The day the camera died ...

---

Sitting in Santorini, it's a bit hard to sit back and recall our two days in Dubai. Although less than a week ago, it seems a lifetime away.

There are certain things I definitiely remember. Dropping my camera in the Arabian Gulf being a key one (and of course the reason why there are no photos with this blog).

Yes, my faithful old Pentax is dead, it doesn't swim, and my attempts at taking it to bits with Christie's pen knife availed nothing more than my being able to say "so that's what the inside of a camera looks like". Yes, my looking at the inside of a camera is about as useful as my looking under the bonnet of a dead car. Unless there's a sign somewhere saying "this bit is broken, hit it twice to fix it", really I was just wasting my time.

Another memory is arriving at our hotel at 6am (after nearly 30 hours travelling) only to be told that check in is at 2pm. Remind me to never use that travel agent again. Anyway, after several discussions with the guy at the desk, and after he quite openly told me that for a bribe he would get me into a room by 10am, another lady came along, sent us up for breakfast and had a room (and a shower!!) ready for us by 10am.

We booked a tour that afternoon, "dune busting" or something it was called where it promised that we could go flying through the sand dunes in 4WD's, followed by a camel ride, arabian coffee, belly dancing and a bbq in the desert as the sun set ... oh and all the soft drink we wanted. I liked that bit.

I felt like I was back in Vietnam on a fast-food tour. Don't get me wrong, we had a great guide, and I would have loved to have seen all the stuff he pointed out as we went out through the city - but I was shoved in the back of the 4WD banging my head against the roof and not able to see much more than my feet and the roof. The dune bashing was actually great fun, and I had a great photo of Christie turning green after one dune to many.

The rest of the tour was a typical toursit trap. The camera ride was approximately 20meteres in a circle so you could fget your photo taken, the arabina coffee was served from someone's old fuel tank, and basically you felt you were just being rushed from one thing to another. I obstained, got my soft drink and just enjoed the desert evening.

But, I've been rambling. Dubai itself is everything you expect. Firstly, despite the brochures, Dubai is more like a construction site than a city. Seriously, I think there was one finished building and 50,000 under construction. Everything, the airport, the roads, the roundabouts, the sidewalks, the buidlings, the beaches ... everything is a construction site, except the brochurs and billboards advertising investment opportunites in dubai - They're all finished.

The whole city was also covered by a haze, so we couldn't see much of what was there. We were impressed when we went down to the beach and found both a two way cycling track and an olympic standard soft running track running side by side along the top of the beach. I was so impressed that after taking a photo of Christie running along the runing track, I had to go out and stand in the water to take a photo of it all set against the city ... at which point I learned that my camera doesn't swim.

Dubai is a city where petrol costs 70 dirmar (or whatever the currency was) a gallon, which I think works out at something like 10 cents a litre, everyone drives around in hummers and land cruisers, but they have full sized articles in the daily newspper about reducing plastic bag usage. I particularly loved that article, especially as the next days article was on their plans to double the poplation over the next 15 years. Rome is burning did I hear someone say ...

So, I'm guessing I sounded like I didn't like Dubai, which is and isn't true. It is an amazing place. It is so very, very different to anywhere else I've been in the world, and I'm struglling to describe why. It stands for so much I despise in terms fo rsource use and decadence, but at the same time it is just so amazing that it is there ... what's that old poem "Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, than to be hated needs but to be seen, yet seen too oft, familiar with its face, we first endure, then pity then embrace."

That poem could have ben written about Dubai. I'm so glad I've been there, I'm so glad to know there is this part to the world, but at the same time I was so glad to leave as well, and i doubt I should ever go back ...

---