It rained. WTF? It wasn’t supposed to rain until next year

November 17th, 2008

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It rained last night.

It hasn’t rained since February.

It wasn’t supposed to rain until January.

WTF?

(And if you think the driving is bad in the UAE normally, you should see it after rain)

For the record, The National’s less than overburdened weather forecasters, who usually only have to decide whether it’s hot and sunny, as opposed to sunny and hot, did not predict the downpour.

This is how it looked a couple of days ago. Does it look like it’s about to rain?

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(The top pic was taken by The National’s Rich-Joseph Facun and is the best single pic I’ve seen since I joined the paper. And they splashed — literally — it on the front. Well done all!)

A day at Al Ain

November 12th, 2008

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I’m not entirely sure why the meerkats of the Al Ain zoo are still on the alert for predators. I’m sure the visitors would be disappointed if the absence of threat meant this most anthropomorphic of species spurned their trademark upright vigilance in favour of a far less photogenic attitude displayed by the big cats, of lying around and occasionally raising a lazy head to see what’s going on.

That in turn made me wonder if at night the zoo staff occasionally throw a jackal into their pen or bring in a falcon to cull the slowest of the herd and ensure the rest will be at their vigilant and photogenic best when the visitors return.

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(While looking up the meerkats’ predators, I found this: “The alpha pair often scent-mark subordinates of the group to express their authority, and this is usually followed by the subordinates grooming the alphas and licking their faces.” Scent-mark… Hmmm. I have a sneaking suspicion what that means, and it’s remarkably familiar to anyone who works in the corporate world.)

I went for a day trip up to Al Ain to do research for a project (nudge nudge, wink wink) I’m working on, which included visiting the various tourist attractions of this oasis town on the Oman border. It was an experience that reinforced the binary nature of UAE costs, with everything being either absurdly cheap or stingingly expensive.

The fact it was a day trip reflected that accommodation was firmly in the latter category. The hotel at which I’ve been staying since the start of September, and in which I’ll almost certainly remain until well into next year, has a walk-in rate of 1400 Dirhams (NZ$650/AU$570/US$380) a day. A day! At least I’m not paying that much. And at Al Ain, there was virtually no accommodation other than of the five-star tourist variety, the cheapest of which was Dh600 a day.

So I rose at dawn to make a day trip, which immediately involved examples of the opposite end of the cost spectrum. An aircon bus to Al Ain takes two and a half hours to cover the 145km but costs a paltry Dh10 (NZ$4.60/AU$4/US$2.70) which is less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks (yes, even the Arabian peninsula is not immune to Dr Evil’s front company) or any of the other branded coffee houses in AbDab. For the sake of research, I took a share minibus taxi, which cost twice that (still well below the threshold of significance) and took an hour less time but which included no seat belts and being serenaded the entire distance by the warning alarm that kicks in when you exceed the 120kmh speed limit.

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My first stop was the camel market, which was the only one of its kind left in the UAE.

Al Ain has many appeals. If you’re tired of the bling of Dubai or the building site of Abu Dhabi, Al Ain is about the closest you’ll get to the way the emirates used to be in the days before oil. And it’s as Emirati as the emirates get now, with the nation’s highest proportion of locals — albeit still vastly outnumbered by expats, mostly labourers from the subcontinent.

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This is the closest I’ve come to any action since I arrived in the UAE…

If the camel market was in AbDab or Dubai, it would be housed in some amazing, new and architecturally stunning edifice with airconditioning and interpretive panels. The Al Ain camel market was in a dusty paddock next to an unofficial dump on the outskirts of town, just as it would have been back in the pre-oil days. And there were even dodgy locals, hoping to fleece money off tourists by providing guide services, just like in a real developing country but the first I’ve encountered since arriving in the UAE.

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But unlike India or Morocco, they were easy to dissuade and it was all done in good spirits. The market is traditionally the first stop of the day so that you’re done before the, er, aroma gets too much. Then I headed back to souk (Arabic for “market”) in the middle of town.

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Unlike the rampant stockmarkets of AbDab and Dubai, this was a stockmarket you could believe in — no bulls or bears but plenty of goats. The nice part about it was it was all done for efficiency and custom rather than tourism, giving it an appealing authenticity after the manufacturedness of Dubai and the manufacturedness-in-the-making of AbDab. The market workers’ restaurant offered a breakfast of eggs, vegetables and coffee (not of the Starbucks variety) for Dh5, one quarter of the already paltry cost of my minibus ticket.

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The citrus juicer school of architecture is popular in Al Ain.

I moved on to the Al Ain National Museum (Dh3), where I was offered tea by the world’s friendliest security guards, and then wandered through the truly endearing greenery of the actual oasis, a series of date palm farms that are effectively as they have been since Al Ain (it means “the spring” in Arabic) was first settled 4000 years ago. AbDab, by contrast, was only permanently settled in the last 100 years or so and was the sketchiest of places until they found… well, you can guess.

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I can’t speak highly enough about the oasis, being both green and natural, which is the rarest of things in this manufactured country. I wandered through for about a kilometre, emerging on the far side at the Al Ain Palace Museum, the ancestral home of Sheikh Zayed, the founding father of the UAE.

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The palace had the biggest and most appealing majlis I’d seen yet. Fit for a Sheikh, appropriately enough.

Then I headed for the zoo. Like many people, I’ve been ambivalent about zoos and scathing about the bad ones. I still remember seeing one somewhere in the middle of Java which housed an orangutan in a cell smaller than my current hotel room. He sat there with dead eyes running a stick up and down the bars again and again and again and again… It was unspeakably sad.

And on the PCT outside the Californian town of Big Bear, there was a so-called retirement home for showbiz animals which was no better, with traumatised bears, lions and tigers doing endless loops of their tiny cages. (The only bright part of the experience was hearing later of some of the other hikers that year who unwittingly camped about 300m from the zoo without knowing of its existence and who spent the night unsuccessfully trying to convince themselves the obvious roars of bears and lions were actually the sounds of cattle.)

