Unfortunately the splendid photo of the camel is not mine. I borrowed it from Google images. But I have seen camels. Lots of them.

I have made several trips to the schools I am working in at a town called Madinat Zayad and another in a region called Liwa, which is a strip of oasis in the aptly titled ‘Empty Quarter’

The only photos I have so far were snapped from the car window. This is part of Liwa. Forget the cartoon image of an oasis as a tranquil pool surrounded by palm trees. There is no visible water but lots of irrigated plantations are evidence that water is being pumped from somewhere. The trees here are date palms and there were fields devoted to animal fodder in the form of a sort of hay.

The roads are excellent. Very wide and mostly two or three lanes in each direction with a wide median strip. The speed limit is apparently 100kph but nobody seems to know this. 150 is quite normal but you are regularly overtaken by people doing considerably more than this.

Beyond the oasis there are lots of camel farms. Seems a bit like sheep farming on the Yorkshire moors with camels freely roaming across huge tracts of desert, feeding on very sparse, stunted vegetation which is supplemented by fodder from the oasis. The occasional ramshackle shelter can be seen which the camels stand under to get out of the sun.

So far I have managed to avoid driving out to ‘the desert’. The trip to the school today was around 450km round trip. We can use our own vehicles but I prefer to use one of ‘the company’ drivers. So I am basically chauffeur driven from door to door.

Today my driver had a small bump with another car at a service station. Entirely his fault. The procedure here is to call the police who make an assessment, decide who was at fault and issue a ticket which you must have to get your car repaired. No ticket means no repairs from any garage. So the police were called and because the driver of the other vehicle did not have his insurance certificate with him we had to go to the police station. One hour of filling in forms later my driver was deemed to be at fault and given a Dhm 200 fine. The other driver was fined Dhm 2000 for not having his insurance certificate with him!