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A step by step guide to travel from Doha to Dubai by land. Includes a handy checklist.

I recently travelled with my wife from Doha to Dubai, crossing over land by way of Saudi Arabia. I’ve so many things to say about that trip, as it was an experience in of itself, but also because of curiosity from both friends who want to know what it was like and expats considering the trip for themselves. I’ve undoubtedly missed large pieces of information or glossed over important issues, but the discussion can be continued in the comments below.

Update: I’ve posted a handy checklist!

As a Canadian, I have a certain preconception about land border crossings. I can understand a long wait, sitting in a seemingly endless line for hours. I will pass the time by noting when the car crosses the actual line and my last chance to turn around is reached. The actual time spent at the booth with the nice monsieur and lots of technological paraphernalia surrounding you is pretty much inconsequential in the whole scheme of things. And on a good day (or dead of night) there’s not even a line. Only recently have I even had to think about the requirements for ID.

As an expat, I can safely say that that view of borders is now dead. Canada and the USA are now the friendliest of countries (to each other) I can possibly imagine, and I can see how travellers would opt for the nationality-agnostic view of travellers taken by airports. It’s a lesson both on how nations view each other and how much time you need to leave to cross those borders.

There are many more steps than I was accustomed to involved in making this trip. Visas had to be arranged in advance, not from the Saudi embassy here in Doha, but from a car rental company acting as their service agent. The bank had to give us permission to take our car out of the country and money had to be exchanged for purchases in other countries such as fuel and insurance. And of course there was the seemingly endless research required on things from how to dress while in Saudi (at least for Mandy), what documentation we needed to take with us, what fees and such we would have to pay along the way, and of course how long the whole trip would take. I still don’t think we answered all the questions.

The trip began weeks in advance with the application for our Saudi transit visas. The process was simple, we needed only to drop our passports off at a hole-in-the-wall car rental company in a seemingly random location and with no obvious signs of being anything official at all. They took our passports, 125 Qatari Rials per person and my mobile number so that when the visas were processed I would get a call, which of course never happened.

A week in advance Mandy went to the bank to arrange for the permission to take the car out of the country, and was told ‘No problem!’, come back a day before we leave, the letter will be ready. As is to be expected, the rules changed in the intervening week so that we now were required to have a guarantor, who was a customer of the same bank, a different nationality, and remaining in the Qatar during our absence. A day before we left, in a community of expats many of whom had a month’s holidays, Mandy used her amazing skill to wait in the bank long after closing. She demanded, against the insistence of the staff, that tomorrow wasn’t good enough (it would be Friday, the first day of the weekend), the letter was needed now. And that the rules could be bent, at least this once, to use a guarantor who was also on vacation. And so it was that with all the documents fastidiously placed in easy reach during the voyage, after all this bureaucracy and with an almost inevitable irony that must be quietly accepted and understood in this culture, in this part of the world, no one ever saw that letter again.

On our way to the border it rained. Not that it rains here, it never does. But once a year, the heavens open, the dust scrapers on the front windscreen are reminded of their true purpose and even the highest setting seems wholly insufficient. But it didn’t last, and just out of Doha the sun returned. The only stop we made was to change drivers just before the border, at what appeared to be a fairly well-used beach, though more for rest-stop use than normal beach purposes. Alas, there was a horrid stench likely coming from a dark stain dripping over the embankment and into the water, where it appeared someone had upturned a large drum full of oil. There were many piles left from previous passengers, both snack wrappers and the aforementioned outhouse without walls, as well as strange looking black carcasses of what appeared to be fish unfortunately caught in the vicinity when that barrel was emptied out. So we partook in this uncovered outhouse, switched seats, and got back in the car with due haste.

And even though the GPS showed the border was still many kilometres away, it was with some surprise and very little warning that I found myself cautiously inching over tyre spikes. There’s something I find very frightening about driving over large spikes. They have a sense of certainty about them, clearly stating that there is no return from this point. But beyond that, I find myself constantly concerned that they might malfunction; that a freak circumstance will cause them to pierce my tyres even when crossing in the intended direction, or my car will unexpectedly roll back just a little bit, and at exactly the wrong moment. The kind of spikes that are recessed, their presence indicated only by a long row of narrow slits, I find even more disturbing, because they don’t tell you in advance which direction you are allowed to go over them, if any, and the accident causing their deployment could be entirely out of my control. Luckily, the policeman in the sun-baked booth did not accidentally drop his mobile on the button that pops them up.

The series of booths in each country varies, both on entry and on exit, and I profess no knowledge as to what rhyme or reason they may have for the number or order of steps required to pass. But where my experience has always been at a single, multi-purpose booth, rest assured that no booth here functioned for more than one single task. On our way out of Qatar, there was the police booth on entry, with the tyre spikes, where you don’t need to, or are indeed discouraged from stopping. Then a second booth checked that our car’s registration was in order, a third was a bit of hassle as the occupants of the vehicle are verified, a final stop at a booth where your documents and various papers you collected were either collected or returned, and then a final pass over another series of ominous slits. That’s to leave Qatar. Then, after a very daunting 8 km drive through a valley of barbed wire fences with impossibly tall towers with video cameras and snipers lurking behind small dunes, the process was repeated in a slightly modified order and surprisingly good demeanour to enter into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Spikes and police, some booths, a thorough squeeze of one item in our boot, hand over 100 Saudi Riyals to some dodgy looking blokes in a booth for ‘insurance’, more random exchanges of papers some containing stamps, more spikes and police, and we were in Saudi Arabia. Or we had been for the last six kilometres, but now it was official. We headed out on the road, largely dark by now, nearly 2 hours after starting the process.