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But the Al Ain zoo was of the better variety, with modern enclosures with a reasonable amount of space for the animals. Still, no zoo is good and it was sad to see the big cats’ obvious lack of muscle tone from a sedentary life in which the need to hunt was no longer present. (Maybe they should throw in a meerkat from time to time and kill two birds with one stone?)

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Being up close and personal with a Bengal tiger left no illusions about your respective positions in the food chain.

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But I’ve got to say that overall, I didn’t think it was too bad.

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And I truly never expected to see penguins in the UAE…

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Then it was back to the centre of town, visiting a few hotels and restaurants, before catching the 7pm bus back to Abu Dhabi.

A pine tree in the desert

November 7th, 2008

Statutory warning: if you’re not from New Zealand and/or interested in rugby, the following post will bore you senseless.
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It wasn’t a hand so much as a great paw that was proffered my way at the doorway of the Dubai villa.

This was the same hand that used to hold the rugby ball in 15 years of playing as an All Black.

Colin Meads, or Pine Tree as he’s better known. Or New Zealand’s player of the century, as voted at an RNZFU dinner back in 1999.

The experience was a lot like the times I met Sir Ed, not least because Meads too was a figure of towering ability and mana but also of distinctly Antipodean humility and approachability.

While his successors in the black jersey were playing the first ever Bledisloe Cup clash on neutral soil, in Hong Kong, Meads was hosting a rugby brunch for the Australia New Zealand Association of the Unite Arab Emirates in Dubai. So of course I had to go up there to interview him for The National.

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The road between the madcap construction site of Abu Dhabi and the bling capital of Dubai mostly traverses the heartland of BFN.

Meads is 72 now and between the abuse he suffered on the rugby field (he once had his arm broken during a test against the Springboks but continued to the end, helping ensure the ABs won) and a hard life on the farm (from which he retired in February) meant he was less than limber. But he was certainly loquacious and we chatted amiably (as in, I’d ask inane questions and he’d reply without losing his rag) for about an hour.

Meads was missing the farm, as you’d expect when you go from 100ha to a double town section. And the dogs, of work and pet variety as part of the deal with the shift. He figured that the amateur All Blacks of his era had better friendships than exist now.

He wasn’t keen on watching rugby at the pub (”People ask you silly questions”, he explained) but was amazed by the speed of Dubai’s progress and the things like the indoor skifield at the Mall of the Emirates. The well-established villa in which he was staying had been sand and scrub only four years earlier.


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And even here, he’s recognised in a way that would drive most people mad but which he just accepted as the way things are.

“There are a lot of Kiwis here,” he said.

“When I was in the mall the other day, someone with a Kiwi accent came up and said: “G’day Colin, how are you?”

“Then he kept walking. Because I do a few television commercials, I’m still recognised at home but you just don’t expect to be recognised here.”

By that point, I figured I’d asked enough silly questions of my own so I let him be, after getting another chance to shake that huge paw-like hand.

Dune bashing in Abu Dhabi

October 29th, 2008

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Dunebashing is one of the UAE’s unofficial national sports, probably second in popularity only to the national obsession for Tailgating At Speed. So far as I can tell, the entire population of the Emirates is assiduously training for the day when these two activities are finally recognised as Olympic sports, at which time the nation’s long medals drought will be over.

But after our humbling experience in which we’d turned the Official Vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club into the Official Sand Anchor of the ADAC while barely 30m from the highway, we thought it prudent to enlist the professionals when we designated a dunebashing afternoon. So it was that about 20 of us lined up outside one of the big hotels downtown and jumped into the convoy of Toyota Landcruisers and headed for the desert about half an hour out of Abu Dhabi.

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Our driver was Abdullah, who was a man of few words as he drove in the standard manner — 140kmh, not bothering with the seat belt, and considering the use of indicators as an affront to his manhood — to the town of Al Khatim, about halfway to Al Ain. But what he lacked in verbosity, he made up for in actions as he turned off the little dirt road and headed into the dunes.

Normally in four wheel driving, all actions are best done in a slow and deliberate manner, in stark contrast to the macho image of blasting through at speed, bouncing around over rocks and ruts. But here on the dunes, Abdullah demonstrated the wisdom of the macho when it came to dune bashing.

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It seemed to help to drive aggressively…

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…but not too aggressively.

Abdullah dutifully ensured each of us were wearing our seat belts but omitted to use his own as he began a series of stomach-defying lurches up and down dunes in a graphic demonstration of momentum over logic. Then he stopped next to a pen of a dozen or so photogenic camels for us to regather our bearings, at which point he and the other drivers reduced their tyre pressure to 18psi.

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So the afternoon went on, with us effortlessly blasting along up and down improbable dunes then stopping for photographs and, I suspect, to allow the more tender passengers’ stomachs to settle. The irony was that Stacey’s stomach had not been good before going into this but the more Abdullah attempted to turn the ‘cruiser into an automotive cocktail shaker, the better she felt.

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We stopped beside a particularly photogenic set of dunes, with one that was the spitting image of the sand equivalent of New Zealand’s Mount Aspiring.

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Then we were back into the four wheel drives, blasted around some more, effortlessly scaled yet more improbable faces of sand and then pulled over beside possibly the least authentic looking casbah this side of Disneyland. The only thing they could have done to make it less authentic would have been to make it out of Lego.

As Chris observed: “I’ve never seen a fort which you look into from all sides.”

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But it was located next to another picturesque sand dune, which was a fine place to watch the sun set while the local teens blasted around on their quad bikes and performed stunts of a kind that even Abdullah had avoided.

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Most of us climbed it, including a Somali woman in full hijab attire and who made an impressive sight perched on the very top of the dune.

