Welcome to Super Mario Land

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It's official, I am finally fed up with the Salam Street roadworks. I can cope with the modified working hours to avoid the traffic. I can nearly always get a parking space close to our building where I won't get blocked in. We're even sort of used to the noise at night, but last night took the buisciut.

Toby was stuck in traffic caused by some sort of accident so instead of just sitting there he quite sensibly swung into the Sheraton for some Tapas and phoned us to meet him. "Great" I said, "we'll be there in ten minutes".

I was quite confident in the ten minute meeting time as The Sheraton is less than ten minutes walk from our flat. You can bloody see it from the Salam Street car park of our building.

20 minutes later and still half a kilometer from the Sheraton I had to phone up and say we were still five minutes away. What I had not realised was that not only have they blocked off Salam Street, but the pavements, road crossings and everything else has been chopped around to make a ten minute stroll into a mixture of an army assualt course, the eliminator round from Gladiators and that chase scene from "Indiana jones amd the Temple of Doom" (the one with the rope bridge, not the one in the mining carts).

There are detours that lead into dead ends, bridges made out of chequer plate, re-bar, scaffold boards and baling wire. There are massive dewatering lines running along pavemtents disappearing into the ground then reappearing 20 meters later like a cross between the Sandworm from "Dune"and the fake alien squid monster from the end of Watchmen (the book, not the film)

Dewatering pumps are belching fumes and a mixture of oily sea water and sludge along the way and there must have been a competition to see who can come up with the most random paving material. Rubber sheets? 2X2 batons? Straw? Carpet? Wobbly stepping stones made out of ornamental garden paving? Anything, no matter how sprained ankle inducing is preferable to the Abu Dhabi pedestrian having to set foot on a square inch of sand, which seems odd to me considering how proud they are here of there heritage and that that 50 years ago the only paving system they had here was dirt road.

OK, now I know this is not exactly like walking around Baghdad, but two years ago Abu Dhabi was probably the best developed metropolitan city in the region.

If you watch CNN, Al jazeera or BBC World News, it seems that every three minutes there is an advert showing some very nice parts of Abu Dhabi - i.e. the bits that aren't dug up - with the strap line "Abu Dhabi - Travellers Welcome".

What they should say is "Abu Dhabi - Travellers Welcome - Bring some decent boots" or if they wanted to be completely honest, "Abu Dhabi - It'll be nice when it's finished".

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Photos

"The Squid"
Clear the rubble trap, vault the green pipe and tackle the water balloons.

"The Dieselator"
Pass its mighty fire breathing mouth

"The Rubber"
Over the pipe and plank and on to the rubber matting - don't worry, it's nailed down.

"The Ankle-ator"
This is particularly treacherous if there is more than one person on it

"The Son of Ankl-ator"
Which is the wobbly brick? All of them!

"The Last Bridge"
Curiously over engineered.

"Smoke on the Water"
Where's the smoke? Ha - it is now Diesel on the Water.