Alessandro Votta

Italia - Canada - 19-Feb-12 -

I've recently spent one hour at the Khor Al-Adaid, during an half-day trip from Doha. There is no road to reach this place, so the only way is to hire a local driver from Doha with a 4x4 to take you to this desert place. The travel itself is an unforgettable experience, since you have to ride all the sand dunes with the car.. but it's more a touristic experience, rather than linked to the TL site itself. Once you reach the "inland sea" (it takes like 1 hour and half from Doha), you feel lost in this desertic place, with the unreal water laying between the dunes. We could not see any wildlife; some bedouin tents and the tracks of the 4x4 were the only traces of human life here. For sure the landscape is spectacular, and maybe the only way to protect this site is to avoid any road construction. I don't think there is something else that could be done to protect this place. The site is very wide, we could just see a part of it (we haven't reached the 10 km channel linking the inland sea with the open sea, as it's mentioned on the Unesco website), but still we could see many lagoons linked to each other, surrounded by wonderful sand dunes. The return way was much easier, we just followed the sea shore, on the flat way it took much less to reach the road. If this site would ever be added to the WHS, I'm afraid we're gonna see each globe corner inscribed on our beloved list, in fact I don't see anything special in this site to be protected, other than scenic beauty. I even had concerns about the Wadi Rum inscription, but at least that site has more historical meaning. Here we couldn't see any of the old remains described in the unesco site, I don't think our driver was aware of it. The most special thing about this site was the silence, the absence of pollution and the colour of the sand dunes reflected in the water.