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She too was apparently indulging in the theory that nothing is real unless it’s captured in binary.

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Looking along the line of the dunes, we could see in at least the next two valleys between dunes there were equally fake-looking casbahs to which convoys of four wheel drives delivered more groups of tourists.

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The sun set and other four wheel drives made their way across the dunes.

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Some of our colleagues lined up for two-minute camel rides that circumnavigated the cluster of four wheel drives and then we heard the equivalent of the muezzin, except instead of the faithful being called to prayer, the tourists were called to the casbah but eighties house music blaring from a set of speakers.

My appetite for vanilla travel experiences of the kind offered to mainstream tourists is meagre at the best of times but the quirkiness of hearing music from the mid-eighties while a Punjabi MC promised us “velly, velly special” entertainment — a bored-looking belly dancer — was sufficiently surreal for it to provide its own unintended amusement.

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I thought maybe I’d get a facile genericised taste of the traditional Bedu culture, in the same way A Night Of Maori Magic does in New Zealand, but instead it became A Night Of Punjabi Magic as out pantomime-accented host started playing the hits of northern India. As so often since I arrived in the UAE, I just pretended I was a character in an absurdist play and sat back and smiled…

Friday prayers in Abu Dhabi

October 22nd, 2008

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On the day after two Brits were jailed for a drunken liaison on a Dubai beach, I attended my first “Friday Prayers” session.

Friday prayers, it has to be said, has no connection with religion and even less to do with piety. It’s the euphemistic term for the alcohol-fuelled all-you-can-eat-and-drink brunch sessions at the western hotels in which the expat crowd indulge to excess under the remarkable tolerance of the Emiratis.

It was at just such a session in Dubai at the start of July that Michelle Palmer and Vince Acors met and acquired the beer goggles that led them to, er, demonstrate their newfound affection on a Jumeirah beach.

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Their case been a bit of a flashpoint, with some saying it demonstrates the thin veneer covering the hardline Islamic Sharia law that operates in the Emirates. To their credit, more people have said what the pair did would have been just as illegal in Britain, the US, Australia or anywhere else.

If anything, I think it served to show how tolerant the authorities here have been. The pair had been spotted by a policeman going at it on the beach and all he did was tell them to stop and go home. They moved along the beach and resumed then when they were confronted again, she reportedly threw her sandal at the policeman.

It was only then the pair were arrested and charged. I doubt if they’d have been treated as leniently at Surfers Paradise or Brighton beach. On Thursday they were sentenced to three months jail (compared to a maximum penality of, I think, four years) for “illicit relations”, fined Dh1000 (US$272/NZ$500) for being drunk in public and ordered to be deported. She was sacked by her employer. He was supposedly only here on a short business trip but has been stuck in the Emirates ever since.

That’s not to say everything here is as tolerant. Much of the way things are done here seems less to do with illegality than whether they come to the attention of the authorities. The horizontal polka between unmarried people is technically illegal here but the Dubai Two would have been fine if they’d gone to either of their homes. As it is, unmarried expat couples cohabit here on a fairly frequent basis.

A little more disturbing are some of the other ways in which seemingly tolerated illegalities can come to the attention of the authorities. Getting pregnant is one. There’s great compulsory medical cover in Abu Dhabi but if you go to a doctor here for something related to pregnancy, you’re immediately asked how long you’ve been married for. It seems possible to bluff it but an unmarried expat woman who gets pregnant here is jailed and then deported.

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But back to the point. My own Friday Prayers session was rather more sedate. It was in the Abu Dhabi Millennium Hotel and hosted by the local hash house harriers, a running club that operates even during the 50degC/124degF heights of summer and thereby instantly met the barking-mad test by which I judge most of my activities. Apart from anything else, the hash runs are a rare exception to the usual expat activities which seem to revolve around being in the least Emirati environment possible — usually the pool of one of the western hotels — and cultivating an air of insolent indolence.

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The buffet at the brunch had been about as good as buffets get, which probably says more about buffets than about the Millennium Hotel or Abu Dhabi. With unlimited wine, beer and margaritas, the cost was Dh160 (about US$40/NZ$65) but at heart I’d have preferred to have been at one of the skanky but authentic restaurants encircling my hotel.

Nobody got drunk, let alone obnoxious. That was good because the wine was of a quality more commonly associated with university undergrads than half-decent restaurants. The food was good, the company interesting and it was interesting to compare notes with others going through pretty much the same experience.

We then moved on to yet another indeterminately western hotel, Le Royal Meridien, to their Irish bar. I’ll admit that on rare occasions, I’ve been overwhelmed by foreign cultures and retreated into the familiar recess of the western ways. In Japan this year, while walking the pilgrimage trail around the island of Shikoku and after not having had a fluent English conversation for almost a month, I retreated for a few hours into an internet cafe and watched the entirety of Terminator III on YouTube.

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But here in an Irish bar that looked like every other Irish bar from Tel Aviv to Invercargill — but not, ironically enough, like the actual bars in Ireland — and listening to classic rock from the 1980s, watching drunken westerners dance, well… it wasn’t why I’m here in Abu Dhabi.

Besides my first Friday Prayers, this weekend also featured another landmark of sorts. I finally lost the big toenail I’d snapped during my descent from Denali back at the start of June. When I accepted the job here, I’d toyed with the paradoxical prospect that I’d still have the last vestiges of frostnip on my right index finger and thumb when I arrived in Abu Dhabi, only for the passage of time to repair the vascular damage before I arrived.

Instead the toenail has been like a final reminder that a few months before arriving in the blast furnace of the Persian Gulf, I was in -25degC on top of an Alaskan mountain. Even the scar from the dog bite I received while hiking a section of the Iditarod Trail outside Anchorage has just about disappeared.

I’ve chronicled the toenail’s demise in words and, more disturbingly, in photo form but given the culinary theme of this entry, I thought it might be best to post a pic of these cute and cuddly kittens instead.

