Where in the world is John Henzell?

One of the first groups I joined after moving to the Dhabs was the local branch of the hash house harriers, mostly because they continued to run even during the heat and privations of Ramadan.

Everyone else seemed to adopt the otherwise seemingly compulsory expat position: horizontal and poolside with a drink in one hand.

Once a year when the temperature had cooled off, a few hundred people from all the hash groups in the region would gather in the desert outside Abu Dhabi and have what’s known as the rehydration run.

Apart from being a demonstration of skill (or not) at desert driving, and the corollary display of skill (or not) of bogged car extraction techniques, this involved a circular route through the dunes visiting eight checkpoints themed on and serving food and drink from a particular country. There was Curacao, USA, Japan, Ireland, Germany, Transylvania, and South Africa.

I volunteered to do the New Zealand stall, serving Kiwi kai and wine.

A far smarter move than volunteering was enlisting Stacey, a trained chef who’d cooked for the Queen and in a Michelin-starred restaurant, as a helper. (Obviously “helper” in this context means she was the brains behind the outfit, with me as honourary dishwasher and cleaneruperer)

  
She opted for ginger kisses, a staple of Kiwi bakeries and tea houses which in less-PC times went by the name Maori kisses.

After she had a couple of days of experimenting with the recipe, of which Chris was the primary beneficiary, we went into production zone at 9am.

I lasted five hours before I was due elsewhere and it was humbling to note that she worked another five hours after that, putting 34-plus trays through the oven to creat the 400 component parts of the two-piece cookies to feed the expected horde.

One of the 34 trays baking.

And the finished product, ready to transport out into the desert.

It seemed a little unfair then that Ariana caught a cold and prevented Stacey coming out to the run site and getting the praise for her baking efforts. But Chris did a day trip and Wendy, another of the Kiwi contingent in the Dhabs and fresh from the Venice marathon, joined us.

One of the race organisers showed us to the location for Checkpoint Four, which so far as we could tell was in the middle of B*tt F*ck Nowhere.

A few snafus meant Chris’ Land Rover was getting repaired, so we’d borrowed a Toyota 4WD but it had a broken CD player, preventing us using classic Kiwi playlist Wendy had carefully compiled.

But that paled in comparison to an ordering snafu where instead of having 24 bottles of Kiwi sauv blanc, we received six and had to supplement the supply with … the horror… SOUTH AFRICAN wine!?

WTF!!

Who got Saffa wine and who got Kiwi wine was decided by a series of tests: “What was the score in the third 1986 Bledisloe Cup match” “On what ground did Zinzan Brooke kick the longest drop goal in test rugby history” “In which Olympics did the New Zealand rowing team win more medals than the entire Australian contingent.”

The wrong answer on any of these meant the recipient was served Saffa wine!

While I set up, the actual race got underway.

The distance between checkpoints was in inverse proportion to blood alcohol levels, so there was a long haul to the first checkpoint and then each leg between checkpoints decreased appropriately.

I was fortunate that I could see the first runners well before they arrived.

The advance warning was exacerbated by the presence of the Japanese checkpoint in between.

This featuring a blood-covered whale and some less-than-fully-covering sumo outfits that looked more like badly tied nappies.

It was gratifying to see that the first runners did not include any of the Abu Dhabi island hashers, displaying the commendable absence of conscientiousness for which they’re renown. The first one to arrive was a dog, who was served water rather than sauv blanc.

  
Wendy found this wasn’t like the Venice Marathon, partly because in Italy she hadn’t have to stop at each waystation to empty the sand from her shoes. And of course those waystations didn’t offer sauv blanc.

Most of the competitors were walking by this point. The later ones clearly looked like they’d dined not wisely but too well at some of the previous checkpoints.

The next checkpoint had an Irish theme, despite the token Irishwoman having injured herself a couple of days before and finding herself unable to make it.

Instead it was run ably by Jenny and Juliet, who dressed appropriately and doled out Irish Car Bombs, a form of cocktail made from Guinness, whiskey and Irish cream which were just as lethal as their IRA namesakes.

This might in turn explain why those who left the Irish stand chose to go over the top of the tallest dune to get to the next checkpoint, Germany.

