Double Dubai - Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
We landed about ten minutes to midnight, telling ourselves that it was "really" only 9pm, so we shouldn't feel tired, but that our body clocks should please feel like it was midnight - or even 3am - in order to advance the jet lag process. Why is flying so exhausting? You sit there, moderately comfortable, and read a magazine or watch a movie, and someone brings you rather average food which requires unwrapping like a bizarre Christmas morning (even to the pile of wrappings remaining afterwards) and you occasionally get up and wander around a little, and six hours later you feel as if you've been awake for three weeks while running a marathon every day. Can it be only the air conditioning, or is there something more subtle and more powerful happening? To quote Flanders and Swan, if God had meant us to fly, he would never have given us the railways. Dubai Airport, as it should be, being such an enormous hub, is enormously efficient, with literally dozens of check-in desks and security lines; baggage handling which seems to deliver your luggage almost instantaneously; helpful English-speaking people in uniform everywhere, waiting to assist you; clean bathrooms; and an amazing taxi queue, where you join a line about a hundred metres long, your heart sinking, but you walk forward almost as fast as you can push your luggage, and are ushered straight into a cab which has plenty of room for all your ****, and a driver who knows where your hotel is. Fantastic efficiency.... all except for one major bottleneck in both directions, Passport Control. And this time, I have figured out why. It is because all the other functions of the airport, from running a taxi line to manning the x-ray machine, are run by Indian or Pakistani or Indonesian or Filipino guest workers, but the important role of Passport Officer seems to be reserved for white-robe Arab citizens (plus a smattering of their black-robed female compatriots.) And they are far, FAR too important to actually do a job of work. Instead they chat quietly, as they would in the coffee house (I suspect there is a shika in the bottom of some of the passport desks) or simply gaze imperiously into space, while in front of them a long line of despairing travellers wilts in exhaustion and frustration. Occasionally one of the Mighty will wave an imperious hand and the fortunate traveler cowers forward, head bowed, offering up his passport as a sacrifice. It will be thumbed through once, twice, three times, while the Lord High Passport Officer smirks slightly at the places you've been to. Then scanned. Then thumbed through again. He barks, "Amanda!" at you, and you whimper "yes?" (Should you be saying, "yes, Massa?") Finally he puts the passport down, and picks up his Big Important Stamp. He inspects it, both top and underside, as if he's never seen such a bizarre implement before. Sighing in amazement at his own magnificence, he flicks through your passport one last time, finds a blank page (because why should he use one that some filthy foreigner has used before him?) and stamps loudly and firmly, as befits a Lord High Passport Official. One last flick through the passport, in case some suspicious activity has appeared since he checked last. And slaps it onto the counter. "Welcome to Dubai!" he snarls, and off you gratefully scamper, leaving the LHPO to a well-earned break before he has to deal with the next smelly foreigner. Anyway, all that being so, we got to our hotel just on 1:20am. It is down a tiny alley behind what I think is a madrassa (the Ahmadiya School) that is the only really nice, authentic-looking building left in Dubai. I photographed it last time I was here on my own, but didn't know that a nice little hotel was just behind it. The hotel is an old building, with a nice courtyard in the middle, and we were given a big tiled room filled with some gorgeous old, very heavy, very Arabic furniture, on the first floor. The door is a pair of narrow double doors locked from inside with a great big medieval post that you drop across the join, and on the outside by the largest brass padlock you have ever seen. Instead of windows to the outside, there are four large shuttered openings onto the courtyard, with no glass, just bars, so once you were dressed and decent in the morning, you flung them open and become almost part of the passage looking down onto the courtyard. Other guests passing by glance in as they walk past. The bed was huge and firm, the room was dark and quiet and a perfect temperature, it was late, even according to our body-clocks, we were exhausted.... and do you think we could sleep?? Not a wink. Most frustrating of all was lying there and thinking of the long flight ahead on Friday, 14 hours, and how uncomfortable and tired and ******ety we would be, and how we would long for a few hours' shut-eye on a flat bed... and not be able to make proper use of it while we had it. Morning came eventually, and Gray got up just in time for breakfast, which finished at 9am. (How glad we would have been to have been able to get breakfast as early as nine on some of our travels - let alone seven!) My best quality sleep is right at the end of the night once he's up, so I slept until about 9:30 and woke to find the wonderful man had scrounged me a breakfast tray and left it on the Conference Table. (As well as all our other Large and Stately furniture, we have a dining table with four severe upright chairs, and a coffee table, surrounded by another four severe upright chairs. It looks like the perfect setting for something like a divorce settlement discussion or a major property deal.) Having been uninspired by what Dubai has to offer on our last visit, we were very keen to do a hike that we had found online. It was posted by someone who must live in the area, as being something one could do in a day from