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But if you click on the kittens (well, if my html is up to scratch) you’ll get the whole ugly story…

The Abu Dhabi Alpine Club rides again

October 13th, 2008

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“Well, we’ve ticked all the boxes today,” Chris said.

And we had. Since lunchtime we’d handled Russian automatic weapons, watched Emiratis tyre-kick their way around stands of hunting falcons, witnessed a Saluki beauty show, headed into the desert, climbed a sand dune at dusk, watched a camel train driven a singing Bedouin, and managed to repeatedly bog the Official Vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club.

So, quite a day. And especially since it didn’t start until around lunchtime. On Friday — the first day of the weekend in this Muslim society — Chris and Stacey said they were heading to the Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition. I’d already arranged to go to a brunch with some of the expat brigade at The National so couldn’t make it.

Later in the day, Chris and Stacey admitted they’d succumbed to “the inshallahs” — the phrase means “If God so wills” but here it has a more figurative meaning closer to the Spanish “manana” — and hadn’t made it. So on Saturday, the three of us headed out to the enormous new National Exhibition Centre for the exhibition.

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I’d heard from some of those at the brunch who had been to the exhibition but had to see it to believe it. Until now, I’d never seen the row upon row of recreational hunting falcons which for the Emiratis is a sport on a par with rugby in New Zealand, aussie rules in Melbourne, or football in Britain.

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This was one of the few times I’d been up close to Emiratis, who are a tiny minority in their own country because of the massive influx of professionals and labourers enlisted to complete its transformation from the camel age to a modern society with a diverse economy not dependent on oil.

Just to prove the adage that people are basically the same everywhere, the Emirati falcon buyers were far outnumbered by the tyre-kickers who were just wandering around comparing various birds, which spent most of their time blinded by hoods and tethered to their stands.

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Even with their hoods, the slightest noise — and particularly the various electronic bleeps of my camera — would have them twisting their heads around trying to work out its origin. These were clearly finely-tuned hunting birds.

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We chatted with one of them about the birds and the sport, at the end of which I thanked him and said I’d been finding it difficult to meet Emiratis. He seemed genuinely surprised.

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Emirati boys enjoying the Saluki show

Then it was on to the show arena, where a few days earlier I’d been told a camel had sold for several million dollars. The horse auction was not due to begin for several hours so we contented ourselves by watching a beauty show for Salukis, the sinuous breed of hunting dogs used by the Arab Bedouin for millennia and which are clearly close cousins to Afghan dogs.

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There were a lot of places selling equipment for the UAE hobby of camping in the desert, which is always, always supported by cars so weight was possibly the least important consideration. There were some bling barbecues but nothing could compare to the portable majlis based around a typically massive American pickup, complete with widescreen LCD television.

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Stacey, ex the RNZAF, looks waaaay too comfortable holding a gun…

Then we moved on to the bit that I’d been told would be the most amusing — the gun section. This lived up to its billing. We were searched on the way in, with metal detectors and security scans, although it wasn’t clear why because we were heading into a place where there were huge quantities of arms and, it seemed, matching ammunition. And, as we witnessed, one Emirati visitor simply put his pistol beside his cellphone and car keys in the little plastic basket while he went through the security scan and collected them on the other side.

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You lookin’ at me? Don’t see anyone else here…

There was a very family friendly feel to the inside of the gun section, complete with a three year old wandering around with a pistol as wide as his head. So far as I’ve been told, only Emiratis are allowed to buy guns but they were happy to let us expat tyre-kickers have a look around, pick up Russian automatic weapons and take a bunch of silly photos.

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“And this is only a .22?”

I wasn’t quite what to make of the “art guns”, with one $750,000 example made almost entirely out of ivory, complete with a bolt handle in the spectacularly tacky shape of an elephant trunk. All the metal parts were plated in 24 carat gold and there was, of course, a diamond for the sight at the tip of the bling barrel.

As we headed back out into the sunlight, Chris suggested heading to Liwa, an oasis town about 150km from Abu Dhabi. Liwa’s best known for being in the middle of the Rub al-Khali — the infamous “empty quarter” at the start of the world’s biggest sand dune desert that stretches far into Saudi Arabia.

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We barrelled along the highway with the usual weaving dance between haphazardly driven trucks and cars shooting past at warp speed. At first there was the bleak but unremarkable slightly scrubby desert just off Abu Dhabi island but then we headed off onto an otherwise entirely featureless plain of what seemed like salt flats. In time we turned off and headed south off the coastal motorway and began to see occasional sand dunes making an appearance.

Once past Madinet Zayed — a small town with no apparent purpose which we declared to be the capital of BFN (butt-f*ck nowhere, in the inimitable parlance of America) — the sand dunes began in earnest. Thanks to some Olympic level faffing and despite adopting the Emirati style of driving at 140kmh, the sun set long before we were due to arrived in Liwa so we stopped at the nearest dunes.

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We jumped the fence (presumably designed to keep camels off the highway) then Chris demonstrated his chivalrous tendencies by piggy backing Stacey because her shoe choice had been based on thinking she was going to be wandering around an aircon exhibition centre.

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We headed up a dune turning an appropriate colour in the setting sun then watched as a camel train passed by, complete with a Bedouin on the final camel singing some ridiculously atmospheric song which wafted across to us on the warm evening air.

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“This is the first time I feel like we’ve got beyond the fence and away from the parks,” Chris said, and we all agreed. This part of the world holds a particular and stark beauty but we’d been spending too much of our spare time in the soullessly international bits of downtown. We vowed to spend more time out in the countryside, and particularly heading into the dune country, then returned to the Official Vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club.

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Within a few minutes the Official Vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club became the Official Sand Anchor of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club. Some perverse facet of physics meant the level sand track we’d covered effortlessly on the way in now conspired to make the OV/SAADAC sink in to its axles. We tried pushing then resorted to digging and using fronds from the date palms nearby, which provided just enough traction to move the Disco another 10m where it would get hopelessly stuck again.

