On tour with Michi, 05.05.2012

Michi (you might know her from a different post about Sardinia) had been in Dubai already last year, so I didn't have to take her to all the touristy places Dubai has to offer, but with her I discovered the "outback" of the UAE.

Our first trip took us to the East coast of the UAE: to Fujairah, supposedly the "greenest" emirate, with its small island within swimming-distance "Snoopy-island".

Here we spent a couple of hours at the beach, trying to figure out what the small holes and the sand hills close by could be.

Later on the solution was revealed: we saw some crabs digging their canal-system into the ground of the beach. And they were huge!!! I mean, I have never seen such creatures "live" before, and I really didn't have a clue how the holes came into the ground...

Even though Dibba is a really nice place: after this revelation, the humidity steaming up the place and the fact there was some oil in the water (probably because there is an industrial harbour not too far away), we decided to move on, and to search for Wadi Wurayah. Wadi stands for riverbed, and in this region of the world riverbeds are hardly ever actually filled with water. Instead, you can use them for a nice offroad-drive, usually leading through some greener areas and if you are lucky, you will even find pools or a spring.

On the road again...

Unfortunately we missed out on the actual turn into the Wadi, but instead we were rewarded with a beautiful view over the area we were supposed to go and it was quite impressive to see how much water must have flown through to cut out such huge pieces of the mountains to create this valley:

Later on we headed back and found the right turn:

following the other cars on the bumpy track:

ending up at a pool where locals were already splashing in the water. Maybe I would have to narrow down the definition of locals in this case: the crowd was limited to men swimming in the water and jumping off the rocks whereas women sat quitely and fully "wrapped up" (in their abayas, the black dress) in a picnic area close by watching the younger kids.

 

In this case we didn't want to draw more attention to us than we already did, being two young ladies of bright white colour, climbing up the few rocks to take some pictures and so we refrained from jumping into the comparably cooler water...