Where in the world is John Henzell?

Soon after I first arrived in the Dhabs, I met another expat in the lifts at The Capital.

This was the not-quite-Corniche-front hotel I’d moved into after one night in the less salubrious delights of the Euro Hotel, which was known variously as the Eurotrash and as Saddam’s S*x Palace. Both were hotels used by the then relatively newly-launched The National for medium-term stays by its incoming journalists until company flats came on line.

He looked so downcast that I broke the usual no-speaking-in-lifts rule and asked something asinine like “Been staying here long?”

“Six months,” he replied, although the accompanying shake of the head and dejected gaze expressed more than the words.

Six months, I thought to myself, tried to imagine it but couldn’t. It was a nice enough five-star hotel but still… six months.

Over the following eight months, I got pretty used to the lifts at The Capital.

Sometimes I’d share them with other newly-minted expats still fresh with the novelty of finding themselves in the world’s richest city, next to the world’s biggest sand desert and amid the world’s most geopolitically turbulent region.

There was a bar on the second floor — the Rock Bottom, which was at least truth in advertising, although I managed to avoid it — and too often late at night I’d share the lifts with boozed-up expats swaying around.

Far too often, they’d be accompanied by some of the bar’s skanky Chinese hoookers, except the expats’ beer-goggled state diminished their assessment of the kisses from these jaded Chinese princesses.

And once, memorably, I shared the lift with a gaggle of Russian trannies, which finally scotched once and for all time theories that religious proscriptions are able to out-trump the many variations of the human condition.

In the lift with me at the time was another seasoned expat (I didn’t know him but after a while you can just tell). We said nothing as the trannies reached the second floor, made a cursory attempt to invite us to follow them and then they headed to the Rock Bottom bar.

There was silence after they left, as we contemplated the shock in store that night, or possibly the next morning, for some of the drunken expats. Then the other guy said: “It’s not as bad as in Nigeria, where they’ll drag you out of the lift.”

On the plus side, the procession of jaded Chinese princesses helped create a bond between us long-termers and the Indian and Filipino staff who ran the hotel. Whenever I’d come in late at night as the lifts disgorged the latest batch of geographical bachelors with their skanky hoookers, I’d glance across at the foyer staff and we’d each raise our eyebrows in the international symbol of WTF.

We were only supposed to be in the hotel for a couple of months, until the promised company flats became available, which we were relying on because accommodation in the Dhabs is the same price as in London’s Knightsbridge or New York’s Greenwich Village.

And the company paid the difference between our accommodation allowance and the actual cost of the hotel, which was good because the walk-in rate for The Capital was a wallet-bleeding NZ$5080/ US$2200/ AU$4000 a week.

(We’re owned by Mubadala, the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government. Ever wondered where the $1.50 you pay for a litre of petrol goes? It goes into subsidising my stay in The Capital).

Journo instincts meant we all quickly learned that the “couple of months” estimate was about as accurate as American predictions for the invasion of Iraq. Some of my colleagues who had arrived before the launch had already been living in their hotels for six months or more when I arrived, with no prospect of an imminent move into flats.

So, life settled into a strange and unsettled regime of being permanently temporary.

The Capital was on the far left of this National Day firework display.

There was no washing machine so I’d ply the Indian sweatshop laundries dotted all around, dropping off my dirty clothes which would be intricately recorded by the staff in their own way. Trousers were “pantaloons” on the docket, grunds were “undershorts” and so on.

Then three days later, I’d collect it all again, with everything clean and perfectly ironed. Everything. I have never previously worn underwear with perfect creases in them but now I know what it’s like.

Every single day, unless I put on the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, the room would be made up by the maid service. (”Maid” in this instance meaning short hairy Keralan men) At night, I’d watch CNN in quantities that should have warranted a legal opinion from the Bush White House legal team about whether it violated international conventions on torture.

