13th October: Doha, Qatar
Today was a very successful planning day! We’d always intended for 2 of our 4 days in Qatar to be China planning – it’s why we booked such a long stopover – and we’ve really needed it to get to the bottom of various logistically headaches. We’ve both got eSIMs set up now, which should work in mainland China. We have 2 different VPNs as well. China runs on a completely different set of apps to what we’re used to, so we’ve downloaded and registered for most of those (although many were manual installs as they’re blocked by the Google Play store). The biggest thing though is payments as 90% are made through QR codes on one of two apps – WeChat and AliPay. We set those up a while ago but have only just gone through the various ‘real name authentication’ steps. This involves, amongst other things, uploaded passport photos and gawking at your phone’s camera to prove you’re real! It remains to be seen if these work for us, as they are notoriously fickle for foreigners.
On to more exciting things, we think we’re pretty set on our itinerary now. We have to leave mainland China every 30 days and will either have 2 or 3 stints there. The first will be Beijing [6 nights] > Datong [3] > Pingyao [3] > Xi’An [3] > Chengdu [5] > Chongqing [3] > Yichang/Three Gorges – TBC [2] > Zhangjiajie [3] > sleeper train to Shenzhen [1] > Hong Kong [4]. The 2-3 week middle leg, to the east coast, is the one which might get dropped if we’re finding China too overwhelming or expensive. We will end with 3-4 weeks in the southwest, taking in the Yangshuo/Guilin area and then Yunnan province before heading over the border to Laos. We’ve made the tough choice to rule out most of the higher altitude areas given we’re not prepared for the cold. We’re also strategically trying to rush around a little less and have a base for a few days at a time. The Caucasus part of our trip taught us that we need to slow down a little and space out the travel days a bit. All in all, I think we can now say we’re pretty excited!
Today, Sunday, was a working day in Qatar. The weekend is effectively Friday and Saturday here, with Friday morning the quiet time when even the metro is shut down until 2pm. Out of the window (we didn’t go anywhere today), the traffic was much busier than previous days and what had appeared to be massively oversized empty car parks were now full. Watching from above was quite funny when everything emptied out for the afternoon siesta. Nobody gave way and so many cars were driving on the wrong side of the road that you could be mistaken for believing Qatar drove in the left.
Despite not venturing out, we did still manage to eat some great food. We ordered a mezze which was packed with flavour and sorted us for lunch and dinner. We feasted on a zaatar lahmajoun; a delicate lentil soup; an incredibly fresh tabouleh; batata harra had that just the right amount of spice; and vine leaves, which were wrapped around rice and tomato but tasted not dissimilar to cig kofte. Yum!
