Long time no write. Lots has happened in the past month. I have founded the Kuwait Mapping Meetup and we have had 2 events already. I also did a few more sailing trips, went on the inaugural ride of the Kuwait Cycling Caveliers bike club, became a full member of the Kuwait Desert Bikers Club (another mountain biking club)... not to mention all that's happened at work. As mentioned in the title, I've also been out and about on Highway 80, otherwise known ...

TL;DR: I made a playlist of videos here. I also made a map of the 4WD trip we did on the second day here.BEERI HAD BEER. Enough said! Never thought I would like Fosters. Turns out 3 months of beer deprivation will make me love dishwater.BURJ KHALIFATallest building: tick. This is about 800m high. It is underwhelming when viewed from a distance at night. I was expeciting something that glistened like the Petronas Towers with all of their stainless steel. The Burj ...

The next day we drove up Jebel Hafeet, a small mountain 15km south of Al Ain, a small city in the southeast of the UAE nearby Oman. It is a long boring highway drive to get there... next time we'll have to figure out a more interesting route using the offroad book. We certainly had a lot of fun when we arrived though. Come to think of it, we should have hired a different car for this! We saw a nice new Toyota 86 that a couple of Koreans Americans had, perfect...

TL;DR: I made a playlist of videos here. I also made a map of the 4WD trip we did on the second day here.On Friday 9/8/13 we did a roughly 500km 4WD trip starting in Dubai and heading southeast through Al Awir and Maleihah for some fun in the dunes before heading through the wadis (dry river beds) and mountains for the coast in the emirate of Fujeira. We also crossed through Shajah. This was an epic, exhausting trip. I'd never gone through dunes in ...anyth...

Welcome to the most unlikely comparison piece ever written. I am going to compare Kuwait with Cambodia. For the simple reason that I spent 10 months in the latter until last year and Kuwait is the next country I went to after that. First I will talk about myself, comparing my motivations for going to each country. Then I will cover how they face off against each other on a useful online GIS called If It Were My Home. Then I will talk about history. This will take...