Trip to Hatta

We have just had a lovely weekend in Hatta. We stayed at The Hatta Fort Hotel, which we can thoroughly recommend. The staff were really helpful and friendly, the room was lovely and the sightseeing we did was great.

It was interesting to see the scenery change as we left the outskirts of Dubai towards Oman. The sand became redder to start with and then there was more vegetation and trees more like you would expect in a savanna climate. Then we hit the hills and mountains.

We took a look at the Heritage Village on the early evening when we arrived. To be honest, once you have seen one, you have seen them all, but this was nice with the mountains surrounding Hatta. We were up at one of the battlements when the early evening prayer call started and was once of the most amazing things we had experienced here yet. To hear the mosque prayer callers (or Mu'adh-dhin) begin one after the other, while the calls echoed around the mountains was awesome!

We did some offroading into the mountains today, which I absolutely loved but which Caz may have loved more had she been driving and not me! The mountain road is actually over the Oman boarder, but at this point there is no boarder control. We paddled in one of the Wadis that had water flowing, which was nice and cooling.

All in all, a great trip and if we get chance we will go back and maybe drive further into Oman.

Here's a link to my photos and more comments....

Trip to Hatta

Poor man....

Saw this on the way home. This incident was on the entry slip road to Jebel Ali FZ gate 5. The guy has somehow managed to get his car completely jammed underneath the coach in front. I don't know if maybe he wasn't watching and didn't see it stop? Whether it was his fault or not, he is lucky to be alive. I can only assume that as at this point he is still in the car, that he is trapped somehow. I only hope that there was no one in the passenger seat.......

..and the big news of the day is.....

...we are moving home!!!! Or as they say over here we are "shifting" to another apartment. We really have had enough of life in Mohammed bin Zayed City, so we are moving to the City. Lots of people think we are mad because of the higher rents, therefore smaller places that are affordable and the total lack of parking in most areas. However, we need to feel like we are "connected" to this place and not isolated as we are now. If you look out of our window you see nothing except maybe someone arriving that lives upstairs. In the City there is life. There are people. There are shops and restaurants etc etc. We have none of this at the moment.


So, we have found an apartment which is right near Caroline's work, so she can walk there - perfect! It means we can dispense with one car, Caz can walk to work and when I am doing business in the City, which is 75% of the time, I am right there amongst it too. Here's the location of the tower....unfortunately no sea view for us!



Also when we have visitors they can easily walk to places or get cabs to go anywhere. No cabs ever come past our place in MBZC. The apartment is secured with a deposit, the contract will start 1st May, although we may not actually move in until a while after. Our current lease doesn't expire until July 5th, but our current landlord has agreed to release us 1 month early. We will be back in the UK from May 28th-June 6th, so basically we will definitely have to have moved before then.

So watch this space.........

Red Bull Air Race

I have to say I don't quite get the fascination with this event, it's really a bit of a boring spectator sport. Once you've seen a few races (which are basically time trials), the interest soon wains. I think a good old fashioned dog fight where one gets shot down a bursts into flames would be much more interesting! Anyway, here's a few pics from today.

More Indian van victims...

Must have been some major injures from this one I would say.....