Luke Evans blogs from the Tour of Qatar, where is he motorbike pilot for photographer Graham Watson 

Took this shot about 10km north of Doha, on highway 1 which heads up the east side of Qatar.

A newly-laid dual carriageway it goes to the northern tip of gas-rich Qatar, which looks like an upturned thumb sticking into the Arabian Gulf.

We stopped to take pictures of the teams riding to the Losail race circuit, where Moto GP holds round one of the premier motorcycle championship this April.

The team time trial was being held in the afternoon, alas not on the race track but on adjacent access roads.

At only 11.3km a good warm up was essential so the teams risked mixing it with unpredictable pick-ups and foot to the floor 4x4s by riding to the circuit from Doha, which you can just see in the distance.

On the left of the photo is one of scores of cement trucks engaged in their own Moto GP as they raced from a massive cement plant to building sites in Doha and beyond. Thundering along with empty hoppers they were actually pulling overtakes on each other as they rushed back for the next load.

There's a frenzy of building activity here, and it's not just stadiums for the 2022 footie World Cup.

High rise luxury apartments, roads and shopping malls are pushing back the desert. You can hardly blame the Qataris, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, for having the means to transform a grit strewn wasteland with few natural features to lift the heart.

Still getting used to the Ducati Monster which is far from the ideal camera bike. It's a snug fit for two comfortably built fellows and limbs are already creaking thanks to high footpegs.

Jerk the throttle and ninja-like, Graham would be plucked from his lofty perch and dumped in the road, probably in front of Cavendish.

Not good for business, and Cav would probably swear colourfully, just like we heard him do when some riders crashed in front of him yesterday.

Luke Evans blogs from the Tour of Qatar, where is he motorbike pilot for photographer Graham Watson

The Tour of Qatar starts tomorrow and it looks like the high winds which battered the womens race may be on the wane.

Fine sand covered everything and dulled the normally clear blue skies.

Today we took a walk to a new marina development under construction near the race hotel and HQ and it was blowy but dust free. Everywhere there were non-Qatari workers wiping sand off railings and benches.

And what do you build when you've got tons of money? An ersatz version of Venice of course.

The photo shows the Qatari version of the famous Rialto bridge, in a complex of pastel painted villas.

In the marina, Venetian pontoons await the superyachts that the new apartment owners will presumably bring with them.

Strange place, it will be a relief to go into the desert tomorrow and follow a bike race again.

It's been a tough couple of week's work for the Endura riders on this camp. Although they came in from a seven hour jaunt on Tuesday, the training has been as much about quality as quantity. With its various reps, time trial efforts, intervals, motorpacing and leadouts, the piece of A4 paper that maps out the whole fortnight's training schedule looks something like a torture regime. "Steady miles is what they should have been doing over the winter," explained DS Alex Sans Vega. "Here's where we get them ready for racing."

Ready for racing they need to be as the action starts as early as Sunday for eight of the riders. They'll be facing the likes of Contador, Evans and the Schlecks. So, with the cumulative fatigue of the camp's efforts being felt by many last night, today was dedicated to travel and recuperation. While the bulk of the British riders on the team flew back to Stansted with just a few days break at home before the Tour of the Med starts on Thursday, the Challenge Ciclista Mallorca riders (including young Brits Jonny McEvoy and Erick Rowsell) went either for short light spins or stayed off the bike completely.

At about midday I found four of the slackers sat around a table in the hotel bar. German Paul Voß was lost to his headphones while Australian Jack Anderson was knocking back coffees and cracking jokes to Alex Wetterhall. The Swede explained he'd done a little core work on a gym ball that morning but that would suffice. Alex Blain meanwhile had his head in a computer game. "I am the boss," the Frenchman announced when the conversation turned to his obsession. It transpired that he was playing a simulation where he was the manager of an Alpine ski resort. "I play it a lot," he admitted before turning his attention back to virtual snow patrol. "That piste is just too dangerous," he told the laptop.

Those that ventured out, didn't go far. Dean Windsor and pals only rode round to Magaluf before pulling up at a café. "That place is like Blackpool," he noted. The only sweat Basque Iker Camano worked up was in the sauna.