Then it was on to Transylvania, run by some Kiwis.

They went to a lot of effort, and of course each runner was offered a bloody mary as well as vodka worms and garlic shots.

In keeping with diminishing capacity, the checkpoints became increasing close to each other like a reverse Fibonacci sequence.

Finally there was an 800m stroll back to the base, where the South African stand offered what was euphemistically termed “punch” and served by Thea and Louisa, who had adopted a sartorial style they’d dubbed “slutty zebras”.

The South African butchery in Abu Dhabi created a magnificent brai meals, prompting a sudden silence among the assembled hashers.

Dancing on Mikey’s car became the thing to do, at least until a loud crack was heard to come from the roof of his Jeep.

And we were impressed by Simon dancing on the roof of his Land Rover Discovery, thus creating a disco on a disco.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a night in the desert without a fire.

And it wouldn’t be a fire involving men unless it was so big that you couldn’t sit within 5m of it and it merited its own chapter in the Kyoto Protocol.

And it wouldn’t be a fire without inappropriate stuff thrown onto it, in this case a camp chair.

And it wouldn’t be a fire without marshmallows, although this provided the opportunity to soak up that burning petrochemical goodness…

With people having started drinking at 2pm in the sunshine, there were by then some sorry-looking participants.

This was the race organiser, enjoying a break from the cat-herding efforts of trying to organise hashers. Or, as my friend Marion put it: “Lucy looks like that typical angry wife burning down her ex-husband’s car and celebrating. haha!”

Our hashmaster Prancer led us all on a lion hunt.

Then how wholesome is this? A fireside sing-song. Except for the lewd hash lyrics…

Of course it didn’t take long to turn less wholesome.

Expat + desert + alcohol + fire = n*ked fire jumping.

Most people jumped the fire by the shortest axis, others by the longest…

“Why does my foot hurt and why is there a smell of overcooked sausages around me?”

I’m never going to be able to think about nuts roasting on the fire in the same way again after this…

Mostly it was good natured, with only one incident late in the evening when someone had a fight with their partner and got behind the wheel of their car, tried to thread a route through the campsite and hit the course setter’s 4WD.

  

This could have been way worse since the idiot who decided to get behind the wheel could just as easily have driven over a tent with people sleeping in it rather than hitting a car.

However the Japanese whale survived the night bloodied but intact and we packed up to go back to the Dhabs, with yet another surreal Abu Dhabi encounter under our belts.

We were barely an hour into our tour of Astana, the shiny new capital of Kazakhstan, and our guide already found herself facing a popular uprising in central Asia.

Our group had just been to the top of the Bayterek Monument, a strikingly modern tower that offered views over the attractively designed new buildings aligned along the capital district’s Avenue of the Republic.

It was clear this was our cue to make admiring comments about this city created on the otherwise featureless and treeless plains of the Central Asian steppe.

But for anyone coming from the UAE, that scenario – of the lesser-known capital city of a young but tolerant Islamic nation using its oil wealth to create a modern metropolis in a bleak and unforgiving environment – was a little too familiar to be impressive.

“We’re from Abu Dhabi,” we told our guide. “We don’t want to see new buildings. We want to see nature. We want to see the essence of Central Asia!”

The guide looked at us with blank incomprehension. With the help of the translator, we were told: “There is no nature – only steppe.”

The Astana people we had met so far had all been inestimably proud of this modern new city, basking in the proof they were just like Europe or America and not the Central Asian backwater of popular imagination. It was no wonder the authorities hated the film Borat so much.

So it took a degree of duress to convince our guide to abandon her standard route through the city’s modern architectural marvels and drive us out into the steppe that makes up most of Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth biggest nation.

We eventually found a nondescript village, prompting her to look at us with disbelief, as if to say: “Why on earth would they want to come here?”

Instead of mirrored glass, there were sod roofs that traditionally helped the residents cope with temperatures that range from up to 40°C in summer down to -40°C in the depths of winter. Some of the homes had no roofs at all, suggesting a slow depopulation over many years.

