Emirate of Abu Dhabi

The border crossing is easy and is soon completed. The borders here are fully electronic, which means that the border guards can see online when we have entered and left the country and whether our visa is still valid. There is no entry or exit stamp in our passports.

We spend our first night, as we have done several times before, at the beach park in Al Sila. Here we wait until the Arabian weekend is over (Friday – Saturday). But later we realize that the weekend in the Emirates does not last from Friday to Saturday, but from Saturday to Sunday.

Mohamed Bin Zayed City

We actually want to go to the MAN workshop in Abu Dhabi today, but find out that it doesn’t work from Sunday like in Saudi Arabia, but only from Monday. We therefore set off for the neighboring district of“Mohamed Bin Zayed City” and look for a hair salon there that could take care of my perm. Although there are many hair salons there, none of them offer “perms”.

Dalma Mall

We therefore visit the huge Dalma Mall, which offers an extraordinarily diverse range of stores. There are also 60 restaurants, a Carrefour supermarket, banks and cinemas. This is where we first get a taste of “Christmas”. Next to the large Christmas tree, a stage is set up on which a theater group performs dances and tricks. We are surprised to see some atmosphere again for the first time.

During our stay in Abu Dhabi, we spend a few nights in a sandy parking lot next to the mall, safe and relatively quiet.

MAN workshop

We receive a very friendly welcome at the MAN workshop. The employee realizes that we are already regular customers and gives us generous discounts. Our visit in 2019 has apparently been recorded electronically.
We happen to have noticed a small oil leak in a line and our compressed air system is also leaking somewhere. We also want to have the drive shafts lubricated again.

But the most important issue, new tires, could not be solved successfully. MAN could get us new tires within three weeks, but at such a horrendous price that we would have to keep looking around.

Tires

As one of the tires burst in Saudi Arabia, we need at least two new tires, as another one no longer seems entirely trustworthy.
As already mentioned, the tires offered by MAN are too expensive for us.
However, we are in contact with Micheline’s central warehouse, Shiraz Khan from India. We also try our luck with other tire companies,
. We are also offered tires with the comment that they are practically identical to our size. But far from it, the proposed tires with the size 365/80/R20 unfortunately only have a load capacity of 3.5 tons – our tire size of 365/85/R20, on the other hand, has a load capacity of 5 tons per tire.

Last but not least, we order 4 tires of our size from Micheline, but they will only be delivered when we are back from Oman.
And Shiraz Khan gets us a used spare tire so that we can continue our journey to Oman without any worries.

Last night in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi

This evening on a sand dune is the best way to get in the mood for our upcoming trip through Oman. We love sand dunes, as long as we don’t get stuck.