Being surrounded by vast stretches of sand creates a vista that is unforgiving when it comes to litter. Many a view of a pristine dune is ruined by a flattened plastic water bottle of a colored plastic bag. With little or no vegetation to hide in or under, the detritus of modern life is on proud display, especially along roads. Why they haven’t banned plastic bags and bottles is a puzzle, because even with tens of thousands of laborers in purple jump suits patrolling the roadways, this stuff is everywhere. Sand and wind could theoretically hide it, but it’s a slow process, and the lightest stuff avoids being buried and just blows along the surface. At the edges of fences you can find hundreds of plastic water bottles, and little plastic bags, baking in the sun.
Tag: sand
Amazing Sand Formations
I haven’t figured out how to post more than one picture on this blog, but if you want to see more pictures of sand formations, check out my Facebook postings. This one that I took today looks like an enormous breast. It’s about twelve feet high, and sits in front of a construction site where they’re building yet another apartment complex that will sit empty for God-knows-how-long, competing with all the other buildings that have been sitting empty for the last three years. But what an amazing subject for photography. After a year in Thailand, where everything was green this is quite a switch. I’m surrounded by sand, and the wind does the sculpting.
Rough Country Indeed
In addition to beautiful red sand dunes, there are really rough, completely bare, scary-looking mountains along the border with Oman and along the UAE coast near Fujairah. Those mountains also extend northeast to Muscat, Oman. I have never seen more desolate country, except in Nevada. Even in New Mexico the hills have some sort of vegetation on them, but here it looks like photos sent back from the Mars rover.
This picture was taken on Christmas Day (not a holiday here) just after some pretty substantial rains, hence the spot of greenery in the foreground. I’ve noticed some green fuzz along the roadside sand as well. I imagine that will turn into dust within a few weeks.
Speaking of dust, the sand here has the consistency of dust. It’s so old it has been ground fine. If they need sand for filtering, they have to import coarse sand. I talked to somebody who used to work at a water-treatment plant in Egypt, and he said they imported sand for that purpose from Muscatine, Iowa!
On becoming a sand connoisseur
The sand here is so fine it’s like rouge, like dust. The wind sculpts it very easily into beautiful shapes and it’s possible to find dunes that have no been ruined by tire tracks, though they’re outnumbered by those that have. There’s not a lot for kids
to do around here, and it seems that there are no shortage of land rovers, land cruisers, jeeps and other four wheel drive vehicles. In fact, I feel like I’m the only person in town without one. I have a little Peugeot that got stuck in five inches of sand the first time I tried to veer off the road. Fortunately, it was light enough to push it back onto the pavement. I’ve bored all my Facebook friends with too many pictures of sand, but I can’t stop taking them. In Thailand, I took pictures of vegetation, but here it’s sand
geezersabroad 