Three Days in Qatar

I ended up in Qatar because I went the long way home.

I was in Hong Kong, at the tail end of a long stretch of work: Chicago first, then a string of other places, then Southeast Asia, and finally Hong Kong. The obvious route home to San Francisco from there is to cross the Pacific. But when I was looking at flights, there was this other option, the completely wrong direction, the longest possible way home: leave Hong Kong, fly to Doha, then Doha to San Francisco on these massive, mind-bending flights. It was a holiday weekend. I had until Tuesday. And here is the part that sealed it: going west, I was traveling against time. The flights were long, but the clock was on my side. I would land in San Francisco having gained back hours.

So I booked it. I arrived in Doha at six in the morning on a Saturday and left at midday on Monday. Two and a half days I had not really thought about, on the back end of a trip I had not yet finished, in a country I had never set foot in.

I came home thinking I have to go back, and I should bring my parents.

Engaging the people who know

I love planning travel. It is what I do, professionally and for myself. I love the research, the maps, the rabbit holes of figuring out where to stay, who to know, what to do, what to leave room for. But by the time I landed in Doha, I had nothing left for that kind of thinking. I had two and a half days, no plan, and no bandwidth to make one.

So I did something I wholeheartedly believe in. I engaged the people who know.

Part of being a good travel advisor is knowing how to balance your own knowledge and expertise with the knowledge and expertise of trusted local partners, weaving them together to create an experience for a client based on what they actually want from the trip. Local partners are not an alternative to good design. They are part of the foundation of it. Travel advisors are not on the trip with our clients. We need people on the ground who know what is being delivered, who are providing the service and the hospitality in real time, and who can add the depth and texture that turn an itinerary into something memorable. They color in the drawing the advisor has sketched out.

I was in Doha on my own. Joining a group tour turned out to be a wonderful way to meet people and see the country at the same time, so when I say us in what follows, that is who I mean.

The guides themselves were extraordinary. They took us to the fish market and walked us through the different varieties of fish that were part of the industry on which the country was built. They showed us their favorite tea spot in the souq and got us a cup. They gave us light history on Qatari politics, on who the Qatari people are, on Qatar’s long and complicated history with Saudi Arabia, on the wave of immigrants and expatriates who arrived around the 2022 World Cup and the country those people are still building. And they made sure we were capturing the moment of being there. Every picture you see of me in Qatar exists because a guide, unprompted, asked to take it. Twenty-five frames of the same moment so I could pick the one I actually liked. Nobody asked them to do this. They wanted to make sure we had it.

That kind of care does not feel like service. It feels like hospitality, which is a different thing entirely.

The hotel that pays attention to you

I stayed at the Banyan Tree Doha, in one of their urban suites. The room was lush in the way that good hotel rooms are lush, but the thing I keep telling people about is the aromatherapy program.

There is a water diffuser and there is incense, each with its own scent, and the two scents are designed to complement each other. Both change every day. So you come back to the suite in the evening and the air is one thing, and you come back the next day and it is something else, and the day after that something else again. I did not expect to care about it. I cared about it immediately. There is something about coming back to a room and finding that the air itself has shifted that makes a hotel feel less like a place you are staying and more like a place that is paying attention to you.

A country in the middle of becoming something else

One of the most interesting things about Qatar is how recent all of it is.

The country I was walking through, the towers and the skyline and the luxury hotels and the international airport that flies you straight to anywhere, all of that is essentially new. For most of its history Qatar was a small country of fishermen and pearl divers, defined by the sea and what could be pulled out of it, pressed in on all sides by the neighbors who shared the same gulf. The discovery of oil changed everything, fast. The Qatar you see now is the result.

What I loved was that the country has managed to grow at this extraordinary pace without leaving the old version of itself behind. There is a real dichotomy on display here between new Doha and old Doha, and the city makes a point of showing you both. The picture at the top of this page is the simplest illustration of that I can offer: a traditional wooden dhow, still in active use, lit up at the dock with the new skyline behind it. The boats that built the country are not in a museum. They are in the water.

I went north to Al Zubarah, which is what is left of an eighteenth-century pearling town and the only UNESCO World Heritage site in the country. I went out to the mangroves at Purple Island, where the country is trying to protect what was always there. I walked through the Souq Waqif and the Museum of Islamic Art and the Katara Cultural Village, places where Qatar is telling its own story in its own voice.

The museums in Doha deserve their own paragraph. The thoughtfulness in them does not start at the art on the walls. It starts at the buildings themselves, then the fountains and the statues outside, then the architecture of the interior space, and only then do you get to the work inside. By the time you are looking at an object in a vitrine, you have already been led through three layers of intention. The country is using its museums to tell you something about itself, and the telling begins long before you walk through the door.

The desert is not what I thought

I went to college in Southern California, in the Inland Empire, and I have crossed California’s deserts many times. I know what a desert looks like. What is in Qatar is something else.

The scale is what gets you. It is a sea of sand. The dunes have a height and a depth and an ambition I had not encountered before, and they go on. Standing on top of one of them, you see nothing in any direction but more of them, rolling out to the horizon. The desert in Qatar is not a landscape you cross. It is a landscape you are inside.

We went south to Khor Al Adaid, the inland sea, where the desert runs all the way down to the Arabian Sea and the dunes meet the water. I watched the sun set over both at the same time. The sky and the sand do this thing in the last hour of the day where they go through every color you can name and a few you cannot. I have watched a lot of sunsets in a lot of countries. This one is in the top three.