After several rounds of this, we succeeded and a chastened trio returned to the tarmac, with a new appreciation for the margins of dune travel. There was still time for one more bamboozlement with the motorway interchanges, which saw us heading off to the oasis town of Al Ain when we’d tried to get to Abu Dhabi. Every trip seemed to involve one geographic denouement and we’ll know when we’ve reached true local status when we complete a journey without getting lost.

But getting lost, as Chris opined, was “ticking all the boxes”.

The Abu Dhabi Alpine Club

October 3rd, 2008

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It’s well known that some of the most famous peaks in the world can suffer from congestion at critical points, making an ascent even more hazardous.

There’s the Hillary step near the summit of Everest, the Bottleneck on K2, and the Summit Rocks on Aoraki-Mount Cook. But none of those compare to what we encountered on Jebel Hafeet, the highest peak in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the destination for the inaugural expedition of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club.

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The official vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club.

The Abu Dhabi Alpine Club is not an entirely serious organisation, not least because of the geographical difficulties of being located in one of the hottest and least alpine environments on earth. In early meetings with Kiwi expat co-founders Chris and Stacey, we’d talked about adopting rules in which club members could only be referred to by name if prefixed by the word “Sherpa”.

But Kathmandu is a four-hour flight from here, making the Himalaya a viable weekend destination. And we figured the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club could be a nexus for those of us who were missing the cold and crinkly bits of the planet while stationed in a particularly hot and sandy corner of it. And because we share our acronym with the ginormously wealthy Abu Dhabi Airports Company, there is always the chance that someone might mistakenly send us a cheque equal to the GDP of Norway.

And if the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club was not an entirely seriously alpine, neither was Jebel Hafeet. The peak is on the outskirts of the oasis town of Al Ain (”The Spring” in Arabic) on the border with Oman, reaches the hardly-nosebleed-inducing altitude of a little over 1240m/4070ft above sea level, is barely cooler than the baking surrounding deserts of the Arabian peninsula, and can be safely climbed while shod in Tevas.

And then there’s also the presence of, um, a, er, road leading to within a short walk from the summit.

It was the road that caused the problem. Well, that and the Eid al Fitr holiday to mark the end of the Muslim daylight-fasting month of Ramadan, when all the denial of earthly pleasures and the religious reflection of the previous 30 days is supplanted by massive feasts and general partying.

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Chris, Stacey and I made a day trip to Al Ain with few plans other than getting out of AbDab. We knew there was an extensive grove of date palms still preserved around the oasis, and that there was a well-known zoo where Stacey had thought about seeking work to use her zoology degree rather than succumb to the expat wives’ Stepfordesque obsession with nails and spa treatments. There was also Jebel Hafeet, a great lump of sedimentary rock uplifted by some long distant tectonic event and now standing alone as the final isolated example of the spine of rock that forms the peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz.

The drive itself was an education of life on the UAE’s massive motorways. Thanks to massive irrigation sourced from the equally collosal desalination plants, the route is almost entirely lined with date palms and other similar species to give a vision of relative lushness. Just beyond were rolling red sand dunes and flat rocky desert terrane to show what normal life is like.

An even bigger impression was made by our fellow travellers. We’d beetle along around the 120kmh/70mph speed limit and get passed regularly by other vehicles being driven at up to 200kmh/125mph. On a substantial minority of occasions, the other drivers used the slow lane for these overtaking manoeuvres and as often as not, our substantial Land Rover Discovery would be buffeted by their slipstream. It was not hard to work out why the UAE’s road safety record is near the worst in the world.

We arrived safely at Al Ain and repaired to a mall (yes, I’m becoming a mall rat) for lunch, which was bookended by the surreal experience of watching the Emiratis’ attempts to ice skate on the indoor rink that forms the mall’s ground floor centrepiece. Ever wondered where your $2 a litre for petrol goes? It’s so Arabs can ice skate in the desert.

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The temperature outside was hovering around 40degC/104degF but unlike AbDab, the humidity was barely noticeable. It was even nicer in the shady environs of the impressively intact date palm farms around the oasis, which had been spared from the developers’ otherwise seemingly omnipotent bulldozers.

Around 3.30pm, we tried to get to the zoo but were dissuaded by the vast throng of humanity descending on it.

“I know,” someone said, “Why don’t we go to Jebel Hafeet?”

Almost immediately, there was some kind of traffic snarl in which we were stuck for close to an hour. Within minutes of getting out of that, we were caught in another, although this time it was soon after beginning the ascent of the impressively engineered three-lane road heading to the summit. We were eventually to learn that this snarl extended all the way to the enormous car park just below the summit.

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We — OK, I — foolishly talked about how to kill the hour or two so we would still be on top at sunset. At first it seemed the snarl was caused by the impressive local drivers’ habit of attempting a U-turn in the middle of the worst snarls, prompting the others drivers around them to move forward so that nobody could move in any direction, turning what had merely been congestion into full gridlock.

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Cars boiled over. Cars ran out of fuel. Many people abandoned their cars and walked. We might have joined them but for the prodigious proportions of the Disco — Chris’s work car — which would have had it at the peril of the locals’ questionable driving skills no matter how closely we parked to the guard rails.

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We sat and waited, entertained by kids in neighbouring cars pursuing the national pastime of twirling AK47 replicas, which would no doubt cause pandemonium and fears of junior jihadis to many outside observers but here seemed oddly normal.

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The sun doesn’t set here as such. It disappears into the haze about a handspan above the horizon line and then dusk follows. We were still sitting in the Disco when we saw the sliver of the new moon, on the sighting of which Ramadan’s end is determined. Such is the fickle nature of the sighting, the exact date of the end of Ramadan, and the public holidays for Eid that follow, is not known until a few hours before.

