FILM CITY AND LOST VALLEY

This is a local version of Universal Studios. If you choose the main inland track, prepare your vertebrae for a radical soukouss. If you opt for the seaside track, like us, you'll have to do a bit of rodeo as you climb the sedimentary knoll, or go around to the north to reach your destination.

Film City. This is the Qatari Ok-Coral, the summer residence of the vizier Iznogood, a village built some ten years ago for the TV series Eial Al Deeb(meaning "Sons of the Wolf"), inspired by a story by the local griot Ahmed Al Misnad. On a sandstormy day, in fading visibility, the place can give you the shivers. Shaken by the journey, we had the joy of stumbling across the welcoming Sudanese forgotten there as a guard. The call to prayer recorded by an eloquent muezzin and broadcast in this place almost gives the illusion.

Lost Valley. The same production company had another set built a little further north, closer to the sea, made up of stone huts leaning against the small cliff. A lot of ill-informed visitors repeat tall tales about these sites: the mystery valley, an extinct tribe, and so on. It's just a setting with a hard-boiled Star Wars feel, of stone ruins, like troglodyte dwellings slowly baking in the sun in an unlikely end of the world of mushroom-shaped mineral sculptures. A peculiar geological valley, a little Martian, that inspired the director.