I couldn’t change the organisation of the room, to imprint any kind of personality on it or diminish the relentlessly bland corporate decor. The window to the tiny ironing-board-sized balcony wouldn’t open, possibly a design facet to diminish the prospects of self harm, but that small thing was deeply abhorrent to the way I’ve always lived.

The kitchen amounted to a kettle, a sink and a bar fridge, the latter of which perpetually froze anything put inside it, so if you wanted to pour rather than slice the milk onto your cereal in the morning, you had to remember to take the milk out last thing at night. I bought a rice cooker but it immediately blew the fuses of the wall plug.

On the 12th floor, the shower in my NZ$800/night five star hotel was a pathetic tepid dribble, but that was the price for being sufficiently distant from the Rock Bottom bar that I couldn’t hear the eighties classics being played within at 3am. I wasn’t sufficiently distant to be out of audible range of the local method for locating the people who’d double or triple-parked you in — incessantly blowing the car horn until the problem remedied itself…

Inevitably, this couldn’t continue and it didn’t. When the long-promised company flats were gazumped by someone else with more money and much more wasta, the hotel dwellers — probably 40 of us by that point — were summoned to a company meeting which began with the words: “We’d like to be able to change this but we can’t…”

So we were sent out to find somewhere to live, paying market rents in the richest city on earth. The complicating factor for me was the subsidy for The Capital would end about 10 days after I returned from my trip to Yemen and the Antipodes, after which I’d be paying the full price for the privilege of sharing the hotel lifts with skanky Chinese hoookers.

I was lucky, and a South African friend was looking for a flattie just as the deadline to leave The Capital loomed. I now pay NZ$900/ US$500 /AU$750 a week — three times what my four-bedroom house in Lyttelton is rented for — to get a modest room in a two-bedroom flat in Khaladiya.

My flatmate Thea is a lot of fun to live with, notwithstanding my increasing suspicion that she is covertly funded by the Society For The Perpetuation Of South African Stereotypes, evinced not least by the proportion of meat in her diet being high enough to make an Argentinian grazier blanch.

But it’s an interesting new direction, my neighbours are now a Palestinian family instead of jaded Chinese princesses, and I’m looking forward to this latest act in the absurdist play that is life in Abu Dhabi…

Wilfred Thesiger is famous — in these parts at least — for making two crossings of the Empty Quarter while disguised as one of the Bedu back in the 1940s. It’s been described as the last and the greatest of the Arabian explorations.

I suspect that fame reflects a very eurocentric take on the matter because he was accompanied by Yemeni guides, some of whom had already done the journeys before. As ever, fame is more likely to follow those who bankroll the mission and write the history, rather than those who do the real work.

But to get back to the point, the photo above (or below, or to the right or left, depending on whether wordpress keeps messing with my formatting and my head) isn’t the original Thesiger.

This pic is of the original and the first is one I took this week of the uncanny doppelganger who is playing the role of Thesiger as part of a documentary about Abu Dhabi’s past and future.

On Sunday morning (the beginning of the working week in this Islamic nation) I was sent off at short notice to the film set, high on Jebel Hafeet near Al Ain, where I met Dylan Dolan (parents can be cruel) who works as a corporate trainer and amateur actor in Dubai.

Ben Hirsi, the director of the documentary, said when he began casting and saw Dolan’s photo provided with the CV, he almost dropped his Blackberry in shock in the dunes of Liwa, where he was on location.

The real Thesiger probably wouldn’t have needed to rely on Emirati expertise to tie his Ghutra…

But then the real Bin Ghabaisha probably wouldn’t have chatted on his cellphone between takes…

But we did have Thesiger’s real rifle, borrowed from one of the museums in Al Ain for the day, along with Bin Kabina’s gunbelt and ammunition.

I’m pretty sure, though, that these weren’t Thesiger’s actual trainers…

It was eerie to hold the rifle, having finally finished reading Arabian Sands, Thesiger’s tale, the month before.