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We watched more pointless attempts at U-turns, watched the exodus as our fellow drivers got out to pray at sunset (such was the snarl, it made no appreciable difference to progress up the hill) and then about an hour and a half after dark, finally reached the carpark.

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If we thought we were in a bad place, it was put into perspective by the total gridlock for those attempting to descend, and especially at the exit to the car park, where 10 lanes of traffic attempted to converge into one with all the mayhem you’d expect from a nation where the concepts of queuing and precedence are seen as curious anathemas.

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The summit spire of Jebel Hafeet and a UAE blingmobile

The actual summit of Jebel Hafeet was maybe 200m/600ft higher than the car park and is an impressive spire of rock. At least it’s an impressive spire now, because what had once probably been a moderately graded ridge was obliterated by excavation to create the car park on which we now stood. Now a cliff stood between us and the summit but we could see a rough but wide path heading up around to the back of the peak.

It was odd too to begin an ascent with virtually nothing other than what we were wearing, which for me was a T-shirt, shorts and Tevas. Stacey and Chris had a backpack with some water and food but the contents barely registered. For those used to the vicissitudes of weather in the New Zealand hills, it seemed wrong not to have jackets and other apparent necessities.

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The path up the hill was blocked by a locked gate but we joined the regular procession of people jumping over it. Not all, we quickly learned, were doing so for the undoubted mountaineering status that comes from a glorious ascent of Jebel Hafeet. The presence of men squatting in their shalway chemises or punjabis, the distinctly sewerage-like whiff and then the unmistakeable presence of turds lining the path betrayed the true aims of their missions on the mountain.

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Fortunately, the ablution zone was relatively short and then we ascended the path which seemed of similar steepness to Lyttelton’s bridle path. There was obviously no moon to speak of and we hadn’t been planning a night ascent so we had to rely on the streetlighting from the car park and then by the dodgy LED torch function on my cellphone. The path petered out at yet another car park hewn from the peak’s slopes and we continued on up via some easy scrambling on loose but moderately graded rock to the final summit, which we reached a little before 9pm.

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Chris and Stacey on the summit

It was nice to actually require the use of hands for this, even if it was only for the final 20m. And there was the added amusement of trying to do so while sharing a single dodgy cellphone torch.

It was almost exactly four months since my last summit, on Denali in -25degC/-17degF but here the temperature was perfect, in the high 20s in celcius (the 80s in Fahrenheit).

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The difference four months, one day — and 5000m in altitude — makes.

There was an odd feeling of accomplishment to this ascent, mostly stemming from the bizarre features of the day, which had been one of my most enjoyable so far in the UAE. As with so often when travelling in unfamiliar cultures, it helps to think of yourself as a character in an absurdist drama because then everything that happens becomes entertaining rather than simply frustrating.

We looked back on the line of traffic snaking along the ridgetop road, which remained in total gridlock. It was clear we were not going anywhere soon.

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We retraced our route back to the path with less difficulty than I was expecting and returned to the car park, where we made a cursory attempt to join the 10 lanes constricting down to one gridlocked lane down the mountain. Good sense prevailed and we soon abandoned the line to wait.

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Thus followed one of my favourite memories of the UAE. Besides the dozens stuck in their cars, there were maybe 500 people here — families cooking kebabs on tiny barbecues, burqaed women wandering around in groups, and the boy racers in their flash cars doing laps of the car park with roof-surfing passengers, showing that alcohol was not essential for young men to display an innate wish to win Darwin awards.

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And there were men. Many, many, many men, primarily Pesharis from Pakistan/Afghanistan border who work as labourers in Al Ain.

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In everywhere else I’ve lived, alcohol would be a prominent feature of any such gathering but not here. Maybe that helped explain the convivial atmosphere that prevailed. Groups began to form around men dancing energetically in what I assume to be traditional style and to the tune of battered Corolla taxis’ stereo systems, always turned to 11 on the 1-10 volume control.

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As one group stopped dancing, another group from the crowd would come forward and take over. There was even a throwback to the eighties, with breakdancing youths in stonewashed jeans, but fortunately they were the exception.

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Groups would coalesce and then disperse and I wandered from one to the other, always seemingly welcomed even when I brought out my camera, under the theory that nothing is real unless it’s captured in binary. Some even tried to get me to dance and I did them an enormous favour by declining.

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Other groups would form around trios made up of a bongo drummer, a singer, and someone playing a kind of ground-based accordion. The songs were seemingly all familiar because everyone sang and did the hand gestures in unison.

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By 11pm or so, the traffic had eased off enough to justify leaving and we were still mired in yet another snarl near the bottom of the hill where similar Eid revellers at a lakeside park merged into the Jebel Hafeet traffic.

After yet more slipstream-buffeting driving along the motorway, we returned to AbDab a little before 2am.

Abu Dhabi weather

September 21st, 2008

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Some people say the summertime weather in the United Arab Emirates is unchanging. That’s clearly not right, as this page from today’s newspaper shows. It’s only hot and sunny some of the time. Sometimes it’s sunny and hot…

Ramadan and the silent haka

September 15th, 2008

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I’d never seen a silent haka before, but then I’d never tried to watch a rugby test in a Muslim nation in the middle of Ramadan either.

The holy Muslim month of dawn-to-dusk fasting is designed to be a time when the faithful spurn earthly pleasures in favour of reflection and piety.

That included a ban on entertainment, which created a problem for a different sect of the faithful, which included myself, who were determined to see the winner-take-all Trinations game between the All Blacks and the Wallabies.

The 8pm kickoff time in Brisbane meant a 2pm kickoff in Abu Dhabi, in the middle of the fasting period, making it a mission to find somewhere that was screening the match. But doggedness and determination are sometimes required as much off the paddock as on it, and with the help of an expats’ forum website and a lot of calling around, we found the Hemingway Bar of the Abu Dhabi Hilton was showing the test… with conditions.

