Khor Al Adaid is an arm of the Gulf pushing ten kilometres inland into southeastern Qatar, and there is nothing between the desert and the sea here — no beach, no transition. The sand simply stops and the water starts. There is also no road. Your driver lets the tyres down at the last station and works across forty to sixty metres of barchan dune, and the run ends with the vehicle tipping over a crest and sliding down the face. At the bottom you are standing in warm, shallow, clear water. Almost nothing feeds the inlet but the sea, through one thin channel, so evaporation has left it saltier than the open ocean and the water dries on your skin as a white film.
In the last hour of light the sun comes in low across the dune field and every ripple lays down its own shadow. From a crest above the shore the whole bowl of sand turns copper, and the lagoon stills as the wind drops and holds the colour of the sky. Boards are carried up the slip faces and ridden down toward the blue line below, and the climb back up is what makes you earn the second run. The far shore of the khor is Saudi Arabia. This ground was fought over once: in the 1830s a breakaway branch of the Bani Yas settled here, and in 1837 troops came with British approval and pulled the houses and fortifications down. They came back in 1869, around two hundred people with some thirty pearling boats. Camps stay on after the day trips leave, and greater flamingos and migrant waterfowl work the shallow flats through the winter, far out on the water. The dunes are not just the frame. They are burying the khor: sand blows in year after year, and drowned dune ridges already cut the inner lagoon into separate pockets, each one a little saltier than the last.