But there were also some brand new homes, hinting at an influx of wealth that dated from 12 years ago when the government announced it was moving the capital from the nation’s biggest city, Almaty, in the far south of Kazakhstan, to the outskirts of this hitherto little-known provincial town in the north.

Had we been coming from somewhere other than the UAE, we probably would have been more impressed by how much had been achieved since 1997.

Sited on what had been fields across the river from the historic downtown, nearly everything in the capital district was complete, ranging from the parliament, the presidential palace, government ministries and landmark buildings such as the 77m-high glass pyramid of the multidenominational Palace of Peace and Harmony.

Although there were many international architects brought in (Norman Foster designed three of the buildings, including this mammoth teepee like structure pictured above) there had also been attempts to incorporate Kazakh themes into the mix, such as the design of the Bayterek Monument, which has a gold-hued transparent orb where the viewing platform is located that is inspired by the ancient Kazakh legend of the samruk bird laying a golden egg containing the secrets to human desires and happiness.

But it was almost by chance that we learned of some of the rich human history of the area. It was while chatting with Snezhana, our blue-eyed and blonde-haired translator, that we learned she was not of Russian ethnicity, as we’d thought, but German.

She was devoutly and proudly a citizen of Kazakhstan but her maternal great grandparents had been deported by Stalin to a town near Astana because they had the misfortune to be Germans living in the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II.

Her father’s parents were German and Polish but living in Poland and suffered a similar fate of internal exile. Her parents were both born in Kazakhstan and even though she had spent time in Berlin on a scholarship, this, she said with pride, was her homeland.

This was as close as we got to Kazakh traditions in Astana, at the function “launching” the Abu Dhabi-Astana flights that had actually commenced six months earlier. We concluded this was Kazakh dancing from the WTF era.

We asked Snezhana where we could see traditional Kazakh culture, knowing that until a few generations ago, the Kazakhs had been nomads with proud traditions of hospitality and resourcefulness similar to the Bedu.

“If you want a traditional experience,” she replied, “you should go to the south of Kazakhstan.”

So we did.

As we emerged from Almaty airport after a 90-minute flight early the next day, it was clear we were in a completely different type of city.

We had a new tour guide, a retired teacher, who showed us around Almaty’s parks, cathedrals, museums and monuments, only briefly taking us past Almaty’s quota of shiny new buildings.

Although the government ministries all headed north to Astana, Almaty remained the country’s financial centre and the heart of this is an enormous mirrored-glass edifice that took its architectural cues, we were told, from the Alatau Range against which the city nestles.

Despite the katabatic effect of the snow-fringed range making Almaty a couple of degrees cooler than Astana, the biggest difference between the two cities was that the streets and parks here were full of people in a way they conspicuously had not been in the capital.

This time when we asked to see traditional Kazakh culture, the perplexed and affronted looks were absent.

Instead, our guide drove us up into the mountains to a restaurant that had been set up in a series of yurts, the transportable felt-roofed circular dwellings traditionally used throughout Central Asia.

Above us, the first snows of winter clung to the craggy peaks, while down here in the tree-lined valley the colours of autumn were in full force. In between the two was Chimbulak ski resort, where Kazakhstan had unsuccessfully bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

The yurts were clearly touristy – we suspected traditional yurts did not feature chandeliers or have anterooms with bar service – but it gave a hint at what life for a Kazakh nomad would once have been like.

Among the items we were served was shuzhuk (horse meat sausage) which we washed down with kumys, fermented mare’s milk — both reflected Kazakhstan’s status as the place horses were first domesticated by humans some 4,500 years ago — while being serenaded by an only slightly cheesy Kazakh band.

The experience whetted my appetite for an even more authentic encounter for my final night in Kazakhstan.

I tracked down the Ecotourism Information Resource Centre in Almaty, which put me in touch with Ruslan and Nina, who for about US$26 (Dh97) host visitors in their home located in a remote gorge in a wildlife reserve about two hours from Almaty.

It would be hard to imagine a more different experience than Astana. Instead of mirrored-glass skyscrapers, a long drive along progressively deteriorating and potholed roads brought me to a spartan bungalow that lacked electricity and running water.