It takes time to make hair look like a 1940s Bedu who’d just been through the Empty Quarter, including reversing the effects of modern hair-care regimes.

The Bedu boys get tips from Ben Hirsi on how to look like their grandfathers

They were serious hams…

Thanks to everything running late — plus ca change — we were there as the afternoon light softened.

The camel stick wasn’t Thesiger’s, so far as I can tell. The real Thesiger dropped his several times during the journey and, according to Bedu superstition, it meant his wife was having an affair.

Not that that was likely to be a possibility because, in the coded parlance of the times, Thesiger never married and on all his journeys in Arabia and beyond would accompany himself with lithe young men.

Both bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha are still with us but are thought to be in their eighties — being Bedu, none were sure of their birthdays — and they’re be interviewed for the film reflecting on their time with Thesiger more than 60 years earlier.

The modern-day Bin Kabina and Bin Ghabaisha adopt a pose familiar to anyone who’s read Arabian Sands.

The film begins with Thesiger’s exploits in the 1940s but ends with where Abu Dhabi is supposed to be in 2030, the culimation of the current city plan.

Fortunately I was up to speed with that because I’d spent the previous week at Cityscape Abu Dhabi, the key annual meetfest for the real estate and development industry in this emirate.

Apart from anything else, it’s like a barometer of the industry.

The equivalent event in Dubai, held six months apart from the Abu Dhabi one, managed to hit the frenetic peak of the market in late 2007, when people would line up at the door with suitcases packed with cash to pay deposits on high-rise flats that were not to be built for years and which would be onsold three or four times before any concrete was poured.

And a year later it hit the uber-gloomy nadir of the Dubai market in credit-crunched 2008.

The excesses are not as great in Abu Dhabi, but that’s due a combination of timing and the difference between having 200 year’s worth of oil (in the Dhab’s case) to having virtually none left.

There were only a few absurd examples of architectural onanism at play but there were the usual astonishing number of absurd scale models, with even more absurd levels of networking.

This is Reem Island, just off from Abu Dhabi Island, in what seems to be only slightly less than 1:1 scale.

But the meeting, greeting and business card exchanging was even more frenetic. It’s because the three key factors in doing business in the Gulf are relationships, relationships and relationships.

It’s always amusing to be able to watch networking when you don’t have to do any.

Security went up several notches when Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, took Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas through Cityscape.

(Is it cruel to show shiny high-rise utopia to someone whose own nation is occupied and where the citizens’ homes are being demolished so Israeli settlers can build their own enclaves in the hope of legitimising a permanent occupation?)

The Crown Prince’s armoured Mercedes.

And I thought a three-number licence plate was impressive. This was a car with serious wasta.

For reasons best not stated, we needed a weekend away from reality.

And where better to escape reality than Dubai, the least real city this side of Disneyland?

For those of us in the Dhabs, a trip to the fantasy world of Dubai really is a break because the two cities are so different in tone. We started at Ibn Battuta mall — OK, so we actually started at Lime Tree Cafe, run by Kiwis, full of scary Jumeirah Janes but also the purveyor of some of the finest carrot cake this side of heaven — where it seemed perfectly normal to learn that troubled troubadour Michael Jackson was reputedly once caught in the ladies loo here dressed in a full abaya.

The mall commemorates the journey of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan adventurer who went further and for longer and earlier than Marco Polo. Each wing was themed on a country he visited. And it was, as Chris pointed out, almost entirely constructed of painted fibreglass and plaster.

“You have to remember that nothing here is real,” he added, giving us a rundown on the techniques in which it can look good until you get up close. But for all its faux glory, it was actually done pretty well — until you got up close.

The World. Offshore from Dubai they’re creating a series of islands roughly in the shape of the continents, except work has completely stopped since the credit crunch kicked in. On the plus side, this is the one place where Sarah Palin really can see Russia from her house. (Credit for gag: Team Middleditch)

The Bladerunner view of Dubai’s main drag, Sheikh Zayed Road.