The conditions included that all the curtains had to be drawn, which was OK. And that no alcohol could be served, making it possibly the only time I’ve ever watched rugby without beer. And that the volume was turned off.

This last one flummoxed us. It was only commentary and not the music which is usually banned in Ramadan. Not that I was that desperate to hear Murray Mexted’s mellifluous commentary but despite appealing to the manageress, the sound stayed off.

So it was that about 18 of us watched the odd spectacle of the silent haka (OK, so we snuck the volume up just a little to hear the stirring Kapa O Pango haka) and nursed brightly coloured alcohol-free “mocktails” instead of the usual pints. I went for a coffee over a Shirley Temple.

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It was an interesting bunch. There was a Maori woman from Huntley with her Egyptian husband, both bedecked in All Black paraphernalia, there were a dozen or so predominantly female teachers who were brought over to train the UAE teachers, and a smattering of other nationalities, included a solitary but unbowed Wallabies fan.

“This is the first time I’ve watched rugby without drinking,” one of the teachers said, voicing the thoughts of most of us. “It just seems wrong.”

The game was a cracker, with the lead changing from one side to the other and the end result in doubt until well after the final hooter, when a turnover allowed the All Blacks to kick the ball out and ensure a narrow four-point victory.

For all the silence from the giant LCD television, there was no silence from those watching it and every score was greeted with the usual mix of yells and screams, as if it was going to have any influence on a game being played six time zones away. In between our sporadic yelling, the other end of the bar would occasionally go similarly ballistic as someone scored in the Man U and Liverpool match.

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Besides that, the other main excursion was a trip to the Grand Mosque on the outskirts of AbDab, as the expats call Abu Dhabi. This mosque was truly grand, as you’d imagine from the $2 billion — yep, billion — budget that went into it.

There was an endless procession of mind-bending facts about it, tempered by the knowledge that it was scaled back in size by about a third when they realised it was not a good idea for it to be bigger than the mosque in Mecca. Even the mini version has a capacity of 48,000, with the 10,000 in the main hall praying on the world’s biggest hand-knotted carpet, which is more than half a hectare in size.

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The minarets outside are 107m high, complete with (of course) aircraft warning lights on top. Nearby stands the tomb of Sheik Zayed, the moderniser of the UAE and who initiated the mosque. It’s a modest building where Islamic scholars take turns to recite the Koran over his grave 24/7.

But the bit that really resonated for me was realising that this is truly a modern-day Taj Mahal, where ridiculous oilbucks wealth has allowed detail of a kind usually only prescribed by all-powerful Mughal rulers. (And the initiator of the Taj, it should be remembered, was overthrown by his son for being too extravagant on the building)

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The huge scale and amazing attention to detail included a Kiwi touch. Yep, the ubiquitous and reviled tacky tourist medium of paua — mother of pearl — was used to help create the decorations on some of the 1096 hand-hewn marble pillars.

Opening hours during Ramadan are restricted but I went in to have a look around during one of the thrice-weekly openings for infidels like me. Hardly anyone else was there, apart from a few Germans, and I met one of the long-bearded Emirati faithful who’d earlier sat reciting from the Koran (Quran, if we’re being precise) in front of a pillar of paua. Later he came up to me and we Salaamed then shook hands in the Arabic style, which is the same as in the west but ends with each bringing our hand back over to touch the chest over the heart.

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“Muslim?” he asked.

“La,” (”No”) I replied, and a slightly awkward silence ensued.

Today will be two weeks since I arrived in the UAE and even the oddest things are beginning to gain the tenor of familiarity. Whether it’s the cry of the muezzin in mid-afternoon calling the faithful to prayer (and me to my coffee break) or the mundane aspects such as my glasses instantly fogging up in my brief forays into the opporessive humidity between the aircon of the hotel, the aircon of the taxi and the aircon of the office.

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Only a month or so ago, I revelled in having no keys, no cellphone, no job and no home.

I still have no keys (the hotel works on a swipe card) or cellphone (you need to be a resident before you can get a cellphone plan) or a settled home outside of the maid-serviced hotel room. But I do have a job, to which I’ve already done my first news feature — on the “man drought” in New Zealand, which is relevant to the UAE because the Emirates has the highest percentage of men on the planet. With 2.7 men for every woman of working age, the UAE is the world’s pre-eminent “man reservoir”.

But I’m not sure we’ll see a sudden influx of single women. As the saying goes, sometimes when the odds are good, the goods are odd.

Foul Madams in Abu Dhabi

September 6th, 2008

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I’d only been in the United Arab Emirates for a few hours when I was offered my first foul madams.

I didn’t even have to leave my room — there on the room service menu on the Arabian breakfast option, among the olives, white cheese and flat bread, was “foul madams”. It was entirely in keeping with my initial impressions of Euro Hotel, which was decorated in a style best described as trying to replicate Saddam’s sex palace.*

I thought it prudent to go for the artery-clogging American breakfast instead.

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Even though this was Ramadan, the Muslim month of daylight fasting, there was no problem getting food during daylight hours, so long as it was eaten in your room and not in public. It soon turned out that I was unlikely to offend any Muslims because so far as I could tell, the staff were exclusively Indian Hindus. (Hindus who couldn’t make an American breakfast to save their lives, but that’s another story)

It’s been emblematic of my experience in my first week. Apart from the immigration counter at the airport, I’m not sure if I’ve actually spoken to an Emirati, who comprise either 10 or 20 per cent of the population in their own country depending on which statistic you read.

I’ve seen them, though, driving past in the huge American four-wheel-drives of the sort that, ironically enough, Americans can’t afford to drive any more. And, to their credit, the Emiratis tend to be fonder of high-end BMWs, Mercedes and Range Rovers than of American SUVs.