Dubai, and had good, accurate directions for both reaching the start (something the Hebrides author could learn from) and the walk itself; it was a nice distance (7km, which we figured would be enough since it was going to take an hour and a half's drive to the start at a small village) and went through interesting country, up a wadi, over a hill and down the next wadi, passing through an area where copper smelting had taken place some centuries ago, and one could still see the slag and old ruined buildings. The weather was as cool as I'd imagine it ever gets in Dubai, about 22 degrees, and clear and still. Perfect in every respect. Only one catch. We needed a car to get us to the start, and to bring us back again. Should be easy enough to hire a driver for the day, someone who could drive us out, wait for about three hours to give us time to explore the old copper works, and drive us back. Gray went down to talk to the concierge / receptionist. Oh, a driver? No, they don't do that sort of thing here, but they could probably - possibly - do it over at their main parent hotel on the other side of the Creek. To get there we would need a taxi, or the metro, or we could cross by boat... We decided that it had better wait for next time we are passing through Dubai, and can be planned in advance, and instead set out, rather grumpily, to walk down the Corniche and see what was to be seen in the so-called Creek, which is quite a wide river really. The first thing we saw was a gorgeous wooden dhow setting out to sea. They are much bigger than I expected, and with that simple elegance that comes to any object that is used and built and refined over centuries, with a high prow and simple, clean lines. The morning was improving. Not great yet, though. On the left of where we were walking was the Creek, with its elegant wooden boats and clear water containing schools of pretty blue pipefish. On the right were four thundering lanes of unrelenting traffic, and underfoot a narrow walkway with large excavations every hundred metres or so, covered by very cursory temporary surfaces; for a long time there was what looked like a temporary sewage pipe running right down the middle so we had to walk in single file. Clearly whoever makes the decisions about roadworks in Dubai doesn't defile his dainty Arabic sandals with actual walking. The footpath is merely for the use of guest workers and so can be left in whatever state is convenient and cheap for the roads department. We battled on, determined to to least walk out 4km or so to give us our daily 10,000 steps on the round trip, and before very long came to a large gate with a guard checking vehicles in and out: the entry to the port. Of course we couldn't go in, and there was now a high and ugly fence between us and the Creek, but we could see the dhows, freighters and other cargo ships being loaded. Apart from the presence of small mobile cranes, the scene could have come from Arabian Nights. The cargo was piled high on the wharves and on the ships, and was largely being loaded by hand by men in robes and turbans - or at least packed by hand, as the cranes lifted or lowered each bundle. And what cargo: washing machines and car tyres and whole cars, often packed full of boxes, and sacks of rice and things in large flat boxes and bundles of timber and plastic-wrapped bags.... I expect somewhere there must have been bolts of silk and bags of spices, gold, frankincense and myrrh, and maybe elephants and swift Arabian stallions too. We walked our 4km and by then had only reached halfway, judging by the wharf numbers, so we turned around and went back to the huge and hideous Hyatt for a drink. We found it joined to a Mall (of course! this is Dubai) where we found a place selling very expensive and rather ordinary sushi next to, of all things, a skating rink - just closing as we arrived, so Gray had the pleasure of watching the machine come out to smooth out the ice and could tell me all about Zomboli, the company that makes such machines, the only one in the world. Such are the joys of travelling with an engineer. (He had hugely enjoyed seeing the cargo being loaded, too, taking delight from the knowledge that there was still a trade in things not in shipping containers in the same way I might take in finding a place where people still make their own cheese or weave their own cloth.) As we had set out we had been offered, rather half-heartedly, a boat ride by a man resting by the water's edge. We had planned to do it at the end of our walk, thinking it would be a pleasant activity which would keep us outside with the light in our eyes, helping adjust our body-clocks, rather than napping in our darkened room, which was at that stage all we really felt like doing. But when we returned, the boatman was now fast asleep on his shady bench, (no insomnia for HIM!) so we walked on, wondering where the rest of the boats we had heard of were. Just the other side of Al Ras from where we had emerged, we came quite suddenly upon a lively scene of small dhows busily chugging backwards and forwards across the water, laden with people. Well, if we could just find where they stopped, we could at least cross the Creek, like the chicken and the road. As we walked on, there were more and more boats tied up on the side, and finally we found a proper ferry wharf, with some routes marked, including E4, an hour on the river, 120 dirhams. Sounds like the go. As so often, there was a functionary in a smart uniform who ushered us onto a jetty, shoving other passengers aside, and first onto a nearly full boat, and then off that and onto an empty one, where it seemed our 120 dirhams would get us the boat all to ourselves. Like Venice but with a silent boatman. And a much, much noisier boat. Still, it was a lovely hour. The air was a perfect temperature on our bare arms, such a treat after eight weeks of winter, the sunlight