Where in the world is John Henzell?

While meeting my first squillionaire of the day, I dined on gold.

Literally. Not gold plates or gold cultery. I ate gold.

I was at the Emirates Palace, a waterfront Abu Dhabi hotel famous for being the most expensive ever built – a piffling US$3billion or so – and which is of a scale and level of detail that serves only to confirm all known stereotypes about the Gulf states’ finances.

When you order coffee at the lobby cafe at the Emirates Palace, a latte costs a hefty-but-proportionate Dh34/US$10/AU$14/NZ$17 and comes with a couple of “complimentary” chocolates.

And the chocolates emerge topped with a thumbnail-sized piece of gold sheet. It was my tiny part of the estimated 5kg – kg! – of gold that is ingested by the palace’s patrons each year. That’s US$144,000 worth on today’s spot price.

I was there to do a story about artparis Abu Dhabi, a French contemporary art fair transplanted into Abu Dhabi by the Government as part of its bid to establish the UAE capital as the cultural hub of the Middle East. Just as with the Emirates Palace hotel, also built by the Government, no expense is being spared in this, and a Dh100 billion (US$27bn/AU$42bn/NZ$50bn) development is turning a former tidal sand bank beside Abu Dhabi into a cultural centre in which the Louvre and the Guggenheim will be represented. It’s the former’s sole venue outside of Paris.

More specifically, I was there to interview some of the 100 invited art collectors flown out by – well, you guessed – and put up in the tennis court sized suites at the Emirates Palace.

First up was Nadhim Zahawi, founder and CEO of online pollster YouGov.com, whose estimated wealth was somewhere north of US$15m but who was particularly down to earth. This was good because he came straight from the pool and was dressed in board shorts and an expensively casual T-shirt which would have made it difficult for him to maintain an air of patrician superiority. Mind you, he also let me buy the coffee and aforementioned bullion-blended chocolates, which probably helps explain why he’s a multimillionaire.

The topic was how the art fair’s Abu Dhabi presence should evolve and we discussed issues about value for money (the dealers were charging up to US$50,000 for works by emerging artists who had yet to warrant a solo exhibition) and about the quality of the art (he was chuffed to “discover” Egyptian photographer Osama Esid) and about mixing with 99 of the world’s other top private collectors.

The encounter confirmed my theories about the wealthy, who display the same gamut of human traits as anyone else. I’d always found it easy to relate to those who use their wealth to pursue pleasure without hedonism (as in collecting art) and who used their money to achieve goals other than consolidating their power and prestige

That theory was emphasised by the next pair, displaced New Yorkers Don and Mera Rubell, who are listed among the top 200 private collectors in the world.

We got on extremely well, except for an early faux pas in which I made the mistake of calling them art investors. “We’re collectors,” Don pleasantly corrected me. “Investors intend to sell at some point and we don’t intend to sell anything.”

Their back story was really interesting. They’d met and married as teenagers in the early 1960s and while he went to grad school and they lived on her $100 a week teachers salary in New York, they still made a point of assigning a quarter of their income to buy art. More than 45 years later and thanks to his subsequent career as a gynecologist and other serendipitous fiscal events, the ratio assigned to acquire art remained the same but the numbers had rather a lot more zeroes at the end.

Even more impressive was their ability to spot talent very, very early in artists’ careers, and many of their 5000 or so works of modern and contemporary art were bought for the price similar to that of a pair of shoes or a haircut rather than with the blunt force of their chequebook. They were among the first, for example, to recognise Jeff Koons‘ potential.

When they “committed” to an artist, they explained, they liked to pick up between 10 and 80 of their works. It was not said in a boastful way at all and they were too nice to say on record that the art on display at the fair was overpriced, especially considering the slump in art prices in New York prompted by the chaos on Wall Street.

There were many reasons to be impressed by this pair, whether it was the fact they bought a former Drug Enforcement Agency secure warehouse in Miami to set up their museum, by their down-to-earth manner or, as I remarked to them at the end of our rambling interview, the fact they took the effort to put the chairs back into place rather than leaving it to the army of liveried minions at the Emirates Palace.

The fourth squillionaire was Martin French, an indeterminately wealthy and quietly influential English collector who managed to maintain an impressively tiny Google footprint. He also bolstered my theory about wealthy art collectors being pleasant and down to earth, as he too explained about the challenges ahead for artparis Abu Dhabi.

This was the most enjoyable assignment I’d done since I arrived in the UAE nearly three months ago. The combination of interesting and intelligent subjects, along with tightness of the timing (I had about an hour to Google-swat on the four collectors’ back stories before meeting them and then half a day to turn it into a 1500-word article) reminded me again how much I enjoy journalism and why I’ve avoided going higher up the career ladder towards management.

And, after all, how often do you get to eat gold with a squillionaire?

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?

(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!)

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?)

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

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

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

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

Statutory warning: if you’re not from New Zealand and/or interested in rugby, the following post will bore you senseless.

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.

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.

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.