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The taxi drivers have been Indian, Syrian, or Pakistani. My colleagues on The National are Brits, Canadians, Americans, Australians, Kiwis and a substantial smattering of nationals from around the Middle East.

The Emiratis, a Goan man working at my hotel explained, don’t do those sorts of jobs. They all work in the big offices of the oil and gas companies, or for the US$500 billion sovereign wealth funds that are trying to ensure a post-oil future for the UAE.

So, it’s been quite a ride. I’ve been surprised by how ramshackle some of the urban environment is, outside of the artificially pleasant surrounds of a few big buildings and major hotels.

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An even bigger surprise is how much it reminds me of southern California — there’s the same oversized cars, the same vacuous wealth, the same yawning disparity between rich and poor, the same oppresively unchanging sunniness, the same all-pervading layer of dirt on everything, the same blast-furnace heat, and the same way that anything green and lush is only that way because it’s artificially created. The other surprise is how I’ve ended up here, when I swore I’d never live in southern California.

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But Abu Dhabi is also surprisingly dysfunctional too. For all the massive oil wealth, the locals seem to share that peculiarly subcontinental capacity for tolerance of the substandard.

For all the western input, The National reflects this. I had hints of the shambolic operations beforehand, such as when I signed the job offer and faxed it to the number listed on the form, only to be told that nobody has yet worked out where the fax machine is that relates to that number.

I arrived in Abu Dhabi in the middle of the night, when the temperature was still a ridiculous 35degC/96degF. (The planes don’t land in the middle of the day, I was told, because the temperatures are too high to refuel them safely) Then I took a taxi to the supposedly pre-booked Euro Hotel, arriving at 1am to find they had no booking for me. Fortunately, they had a spare room — the famous Saddam sex bunker — and I decided I was more interested in booking in than on trying to work out the problem.

Then I went to work and was moved to another hotel, just off the Corniche that runs along the waterfront. The Euro (dubbed the Eurotrash by hacks who stayed there before me) had a room rate of a mind-boggling NZ$400 a night but the new hotel, The Al Diar Capital, puts it in the shade with a walk-in rate of NZ$550 a night. And the company is paying for my first month, and will foot most of the bill for possibly another few months after that.

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My home away from home, The Capital Hotel.

“You’ll like The Capital,” I was told by one of The National staffers, conjuring up images in my mind of gyms or pools or such things. He quickly scotched such thoughts by finishing his sentence: “because you can buy alcohol there without a permit from the government.”

It’s nice enough. The aircon at Saddam’s sex bunker was seemingly perpetually stuck on the Antarctic Ice Shelf setting but at The Capital, it’s merely equivalent to the inside of a Dunedin student flat in winter. After a short time in the UAE, it comes as no surprise to learn that the per capita energy consumption is the highest in the world and twice even America’s.

I’ve also been advised that habituating any of The Capital’s bars will lead to approaches by some of the skinny young women who I’ve spotted around the hotel, who have stood out for being scantily clad, for tottering around on ridiculous heels, for their a fondness of oversized golden accessories and for their eastern European accents. It seems the Euro Hotel is not the only place with Foul Madams on the menu…

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At the end of my first week at The National, I have not written a single word for print. That in turn might be because I still haven’t been given a log-in for the computer system and don’t have a phone. I only have somewhere to sit thanks to Jo and Blayne, former colleagues from The Press, who pointed me towards an empty desk. Possession seems to be 99 per cent of the law in the newsroom. I don’t even have a swipe card through the security and have to be swiped in by the guard or follow others through. For that matter, I don’t even have a work permit yet, which will apparently take another month.

I’m reportedly going to be working on the Saturday (the Muslim equivalent of our Sunday) edition of The National, which has been published six days a week since April or so. I asked someone up the food chain when we were intending to launch.

“The second,” he said.

“…of?” I replied.

“November.”

November! The oddest thing is that not only am I not able to do any work, I don’t seem to be required to either. It’s an odd thing for someone who doesn’t like to go a single day without filing at least a couple of stories. The guy who’s going to be my boss has now gone away for two weeks so I’ve volunteered myself to write for the daily edition. The odd thing was it seems nothing would have even been noticed if in that time I’d kept my head down and come in for a few hours each day, surfed the net and left again having achieved nothing other than warming the seat. I probably wouldn’t even have needed to come in at all.

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Ramadan has been no problem, mostly because The National’s bosses have set aside a room at the back for us infidels to eat and drink without offending our Muslim colleagues. It’s been interesting watching the transition from day to night (designated as when it’s sufficiently dark to be unable to distinguish between a black thread and a white thread) and the iftar, the literal “break fast”. One night I was in one of the many, many malls and watched as people ordered food in the final 20 minutes before the end of the day and the staff got it ready to serve once the time came. Outside, you’d have heard the wail of a muezzin on the minarets, calling the faithful to prayer. In here, the time was displayed when the fountain suddenly burst into life and the food suddenly began being served. Traditionally, the fast is broken with a few dates and some tea but my experience so far is that McDonalds and Burger King tend to be more popular among the locals.

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Some things don’t change though. The same seventies shows that were on the Greymouth motel’s cable are on here…

Overall, though, Abu Dhabi has seemed to be particularly tolerant. Some women are locked away in the full burquas but there’s no problem for other Middle Eastern women to wander around in jeans and tight fitting clothing, even though Ramadan is supposed to be a time when extra discretion is required. From what others have said, the worst reaction caused by culturally inappropriate clothing is stares and nothing more.

Reading back over this, it seems a little negative, reflecting a difficult time to be in a challenging country. As you’d imagine, there’s an onslaught for the senses at present but I’m also looking forward to the time when it becomes more familiar and I start to take in some of the minutae of this fascinating place. Such as when I went into a supermarket and found tins of beans labelled “Foul Medammas”…

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حتى في المرة القادمة (until next time)

JH

* Yes, Kathy, that was your line. Remember, it’s recycling and not plagiarism.