Welcome to dusty, hot, dry Bahrain. For us it was a ciy with some nice buildings, a nice hotel, lots of great food, no trees and way too few volleyball games.

It hurts to have one bad game and then no more volleyball for a whole week, and that’s exactly how Bahrain went. We played Bleiker-Beck from Switzerland in the first round. Many aussies would remember Mike Bleiker from last time he was out. They are a pretty good team and it could have been a good game, but unfortunately we didn’t bring it so things were over pretty quickly.

Refelcting, we didnt really prepare well for the game and there were a few basic things that we could have done to make sure we played our best in the first game. Anyway, we had good training for the rest of the week and got to watch heaps of good volleyball.

Bahrain was hot, I dont think it got below 30° the whole time we were there! The games were all played after 4 in the afternoon, under lights. This made conditions really quite nice for watching, but games went till about 1 am so we had plenty of late nights. Another quirk was playing at Bahrain’s “premier sports venue”, the Formula 1 track. You can see the stadium overlooking the back straight in the background.

We are learning, getting into the tour and getting into the habits that will hopefully make us the fierce competitors we need to be to get a break in this cut-throat tour.