Our five star hotel

We think this was supposed to be pomegranate…

There were many, er, interesting products for sale in one of the shops in the souq. It goes to show that the pursuit of profits through a combination of gullibility and insecurity is an entirely cross-cultural phenomenon.

On the left, Chris got ready to attend the next New Zealand First conference. While on the right… isn’t this kind of defeating the purpose?

Joel and Wendy lived in Dubai for a few years before moving to the Dhabs and were generous enough to take us on their well-rehearsed tour of the sights. This is the creek in Dubai, although it’s a tidal lagoon fed by sewerage treatment plants and I’d guess it hasn’t been a creek since the Miocene.

The abras used to cross the creek were still the real thing, a rare bit of reality in the plastic fantasyworld of Dubai.

Of course they’re planning to replace them with enclosed, air-conditioned and electric-powered versions…

Joel used his connections to get us a table that would have required us to get wet feet if we wanted to be any closer to the water. Considering that the only source of flow downstream into the creek, it didn’t pong.

The Burj Dubai, which is either (a) the world’s tallest building, or (b) the world’s most obvious act of overcompensation.

Joel and Stacey were both ex RNZAF so we went to the dawn ANZAC service, located for reasons unknown at the base of this bit of architectural priapism and with everyone facing it.

What better way to start the day than with a breakfast served on “toasted bums”? This was in another of the prime hangouts for Jumeirah Janes, the scary Stepfordesque expat wives.

From the world’s tallest building, we went to the world’s biggest mall (although apparently this is in dispute) inside which was…

…the world’s biggest aquarium. Are you detecting a trend? It really was a big-ass aquarium, though.

The inevitable bit of modern art in the world’s biggest mall. My theory was it drew its theme from those who had speculated in real estate in Dubai in the last year.

Then we headed to Souq Madinat Jumeirah, a recreation of old-style buildings (although I’m sure Arabia never had canals) but overshadowed by the supposed seven-star hotel, the Burj al Arab.

Wendy scored us a primo waterside table.

Beside a coterie of Jumeirah Janes. Really, this is a scarier species than anything shown in Jurassic Park. Beers, western dress codes…

There was traditional sitting right next to modern (slightly slapperish modern, but modern nonetheless) without any problem.

It reminded me of the quote I’d read in Time Out Dubai that morning from Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, who said: “At the height of turbulent moments in the Middle East, the UAE has been a sanctuary for people. During the Iran/Iraq war, Iranians and Iraqis were working together in Dubai; when the Indians and Pakistanis had problems they were colleagues over here. This is an example for everybody to follow. It’s the same for Syrians and Lebanese, Sunnis and Shias, Hindus and Christians… we are so proud of this.” (The full response is here)

That piece in turn was written because reality has begun intruding quite a bit on Dubai, which for the world’s media suddenly seems to have gone from global wunderkind to international pariah. Most notably for stories in the NY Times, the Independent in Britain and a BBC Panorama show all focussing on what they called the “dark side of Dubai”. One UAE blogger even collated all the stories about Dubai which used the “dark side” analogy and found a dozen using that term, which he posted with the comment: “Dear international media, You need to write more articles that reference the ‘dark side of Dubai’, there are clearly not enough.”

But back to the point in hand. It was a nice spot, although we noticed it was hotter than the day before and it turned out to be the start of the fan-forced-oven phase of the Gulf weather, with temperatures peaking at about 43degC/110degF. I’m not sure whether there will be any respite but if not, it’ll be too hot to sit outside comfortably until late October… Yikes!

And we did a loop through the Palm Jumeirah, the first of the ridiculous artificial islands. And this, the Atlantis was the slightly tacky (OK, majorly tacky) hotel at the end, built by the safa who built Sun City in SA.

Then it was back to the Dhabs… and reality.