The biggest surprise was the next day. I had spent the previous evening watching the sun set over the inland sea. The following morning we drove out to Purple Island and walked into a mangrove forest. Lush, green, sprawling, in the middle of a country I had assumed was almost entirely sand. The two days together did something to my understanding of the place. There is a lot more complexity here than I expected, I remember thinking. The country is doing things you do not know about until you go.

About the dune bashing

I have to tell you about the dune bashing, because it is one of the more genuinely fun and slightly absurd things I have done as an adult.

You get into a Toyota Land Cruiser with a driver and four or five other people, almost always strangers. The driver lets some air out of the tires. Electronic music comes on. And then you spend the next stretch of your afternoon essentially riding a roller coaster across the dunes. The car climbs up the face of a dune, hangs at the top for a second, and drops down the other side at an angle that should not be physically possible. Everybody in the car is laughing, including the driver. By the end you are a little bit sandy, a little bit dizzy, and you have made eye contact with five people you will never see again over what they will tell their friends about for years.

I noticed something else on those drives. There must have been a hundred white Toyota Land Cruisers going across the dunes that afternoon. A world of them. I do not know that I have ever seen a more specific and consistent piece of cultural infrastructure anywhere on earth.

About the camels

One of the more unexpected stops was the camel racing track at Al Shahaniya. I was not there for a race. I was there for the evening walk, when the camels are led out by their trainers, hundreds of them, up and down their walking lanes in the late light. I have never seen that many camels in one place.

What surprised me even more than the scale was the social dimension of it. I grew up around people who go to the horse track, and camel racing in the Gulf turns out to be exactly that kind of thing: a serious sport with a serious following, the same rhythms and the same devotion. The one difference is that the jockeys are robots. Small, mechanical, lighter on a camel’s back than a human would be. The combination, hundreds of camels in their evening routine and the matter-of-fact existence of robot jockeys, is the kind of detail you do not get from reading about a country.

The west, which is harder to describe

One of the places I would not have known to go without a guide is the western edge of the country, on the Zekreet peninsula, where the landscape stops looking like a desert and starts looking like a sculpture park.

There are these limestone formations there, weathered into shapes that look like nothing else I have ever seen. Like mushrooms made of stone, or sculptures the earth made on its own. You could spend hours exploring them. There are so many of them, and every one is its own shape, and the stories the guides tell about how they formed and what they have meant to the people of this part of Qatar are as good as the rocks themselves.

And on the way out, in the middle distance, I saw the other thing this part of the country is known for. Past the formations, a flare stack from one of the oil refineries: a flame burning continuously in the open air, an everlasting fire set against the geology. The thing that pulled this country from pearling and fishing into the twenty-first century, burning in the open air, next to formations that have been there for millions of years. There is no place that lets you see the whole story of Qatar in a single sightline quite the way Zekreet does.

And in the middle of that same landscape, in the open desert with nothing else around for miles, there is an installation by the artist Richard Serra called East–West/West–East: four enormous steel plates lined up across more than a kilometer of desert. I do not know that any photograph can do this work justice. The scale is the point, and the scale only registers in person. You walk between the plates in absolute silence, the gypsum plateau flat in every direction, and the work does something to your sense of where you are. Standing in the middle of a Richard Serra in the middle of the Qatari desert is one of those experiences I will think about for the rest of my life.

On the intentionality of Qatari hospitality

What I keep coming back to about Qatar is how deliberate the hospitality is. Not friendly in a casual, ambient way, although the people I met were certainly that. Intentional. Considered. Designed.

You feel it in small acts. The man at a coffee stand in the souq who would not let me pay for the second cup. The guides taking twenty-five frames of the same picture because they wanted me to leave with the one I would actually want. The hotel changing the scent in the air of my suite from one day to the next, twice, because somebody on staff had decided that was a thing worth doing for a guest. None of these things are accidents. Every one of them is a choice.

What I took away is that Qatari hospitality is not a personality trait of the place. It is a value the country has built into the way it receives people, and you feel that value in almost every interaction. By the end of two and a half days, I had the strong sense that this was a country that wanted me to come back. Not in a marketing way. In a quieter way, person by person, choice by choice.

What Doha connects

One thing I did not expect to take away from a short stay was a more sophisticated sense of where in the world Doha actually sits. Qatar and several of the countries near it have made connectivity a serious goal, and as a result this part of the world is much more accessible than people realize. The flights are long, but the routes are many. You can put together itineraries through the Gulf that would have been hard to imagine even ten years ago.

That on its own is a reason to look at the region differently.

What two and a half days can do

Qatar reminded me that not every trip can be long, but every trip can be meaningful. A few days, done well, can put a stamp on your heart. They can become a core memory you carry. The design has to be right, the people on the ground have to be the right people, the days have to be built with care. But when those things are in place, a short trip is not a compromise. It is its own kind of special trip.

I arrived in Doha knowing nothing and left a different kind of curious. I started reading about the country the day I landed back in San Francisco and have not really stopped. Qatar has a vast history, much of it not particularly well known outside the Gulf, and I am still working through it.

I will be back. My parents are coming with me. And I will be sending other people there too.

Priscilla Nzessi is the founder of Moments of Sonder Travel. She travels in many modes and is always looking for the next stopover worth taking.