It's fair to say these riders had deserved their indulgences. To all intents and purposes the Endura camp had reached its end today. Tomorrow the remaining riders will again head out on their bikes and pedal northeast across the island. This will not so much be a training session but a transfer to another hotel - to be more precise: the official Challenge Ciclista Mallorca hotel. By tomorrow evening they'll be back in race mode. The new season will have effectively started.

Endura race lineups

Challenge Ciclista Majorca (January 5th-9th)
Alexander Wetterhall
Alexandre Blain (first two days only)
Dean Windsor
Erick Rowsell
Iker Camaño
Jack Anderson
Jonny McEvoy
Paul Voß
Zak Dempster

Tour of the Mediterranean (January 9th-12th)
Alexandre Blain
Ian Bibby
Ian Wilkinson
Jon Tiernan-Locke
Rene Mandri
Rob Partridge
Russell Downing
Scott Thwaites

The Endura team are based at Palmanova, a few bays along from Palma, and just short of package holiday Mecca Magaluf. It sits on a sweep of pale sandy beach washed by the turquoise waters of the med. Even under today's grey skies, there is no mistaking that this place primarily serves the holiday trade.

Of course, right now, it's out of season. Restaurants and cafes are shut. Holiday apartment block after apartment block stand empty. One member of the team noted that if they weren't staying at the hotel then it would be ‘like God's waiting room'. I thought they were being melodramatic until working in the hotel bar on my first evening here I looked up from my laptop to find myself surrounded by elderly northern Europeans waiting for the bingo.

But that's what Majorca is in January: retired folk and cyclist's making use of the summer tourist trade's somewhat redundant facilities. Alongside the roads and the relatively good weather, this is what appeals about the island as a training camp. The swimming pools are empty, the bars are uncluttered, the hotels offer attractive prices. On the roads, traffic is slim. The smattering of people you see out and about are just going about their business.

Endura are at Palmanova through the Stephen Roche connection. The three time Tour winner bases training camps here and has an office just above the reception.

Downstairs there's ample space for the team mechanics to assemble this year's bikes. There's a laundry with industrial sized washing machines that the soigneurs can use and a restaurant that is familiar with feeding hungry cyclists. "Stephen's been using this place for about 18 years," former British National Champion Neil Martin told me during a spin round the hills this afternoon. Neil, brother-in-law of Stephen and father of Garmin pro Dan, will now be based here till May helping run the camps. "Not many cyclists come to this corner of the island," he noted as we dropped back into town. "Most camps are on the other side."

Roche himself has been milling around the hotel since the day I arrived and says he's been doing flat out days giving the business a bit of a revamp. Over a cup of tea after dinner, he told me about the day he first decided to base his camps here in 1994. "If you arrive on a flight at midnight, the last thing you want is to traipse across the island on a coach for an hour." Here we're twenty minutes from Palma's vast airport. During the formative weeks of the business, Roche experimented with two week camps split between both sides of Mallorca. The overwhelming feedback he got was that this western pocket was better.

For riders the location means closer proximity to the hills. Yesterday, riding with the team, we headed straight out the back of the town over a little drag, before taking a cute little road that switchbacked past orange groves to top one of the rocky ridges that define this side of the island. Fitness among the sixteen riders is high and many of them seem to be chomping at the bit to get racing. Russ Downing's eyed up a couple of stages in the Tour of the Med, 'JT' Locke's pencilled in the Mount Faron stage and Alex Wetterhall is hoping to show his climbing legs at the Tour of Murcia.

Endura has again bolstered its line-up this off season. Of the 16 on the squad, almost all of them are proven winners. I've asked a few of the riders if they envisage this being a problem - too many chiefs and all that. Of course they say no. But some of the exercises they've been doing have been specifically designed to get any squabbling over and done with now. Most illustrative of these have been the lead out practices. After being split into two, the two sub teams had to decide how to conduct things. "They were all over the place and bickering the first time we did it," recalled team DS Julian Winn. "But that was the point. When they realised they need to sort these things out amongst themselves and get organised, they did the lead outs a lot better."