We got off to an interesting start when our taxi driver (a native of Ghana) couldn't find our mainstream hotel in the Doha Port part of the city. 

He had to phone a friend. 

The friend couldn’t help so I showed him that I had the phone number of the hotel as well as the address and he was guided to the hotel by phone directions from the hotel reception. It’s a phenomena we’ve seen in other countries but most notably in Abu Dhabi. Taxi drivers of varying countries of origin, are extremely thick on the ground in Qatar, trawling the streets with eagle eyes, incessant horn tooting, many with no meters, and no sense of direction. As it turned out one only had to look up to see the "Best Western" branding.

Best Western Plus was our hotel (see I said it was mainstream!) and we found ourselves upgraded to a suite. Nice! Heading out to explore, we quickly found it was extremely difficult to be a pedestrian going for a stroll to see the city. A hot searing desert wind was picking up and whipping around everything in its path including the long flowing garments of the few locals abroad. Litter was sailing around high in the air at the level where the street signs should be but weren't.

There was no available meaningful map.The receptionist, who was from the Ukraine (I don’t think we found a native born from Qatar to talk to in our 24 hours there, although we tried) looked at us like we were stark raving mad when we asked for a map and said we wanted to go for a walk. Her advise "take a Taxi'.

Walk we did though, but mostly the next morning when the wind had almost abated. We eventually found the over 100 year old Souq Waqif, a market selling traditional garments, bolts of fine fabrics, spices and handicrafts. We also found uneven pavements, many unfinished building projects and very few friendly faces. Well the women may have had friendly faces - we just couldn’t see them!    

Breakfast time was a delight of western food not available in Myanmar. Lovely thick pot set yoghurt, muesli, apricots, decent grainy bread for toast and standard cooked breakfast items prepared with a smidgen of oil, instead of Myanmar’s bucket loads.

Our quick visit to the country of Qatar over, after several tries we jagged a taxi with a meter to take us to the airport for our Qatar Airways flight to London. 

An interesting note here about Qatar Airways. We flew from Yangon to Doha in an A330 with a capacity of 270 and only around 60 passengers on-board. Our Doha to London flight, also an A330, was even less at around half that. A huge plane for about 30 people! Don’t think we have ever flown in a plane so empty. Doha was an interesting short layover but time to move on.