Um....these are LOW quality pictures taken with a simple point and shoot 2 Meg camera.

My pro stuff at home spits out 21 Megapixel images with file sizes up to 135 MB. 600KB is small to me.

 

Every country looks like that over there at some point... flat and sandy (some have cool dunes others have that table flat blackened crap that looks like a used ashtray).

Bahrain (teeny tiny island), UAE, Oman, Saudi, Egypt has nicer sand but on the other side of the Suez it is as shown, even Turkey, and Morocco has some wonderfully bleak points as well. I have tremendous regard for the Bedoan (sp) tribes that travel nomadically in the open country, a truly resourceful group.