February 25, 2017
A Mirage-Hotel in the Desert.
Briefly, a few words about a place we stayed at in the desert. Well, this hotel… was like… a mirage – for it seemed almost unreal to me, what with it being right in the middle of a real desert!
It was built, so we were told, on a greenfield site bare desert site up from nothing. As you can see – all around there’s nothing but desert. Water gets piped in from 200km away! And the Internet is super-fast. And free! The hotel is called Qasr al Sarab.
When we were there it was full of Chinese New Year tourists; therefore, we got upgraded to a villa! A big thank you to the hotel for that! (Or maybe I’d already stayed at hotels on this chain and the system remembers me? Could be… big data is like that :).
Octavio Paz sprang to mind as I went to sleep that night:
This world is a desert that is a circle.
Heaven is closed and hell is empty.
– Octavio Paz, Elegía interrumpida (Interrupted Elegy), mid-20th century
