IT was meant to be the highlight of the trip. A desert camp complete with camel rides, a feast of lip-smacking Middle Eastern cuisine, tents containing exotic carpets, rugs and cushions and a magnificently robed Sheikh offering a warm welcome.
My imagination worked overtime, fuelled by images from Lawrence of Arabia: sand dunes shining silvery under a moon-lit, star-studded sky; date palms swaying around an oasis of inky black water, the murmur of excited guests occasionally silenced by the ear-piercing cracking and splitting of rocks baked by day and frozen by night, and scorpions scuttling across sand in search of prey.
But then it rained.
It rained so hard that nobody could remember when Bahrain had been so wet. The desert state was awash. One of the driest places in the world was suddenly a sea of mud. The desert camp was cancelled and my visions of a night to remember evaporated.
I was in Bahrain as a guest of Gulf Air and the local tourist authority for two reasons: to sample it as a holiday destination either as a stopover on the way to Europe or as a venue in itself and to assess its virtues as a centre for business conferences. And despite the misfortune over the storm, I must say it made the grade on both counts.
Bahrain is an archipelago consisting of 30 islands situated on the western shores of the Arabian Gulf, 22 kilometres off the East coast of Saudi Arabia, to which it is connected by a causeway, and 28 kilometres from the coast of Qatar.