bright (I even got a little burned after my eight weeks of winter pallor) and the surroundings fascinating. We had seen yet more cargo ships upstream of the wharves we had walked beside earlier, and wondered where they were coming from as clearly the Creek doesn't go very far inland in this desert. Turns out there was yet another, rather more informal wharf running for a kilometre or more upstream of the ferry port. More fridges, bicycles, sacks and thousands of boxes being loaded and unloaded. The fascinating sight, to a landlubber, of sailors leaning on railings, and sailors' washing strung out to dry and sailors' comfy arm chairs down on the docks to allow them to watch the loading and unloading in comfort. (Truth be told, an awful lot of what happens in Dubai seems to involve a lot of sitting and watching other people do very little.) But then, as we got further upstream and the docks got less busy and the boats more tightly packed, up to four or five tied tightly side-to-side at a single stretch of wharf, we started wondering what on earth the cargoes covered with enormous sheets of plastic, or even old advertising hoardings, were, and we realised we were actually passing through the slums of this sleek, shiny city with its enormous clean skyscrapers just beyond the dockside. Clearly when a vessel has got too old and rackety to be much use in transporting air conditioners to Karachi or Toyotas to ISIS fighters, and is too far from the Med to use for people smuggling, you tie it to another similar-sized vessel in Dubai, open the hold, and stretch a makeshift cover from railing to railing. And voila, you're landlord to forty poor guest-workers, all thousands of miles from home and their families. It's a beastly old world sometimes. A bit chastened, we came back to shore and wandered home through the old souk, a bit dusty and sparse and with not one scrap of the glamour of Isfahan. There is a handful of shops selling pashminas, and some bulk spices, but the vast majority seem to be selling extra-shiny, XXXL cooking pots, or enormous bags of rice or dried milk. Interestingly, the ones selling the rice or milk have a single example of each in their window, and the rest of the shop is taken up by five or six young men sitting at computers. We speculated that they were running some sort of stock market. Probably running the whole world's rice trade from that one dusty little shop. We came up against some sort of incident happening in an intersection between two narrow alleys. It was all men, bar a very few women just on the fringes, like us. I certainly couldn't see over the heads and neither could Gray. I had a horrible feeling it was a stoning or something. First a bystander, and then policeman both offered to "make a path" through the crowd for us, thinking we were trying to get around the corner; we said, no it wasn't a problem, we were just wandering anyway, and would go back the way we had come. When it was clear that we really were happy to walk away in the other direction the policeman seized Graham's hand and wrung it gratefully. On the brighter side, as we returned to the little courtyard down the alley, surrounded by our hotel and the madrassa, and a high wall, we found it full of what looked like quite an informal group of men praying. Unsure of the etiquette, especially for me, we waited until another secular person stomped around the edge of the congregation and then we tiptoed after him. We had been looking forward to a nice mint and lemon juice in our courtyard, but it seemed (despite numerous signs offering "refreshments, 24 hours" and even menus on the tables) that this, too, was beyond our concierge / receptionist. No, we must go "outside" for juice. We went outside. There was nothing but the men folding up their prayer mats and putting on their shoes. We peeked in a couple of doorways that might as well have been labelled "Head Office, White Slave Trade." In the blank wall opposite the hotel was a blackboard welcoming us to a restaurant, but the small door beside which it stood was firmly locked. In the end we trailed back to the concierge, feeling like petulant children. We can't find it, we wailed. "Come," he said firmly, and walked us back through the alley and around the front of the locked restaurant, where it was indeed bustling, and which had in its turn its own lovely courtyard where we could get all the lemon and mint our hearts desired. It happened to be the highest-rated restaurant in Al Ras on TripAdvisor so going back there for our dinner was a no brainer. The staff, who had been a bit lethargic at mid-afternoon, were delighted to see us return at dinner time and one particularly helpful waiter helped us put together a delicious choice of food: the usual flat-bread and dips to start with, with the addition of a local fish-based sauce with a lot of cumin in it. The flatbread was being made in a little space just to our left. Main was a plate of mixed kebabs, all good, and a mutton dish with basmati rice along the lines of the one we had in Jordan on a couple of occasions. Very tasty and delicious. Afterwards we chose the thing we didn't know off the tea / coffee list, which turned out to be saffron tea. Perhaps not my first choice in the future. It's too odd sipping tea and smelling paella. The waiter had assured us the flatbread baker would be happy to have us go and look at his oven, so we did. He was very sweet, and showed us exactly what he did, how he made the rolls and rolled in the sesame and then plopped it on the inner wall of the oven. I was probably too enthusiastic, because he insisted upon giving us the two we had watched him make to take away, "Is gift, you not pay!" he assured us. So there we were, stuffed full of dinner as tight as drums, and flying out at crack of dawn, with two loaves of flatbread in a bag. Once more around the souk, and home to bed, perchance to sleep.