and most of the general population who thought it would be Tuesday. We’d chosen that evening to Iftar on the corniche – far enough from the cannon to avoid hearing damage, close enough to know when it was allowed to sip a little water. The call came through that Saudi spotted the moon and had declared the start of Eid, but that Qatar hadn’t announced anything. A bug bit me between the eyes, my face swelled up… still no news. Mr A called a contact at the Emiri Diwan who wasn’t certain. We waited. Finally we gave up and came home, turning on the TV to find a long bearded man announcing the end of Ramadan in Qatar. It turns out that Sudan, Saudi, UAE and Qatar were able to see the moon on Monday night. Odd then that Egypt (geographically between these countries) didn’t see it until Tuesday night, but then who am I to question religious men with very good eyesight and large telescopes?

This news meant our flights to Sudan no longer fitted with the national holiday. We split up – Mr A headed to the Airport, walked straight through the queue with a quick flash of his pass, and rebooked our flights within 10 minutes. I on the other hand was responsible for getting hold of US Dollars printed after 2003 – the only way of buying things in Sudan – so I joined the end of a queue for the Exchange. Where I stayed for over an hour, while the Ramadan ‘entertainment’ belted out beside me from a 3-storey high fake castle, several Qataris jumped the queue and two Filipino guys started a fight. By the time I got to the front I had totally forgotten about the whole 2003 thing and bought $200 we wouldn’t be able to use in Sudan.

This experience may have traumatised me a little. Back at home in holiday mood, Mr A prepared me a Tinto Verano (aka red wine with lemonade) which I spilt all over my dressing table, my packing and several extension leads and plugs. I then screamed at Mr A to help me clear up and lay on the bed weeping for a while.

Convinced it would be chaos with thousands of Eid travellers (the result of having believed doomsaying colleagues), I made us get up at 4am to get to the airport, only to find it quieter than we have ever seen it. Deserted in fact, apart from a chirpy little bird in the lounge.

Our half full flight (strangely Khartoum didn’t seem the most popular of destinations) was an amazing mixture of striking, tall African ladies in jeans, small Arab women entirely covered in black from the top of their heads to their fingertips, ladies swathed in huge lengths of multicoloured fabric and men with wide white turbans and flowing white robes, all of whom clapped when we landed. We were in jeans.

In Khartoum we found airport security somewhat keen to scan our bags, which was not ideal as Mr A was carrying some contraband champagne, a present for our hosts. He did some hasty negotiating, offering his rucksack as a conciliatory prize for not looking in the offending bag, and then finally a Boss agreed with our view of things. Hurrah for champers in a dry country.

We did some hanging out in Khartoum – Mr A and F talking about politics and any other topic they could both pretend they knew something about, and Z and I sharing our thoughts on being a ‘trailing spouse’, home-baked bread, luxury chocolates and Claudia Roden – and took surreptitious pictures of the “Mugran”, the point where the White and Blue Niles converge, from behind the tinted windows of the backseat of the car (taking photos without a licence being one of the numerous illegal practices in Sudan).

Then we headed south to camp by the White Nile, which is really wide at that point and feels almost like a sea. The drive took just over an hour and took us out of Khartoum via hectic, bumpy roads with competing tuk-tuks, cars, buses and people which then fell away to one, straight road with occasional mud-built villages either side.

We put up our tents and had a lovely swim in the river at sunset, hoping the occasional brush on our legs was a Nile perch not a crocodile.

The boys laboriously made a fire (‘careful we don’t run out of matches’) for very tasty supper, only slightly disturbed by the large squishy insects that began dropping onto us from the trees above us. The next morning the girls took control of making a fire. We quietly collected some kindling (avoiding the enormous thorns poking out of anything resembling twigs), screwed up some newspaper, and loaded on some charcoal. One match and a little judicious blowing later and we were away. Ah, the warming feeling of being better than men at things they think they have a caveman-like monopoly over. A feast of sausages, bacon, eggs and tomatoes, eaten while avoiding huge dung beetles and a small scorpion (‘the smaller they are, the more dangerous’), was delicious.

After brunch we took some kayaks out on the river. Mr A had a few problems and only made it one metre from shore before he violently capsized, depositing his sunglasses somewhere on the riverbed (half an hour after waxing lyrical about the benefits of sunglasses in sunny climes). I, in an identical kayak, paddled off quite happily. We were the only people around and the river was so calm. Mr A was a little miffed at my obvious superiority and threw himself out again a little later, muttering something about his left leg being numb. A likely story – his leg seemed to recover rather speedily once we were back on shore.

On our last day we were woken by birds chirruping outside our window, and then wandered around the markets of Omdurman which felt more African that Arabian. In a moment of reckless abandon we stopped for fresh juices at a stall, only to realise that it was made with tap water – after a couple of sips we scarpered like the dirty-water-fearing-foreigners that we are, leaving the juice-maker to ponder what he’d done wrong. We also popped into a museum to admire very old British guns (it’s interesting the pride people can take in showing you the guns your ancestors used to shoot at theirs). All in all it was an unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable city break. Coming from Doha it was refreshingly green and colourful, though if you’d come from anywhere else you might think it looked rather dusty.

Now we are back in Doha which has returned to its pre-Ramadan ways – all the bars are open and people are doing some work. We have made friends with our neighbours and their daughter gave me a beautiful fossilised stone for my collection, and I’ve been reassuring newly-arrived, culture-shocked Londoners that there really are nice people to meet and things to do in Qatar. Time is flying; next week we will have been here for one year…………..

Much Autumnal love to all,

A xxx