But Ruslan and Nina’s welcome was huge and genuine. Between their modest ability at English, my own Russian vocabulary remembered from a month spent in Georgia and Armenia in 1995, and some elaborate miming, we managed to communicate well enough.

That was probably aided by what Ruslan dubbed his “vinaigrette”, an unsophisticated but quaffable home-made concoction which helped us overcome the linguistic distance between us.

It was clear they had mastered a tough existence. For four months each year, avalanches block the access road so they have to ski cross country down the valley to get their supplies. But we dined exceptionally well and finished the meal with tea sweetened with spoonfuls of Nina’s homemade cherry jam.

When I arrived soon after dusk, the temperatures were hovering around freezing outside but Nina cooked in an unheated kitchen with the door open, ladling water from a bucket into the pot, while Ruslan would continually refill my glass and toast to international friendship, to Abu Dhabi, to Kazakhstan, to Nina, to us and so on.

The next morning the ground was white with frost and I went for a walk into the hills just behind the house. Snow leopards are still occasionally seen in this area, although their population is estimated to be down to a few hundred throughout this mountain range several hundred kilometres long.

Unsurprisingly, none made an appearance and I had to be satisfied with several large pheasants that exploded into flight within a few metres of where I was walking.

Then Ruslan fired up his 1976 Soviet-made four-wheel-drive and took me to Talgar, the nearest big town, an hour away, where I left with a “Большое спасибо” (thank you very much).

Then I took a bus to Almaty for my flight back to Abu Dhabi, with a dog-leg to avoid flying over Afghanistan.

I landed knowing I’d get back to central Asia sometime soon. Just probably not to Astana…

I slept where Pavarotti slept.

Except he wasn’t there, obviously. And while technically we were both in the same hotel on the banks of the Bosphorous in Istanbul, he’d dossed down in the Mayfair/Scarborough/Hamilton/Al Bateen* of the rooms and I’d kipped in the equivalent of Scunthorpe/Phillipstown/Inala/Mohammed bin Zayed City.

(* depending if you’re referencing this to Britain, Christchurch, Brisbane or Abu Dhabi respectively)

All of this is to say that as part of Etihad, the national airline of the UAE, commemorating a new route between Abu Dhabi and Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, I joined a select group of journalists who were put up in Turkey’s most expensive hotel for a night because the connections wouldn’t work for direct flights on the day we wanted to leave.

None of this should have been surprising because flights had started six months ago on the “new” route we were ostensibly commemorating.

But anything that gets me out of the office and into countries I love (Turkey) or haven’t been before (Kazakhstan) while using lieu time at work rather than annual leave has got to be a good thing.

The hotel was the Çiragan Palace, which was based on a 19th Century saray built by the 32nd Sultan in charge of the then-waning Ottoman empire.

It was sited on the European side of the Bosphorous, with a view in one direction of the six minarets of the Blue Mosque in the historic Sultanahmet downtown of Istanbul.

In the other direction, and unimaginable to the Sultan, was the bridge linking Europe and Asia that was built about 100 years after the palace was being constructed.

With the exception of the UAE, it’s difficult to imagine a country that had undergone a more significant transformation, from theosophical empire to secular democracy.

The palace was not enjoyed much by the sultan who built it because almost immediately after it was finished in the 1870s, he was deposed by his nephew and then died soon after.

The nephew lasted three months before he too was deposed by his brother, who built another palace on the hill behind. The nephew spent the rest of his days under palace arrest at the Çiragan.

Then in 1909/10, it caught fire and was gutted and laid untouched until the mid-1980s, when it was turned into a five star hotel.

The top room in the palace went for Euro50,000 a night. (US$60,000 or Dh250,000, or three times the top rate at the Emirates Palace in the Dhabs) There was also a separate hotel building which was built in the 1980s (and felt like it).

Guess which one Pavarotti slept in and which one I slept in?

There are four-posters and then there are !!FOUR POSTERS!!

Yeh, I suppose it was OK.

There was no in-room tea and coffee making ability. But there was a dedicated butler 24/7, which I suppose makes up for it.

This was the only remaining original part of the sultan’s palace to survive the fire: his hammam, or Turkish bath room.

