Heading East

Woke up this morning and noticed the sky straight away - BEAUTIFUL blue - but then it is often like that early morning, and it rapidly disappears as the sun gets stronger. But not today. It stayed. And it was so blue, it was remarkable for this time of the year. I went out but as I was running lots of errands, I didn't take my camera - so no pic of this amazing sky! Amazing for Dubai of course - got to keep things in context.

Well, my blip buddies... I have chickened out of making a decision today and you have . . . a collage! As you can see from the terrain (love the word), we headed out of town for Gs visa run. I was hoping the sky would be equally gorgeous en route but it seems we left it back in the City. I do love this drive. There are so many different types of terrain (that word again) you see along the way - white sand with lots of shrubs and trees, then red sand with different shrubs, then red sand dunes with NO shrubs at all, then at a certain point, the dunes just suddenly end and you have rocky terrain with acacia trees. Looks very African. And lastly, you get the mountains - majestic and rugged. If you go large, in the top right picture, you can see we have had rain as there is water in the wadi (dried up river bed).

A good trip. Really getting the hang of the whole thing though always something different. We met a friend at the Oman border. He was travelling to Muscat for work. I got called into the office at the UAE border on our return. They wanted to see Gs driver! Fortunately, I had the visa my friend has organised, so no problems there. Driving back - we had the sun RIGHT in front of us in all it's glory. LARGE and perfectly round and it was possible to look straight at it without hurting your eyes. I must credit G with 3 of these pictures as she took them while I was driving.

All ready for the start of a new week.

PS. I must explain the "pickle" project of yesterday... labourers here are very badly paid and eat extremely simple food. They use pickle to add flavour to plain white rice, using the tiniest amount possible to make it last as long as possible.