The trip through Saudi, what little of it I saw, was decidedly different from Qatar or the UAE. The road was in poor condition, to say the least, and the unmarked and unpainted speed humps a small terror on the 120 km/h highway. On the way out the cheapest petrol station I’ve ever used, I felt quite fortunate to not be travelling at high speeds as I crossed over some very large dents, for lack of a better description, in the road, reminiscent of the drop created when the tarmac is stripped away in preparation for resurfacing, only much deeper and just wide enough to give a good solid hit. Even then I felt like I could have gone 30 km/h slower and still felt like I ruined the suspension.

There were also many trucks on the road that, for reasons beyond me, loved to decorate their trucks with flashing red and blue lights. Time after time, I would slow the car down until the constant companion of the speed limiter stopped dinging, only to find that no, it was just another truck. At which point I would turn the limiter on again by resuming speeding, until I was again uncertain about another set in the distance. Which continued, except for the one time that the lights actually did sit atop an oldish Crown Victoria or similar American-model police car, and I wondered why they bought so many American vehicles in this part of the world.

Many times I thought I was coming upon the border with the Emirates, only to lurch to a halt before yet another freeway model speed hump, and realise that it was just a turnoff to another industrial complex glowing on the horizon. When we did finally get to the border, it was much the same as before, exchanging bits of paper for passage, slowly advancing from one booth to the next. A booth that was covered five rows deep with little stickers quoting various unknown phrases in Arabic had a single, solitary English phrase ‘We defend our prophet.’ Shortly afterwards we left.

There were a few notable differences in entering the UAE. The first booth we waited in line at for many minutes as the other cars went about their business, only to be told upon approaching ‘You, go inside’. Upon parking and entering the obvious building, we found ourselves facing a huge counter, easily fifty metres long, with two people working behind it at unmarked points. We approached one, stood in the line, and the person there kindly handed us a form and pointed to a small room off the end of the hall, for when we finished. We filled them out as best we could, but for one reason or another I left about half the questions blank, expecting clarification. Which came, from the man in the room in the form of a stamp, and a finger pointing us back out to the hall. So we got back in the line, got more stamps, then back to the car. We joined the line of cars, and passed through at 4 km/h a large machine that described itself as a ‘Z Portal’, which I later confirmed is in fact a large x-ray machine. I picked an aisle for what appeared to be the visual inspection, but the official looking men pointed me towards someone in street clothes, who simply waved me through. However when the gate to exit didn’t open, I looked back to find him waving me back, as if he somehow never meant to wave me through in the first place. Sheesh. The search was just as cursory as before, and I started to get the sneaking suspicion that two hours was pretty much the minimum in which you could expect to pass these frontiers.

After the customs and immigration formalities, you need again to leave your car and approach a bunch of booths that could well be carnival vendors for how loudly they yell at you for your patronage. We picked the quietest one, having been told they were all the same, and proceeded to get ourselves some candy floss, shoot a row of ducks, and purchase more insurance for our week in the UAE. I later learned, but haven’t yet verified, that many insurance policies in Qatar also include insurance in the UAE and Oman, so we might have been able to skip this step.

After a whirlwind of a week in Dubai, a city which feels ten years ahead of Doha, we found ourselves with a car packed to the ceiling and a fear of sudden maneuvers. A conversation overheard in a rest stop confirmed that others were as displeased as I to discover that their cars had speed limiters singing to them the entire trip, and the car next to us at the Saudi Border proved that we weren’t the only expats who headed to the Emirates to buy carloads of furniture. Their car was packed in almost exactly the same fashion as ours, so much so that I wondered if there was a large mirror in the inspection bay. The officials were also clearly used to this behaviour, and didn’t blink an eye.

The only extra step we encountered in leaving the UAE was a 30 Dirham departure tax, normally rolled into airline fares, but collected on the spot when leaving by land. As usual, there were no signs above any of the windows or wickets, but people helpfully pointed us in the right direction or rudely yelled at us to skip the line (an activity we are never really inclined to initiate but rarely mind). Also seemingly par for the course is the way the tax is paid, as a 25 Dirham tax, and a 5 Dirham ‘Finance Electronic Sticker’, separated for no evident purpose.

The ride home was as time consuming and uneventful as the trip out, with a steady increase in Toyota Land Cruisers behaving badly as we neared the Qatari border. We were tired from the drive, exhausted from the week, and ready to be back in our own bed.

If you’re reading this and are thinking of making this trek yourself, don’t hesitate to contact me or ask a question below, because there’s a ton more information that I haven’t covered here.

Today, Mandy and I drove to Dubai through the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The process of getting here over land is the story of a thousand and one Arabian immigration booths. It is a story that will be told, but tonight’s story is much shorter, much simpler.

On the way through Saudi, our SUV needed fuel. We were down to half a tank. All service stations here seem to be aptly named, so the gentleman filled our tank, topped it off about ten times, then took our hundred saudi riyal note. He gave us 75 saudi riyals plus ten Qatari rials, I don’t know why. At today’s
exchange rate, do you know how much we paid for roughly 25 litres of petrol?

4.78 Canadian.

Or about 21 cents per litre.

Seriously.