It turned out the pillars in the right hand pic above weren’t marble after all but paint-effects. Jocasta Bloody Innes got everywhere in the 1980s!!

We ate dinner with two of the managers on the terrace overlooking the Bosphorous.

They asked if we wanted to eat inside or out and all of us desert dwellers, having been held prisoner to aircon since the temps hit 50degc/122degF in May, said: “Outside!”

The meal above was testi kebab, made in this disposable eathernware pot which is plugged by a piece of dough, cooked and then broken open to serve.

Apparently it was delicious, but everything was that night.

And this was the grand dessert, which was a little odd, looking like a combination of the remnants of a plastercine fight, a box of Sultan’s Head chocolates, a fondue party and the “dirty protest” era of IRA prisoners in Long Kesh.

Just nearby was the bustling cafe/wharf district of Ortaköy.

I found this example which in my album on Facebook, I captioned: “Turkish fashion”

My Turkish friend Ege tactfully replied: “well, one kind only… lemme share with you my best friend’s collection, too”

Then she added: “by the way this girl looks a little like a hooker?..”

My Kiwi friend and Outrageous Fortune addict Stacey admired her jandals while her husband Chris suggested she looked like a Turkish cousin of the West family.

The heat in the Dhabs has certainly waned but it was nice to be somewhere genuinely autumnal, wander the streets without drowning in sweat, to feel that crispness in the air instead of the humid fug and just smell the… well, the autumness.

The overarching impression was that I’d forgotten how nice Istanbul was. I’d been here in 1986 on the way home from my first votive and cognitive world tour and ended up spending six wonderful weeks in the country while waiting for my visa to Iran to be processed.

This was about three quarters of the way through the eight-year Iran Iraq war. Near the end of the six weeks, Saddam Hussein had decided it would be a good thing to start bombing Iranian passenger trains so my visa application was denied.

I’d visited again briefly in 1995, on my way to a month of mountain biking through the then relatively newly autonomous post-soviet nations of Georgia and Armenia, but in Istanbul I never even left the airport and just connected with the flight to Erzerum.

We spent a morning touring through the Topkapi Palace, which I know I visited in 1986 but about which I have virtually no recollection.

That was almost certainly because at that tender age I was more interested in beer and women.

History is wasted on the young!

But this doorway gave an indication of just how many million footprints have come this way since it was built by the Ottomans.

It was still in remarkable condition and was being further restored ready for Istanbul to become the European city of culture in 2010.

Whenever the Ottomans had a great military victory, they’d build a pavilion to commemorate it. I think this one was the Yerevan Pavilion, for one of their Armenian conquests.

Just another kind of majlis, really.

This was the main entrance to the Topkapi Palace.

I had a sneaking suspicion that somewhere in the calligraphy in these pix there’s a disclaimer about all people entering the palace undertake to do so at their own risk…

Autumn.

I’d almost forgotten about this.

In Abu Dhabi, autumn just means it goes from being stupid-hot to merely hot. It’s still sunny every day and isn’t due to rain until winter, for the first time since March or April.

At my first day back at work, it seemed to be not quite so bright outside and my first thought wasn’t that it might be cloudy but that a shamal was bringing in a dust storm from Iraq…

Outside the mosque, we wandered past the Hippodrome, where the Roman games were played in the days when Constantinople (or was it Byzantium?) was the new capital of the Roman empire.

No idea, although my Kiwi tramping friend and fellow Turkophile Honora said the division between child and adult was rather more abrupt back in the old days.

Then we went on to the Blue Mosque, distinctive because of its six minarets.

I’d visited this too but also remembered nothing from that 1986 visit.

But that was a good thing because going through the main door made the same impression as if I was seeing it for the first time.

Or so I assume.

One of the journalists wanted to stock up on Turkish delight so we went to the Egyptian Bazaar, not far from the Grand Bazaar but better known for its spices.

The brief one-night trip to Istanbul reminded me what a livable city it is.

Throughout the 28 hours or so we were there, I kept remembering more Turkish from the depths of memories from 1986. Usually it was good things: dondurma (ice cream) iskender kebab (the world’s best kebabs, only available in real form in the former capital, Bursa) and Çok iyi (very good) which summed up my impression of the place.

