Day 2: Doha

It had obviously been dark when we'd arrived in Doha on Wednesday night, so when we opened the curtains on Thursday morning we had no idea what sort of view was going to await us.

Our room is on the 19th floor and it turns out that we can see pretty far from up here. It looked hot outside! And quite hazy.

We went down to explore the hotel breakfast, which turned out to be very posh. A waiter brought us coffee and then we were able to help ourselves to the buffet. The cooked breakfast options included chicken sausages and beef bacon (no pork here!), both of which tasted better than I'd expected. The selection of cakes and pastries was amazing and I also helped myself to a vanilla custard Berliner(!) and a double chocolate croissant. Wow!

I checked the weather forecast after breakfast, which confirmed that it was indeed rather hot outside.

The plan was to stay inside until late afternoon, at which point it would (hopefully!) start to cool down a bit. So we made the most of the hotel air-con for a few hours, before getting dressed to go outside.

As you can probably tell, we'd bought special outfits for this trip

Planning any sightseeing in Doha has actually been quite difficult, because Qatar is one of those countries like Moldova which doesn't yet seem to have a full guidebook dedicated to it. In the end I'd booked us on an evening boat trip, which I figured would be a fun way of seeing some sights without doing too much walking in the extreme heat. The boat was departing at 17.00, from a place called Box Park which is at the old port of Doha. That was about 10 miles away, so we needed to take a taxi. I'd read online that Uber was quick and cheap to use in Qatar and that turned out to be true. I requested a taxi in the app as we were exiting the hotel room and by the time we'd got down the lift and out into the lobby, the driver was pulling up outside the hotel. The journey to Box Park cost us around £8, which seemed like good value.

The old port area is called Box Park because it is full of repurposed shipping containers, which have been painted in bright colours and turned into shops and offices.

The office of the company I'd booked the boat tour with was located in one of the containers. We checked in and then they invited us to go and sit in this blue container, an air-conditioned waiting room, while we waited for the boat.

We couldn't resist having a bit of a walk around and exploring first though.

It's definitely a very colourful place

Once we got too hot we went and sat in the waiting room for a bit to cool down.

We were only there for a few minutes and then it was time to board the boat.

This is a wooden dhow boat, which is traditional for this part of the world.

We climbed aboard and went out onto the deck, where we were able to sit down on these sofas.

They were really quite low and hard to stand up out of once you'd sat down! We got given a couple of free bottles of water and later some juice, which was good because despite the fact that it was 5pm it still felt seriously hot.

Soon the boat was off...

...and we got our first views of the Doha skyline as we began to pull out of the harbour.

We sailed past one of the football stadiums which was used in the last World Cup...

...and then got our first glimpse of the seriously tall buildings in the city centre in the distance.

It's hard to see in the photo because of the light, but these lower buildings in front were beautiful pastel colours.

You can see from the photos that the day was still quite hazy.

Sunset was due to be at 18.19, so about an hour away. The sun was still incredibly bright, producing a weird kind of light for the photos.

It provided some really stunning shots though.

As we got closer to the West Bay area, where all the skyscrapers are, we could see the individual towers more clearly.

Perhaps a bit more clearly in the video than in some of the photos.

The boat trip was a return journey of two hours, so the idea was that on the journey out we'd be able to see everything in the daylight, and then on the way back it would be starting to get dark.

As we travelled further up the coast we got closer to the part of Doha where our hotel is. I didn't realise it at the time, but you can actually see the hotel in this photo: it's the building furthest left.

And I just realised I can see it in this one too At the time, we'd arrived at the hotel by taxi and departed it by taxi so hadn't seen the building from a distance to recognise the shape.

The boat was taking us towards a part of Doha called "The Pearl".

This is an artificial island, constructed as a residential development project.

The boat took us in to one of the harbour areas on the island.

There were lots of restaurants and cafes around the waterfront; I even saw a Starbucks at one point!

The most impressive view was of the Katara Towers, one of the most unusually shaped buildings in Doha. Both sides of the towers house posh hotels.

Once we'd admired the Pearl it was time for the boat to turn around and start sailing back to Box Park.

By this point the sun was definitely setting and it doesn't even look real in the photos!

As the skyscrapers came back into view on the horizon, it wasn't yet quite dark enough for them to be completely lit up.

It was still really cool to see all the different towers though.

I loved this one with the red light on the top

Officially sunset was at 18.19, but it took a bit longer to get fully dark.

Once it did, the views of the skyline were really impressive.

At one point our boat got overtaken by a group of locals on a speedboat

Eventually we made it back to the Box Park port where we'd boarded the boat.

I was keen to see a bit more of Doha on foot, but that was going to require us walking about 2km which might be challenging in the heat. We decided to give it a go and see how we got on. I've bought an e-sim with some Qatari phone data, so we had the option to connect and book another Uber if we got too hot.

We walked away from Box Park, passing a square with a huge collection of flags which we'd seen from our original taxi from the airport on Wednesday morning. Maybe they were all the nations competing in the World Cup? There definitely wasn't any wind tonight to make the flags blow anyway!

From there we progressed along the waterfront until we got a view of the Museum of Islamic Art, which is one of the top tourist attractions in Doha.

We're not really art gallery people so I hadn't booked tickets to go and visit it, but the building is definitely really impressive from the outside.

In the opposite direction, we could see could see the so-called Spiral Mosque, which was also stunning.

I have no idea what this building was, but I loved the way it kept changing colour between blue...

...and red.

We were walking towards something called the Pearl Monument.

Before Qatar became rich with oil, people here made money by diving for pearls.

This monument kept changing colour too, which was fun

We were absolutely baking by this point, as we climbed down some stairs into a pedestrian underpass. The good news was that the underpass was air-conditioned. Best underpass ever!

When we emerged at the other side we were closer to the mosque...

...and in an area known as Souq Waqif.

This is a traditional market area, with lots of shops and restaurants.

It was certainly bustling in the evening.

We found this rather bizarre statue of a golden thumb...

...and then switched our attention to trying to find somewhere to eat. I hadn't really done any research on what to eat in Qatar so in the end we decided to play it safe and go into an Indian restaurant. When the food came, the portions were enormous. We should definitely only have ordered one rice!

I thought the prices in Qatar might be expensive but we only ended up paying £38 for everything, including several bottles of water to cool us off. No alcohol though!

Rather than take a taxi, we decided to make our way back to the hotel by metro. The Doha metro is relatively new, having only opened in 2019. There seems to be a system similar to Oyster cards in London, so we were able to buy a couple of rechargeable cards and then load journeys onto them at a ticket machine. Each journey costs QAR 2, which is around 43p. Bargain!

We emerged from the metro and had a walk of about 10 minutes to get back to the hotel. We had some more fantastic views of illuminated towers as we set off.