Then it was time to go to the airport and head to experience the unknown delights of Astana…

As part of the Grand Prix weekend in Abu Dhabi, I had to cover the convoy of 90+ vehicles from the Ferrari Owners Club UAE as they came from Dubai to Abu Dhabi and then along the newly-opened Saadiyat Island highway to the Yas Marina circuit, where the race is to be held.

As you can imagine, this was not exactly a hardship assignment.

The idea was the chairman and vice president of Ferrari would be there and I’d talk briefly to them and write something about it then go on to covering other aspects of the F1’s effect in the Dhabs.

As with my interview of Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, I’d been given a job which many of my friends were (a) incomparably more suited and qualified to do, and (b) would have killed three or four people (possibly including me) for the chance to do so.

But instead the Ferrari bigwigs had been summoned by Sheikh Mohammed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, who had sent his private helicopter to get them.

Mohammed had a bit more wasta than me. Who knew?

So instead I did a story on this woman, whose husband was the president of the UAE Ferrari club and who’d bought her her own Ferrari California, initially without her knowledge. She was a little upset when she found out, saying they already had three cars, but came around to the idea.

But it seemed unlikely the car would be ready in time for the F1 convoy, only for her to be surprised with its arrival (thanks to some late nights in Maranello and then Dubai) just before the convoy briefing.

Her husband (who drives a 599) has now set himself a pretty high benchmark to meet for her next birthday.

Then I heard there was a chance we would be able to interview the Ferrari bosses at Yas Marina.

How to get there? There were 90+ Ferraris — surely one had a spare seat?

Indeed one did, although it meant slumming it in a base model 430…

There were 70-80 Ferraris coming through Dubai, creating a convoy 1km long, so the police closed the six-lane-each-way Sheikh Zayed Road (those who live here will know what a big deal this is) as they passed.

The same thing happened in Abu Dhabi, where it took 15 mins for them to go from Shahama to the Corniche via the normal route.

Then it was time for us, now 90+ strong, to take on the Corniche.

Road closed…

Not sure why Ferrari owners like to have interiors that look like purses carried by Italian hookers?

I was driven by Reno, an Italian-Canadian who was sales manager for Ferrari in the MENA area and who looked about 17.

The paddle shifters on the steering wheel were an F1 adaptation.

We may have been going quite quick at this point…

Uh oh! Police car on the Corniche, except with this much wasta behind us, the police car was screaming ahead to block off the next junction so we could sail through.

Sheikh Khalifa Bridge linking Al Mina with Saadiyat.

We estimated there are about US$25m worth of Ferraris in this pic.

We went so fast that we had to stop on the Saadiyat Highway so we get a fast access entrance to Yas Marina Circuit without the usual bureaucratic faffing.

I like having wasta! Even if it was only vicariously.

The delay gave me a chance to have a look at some of the other models.

These were some of the big hotels built next to the F1 circuit.

Not sure they’d ever seen 90+ Ferraris in a queue before.
Then it was time to file my story and back to the Dhabs.

I never did get the chance to chat with the Ferrari boss, Luca Montezemolo, or ask him the questions suggested by my Facebook advisors, viz:
“Are you considering making a Ferrari green car with focus on more environmentally friendly fuel?”
“When is Ferrari making their first SUV”?
“Can you make a pink one for me if I decide to buy one? With fluffy fur covering the seats made from endangered tiger-cubs?”
“What is your favourite cheese?”
“When Ferrari is going to replace that gay pony emblem with something a little classier?”
“Has you read, “The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein. The main character, a dog named Enzo, is the narrator. His owner becomes a Formula 1 racer - good read!”
“My friend Marion wants to know if you have any spare tickets for Aerosmith.”
“Is it true that the faster a man drives… the shorter his manhood is?”
“Do you have a spare one?” (Ferrari, I’m assuming, and not manhood.)
“The ultimate question: Do the latest models have CUP HOLDERS?”

Hmm. Probably best I didn’t meet them!

For the record, though, I can state Ferraris don’t have cup holders.