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Published: January 1st 2010
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Dubai
A trip on the new metro system
Actually I prefer my Christmas to be cold, white and dark, with cozy christmas lights in the trees and a log fire burning in the open fire. But the chances of that happening where I am now are about as good as the chances of hell freezing over, or if it did, it would mean some bad ass climate change, say a new Ice Age. Luckily the second prerequisite for a good Christmas for me, which is to celebrate it either among friends or my family, was available. I had decided to spend the holidays with my sister and her family in Dubai, and to top it off, our parents came over as well.
How did I end up in Dubai when my last blog was from cold Samarkand in Uzbekistan? Of course it was part of the plan, but what was not part of the plan was the fact that I was forced to buy a new airplane ticket to get me there and that I left a week earlier than expected! This was due to the biggest single issue that confronts travellers in Central Asia, visa hassles!! My flight out to Dubai was from Almaty in Kazakhstan, which
Dubai
Highrise along the metro
meant I needed to get a new Kazakh visa in Tashkent. Now normally Kazakh visa's are probably the easiest to get, but normal is not something that happens a lot in Central Asia. I got into trouble when I made a rather unpleasant discovery on a cold monday morning as I was waiting patiently outside the gates of the embassy, watching the guards let in one happy individual per hour and seeing the time tick away to the inexorable twelve o'clock limit after which visa's are no longer processed on that day, and one has to come back the next and hope for the best. What did I discover? A kindly Belgium guy who could speak and read Russian and was also waiting in the queue, explained to me that a sign posted on the gate stated that the embassy would be closed from wednesday onwards, only opening up the following week due a national holiday in Kazakhstan. This posed a rather nasty problem for me, as my flight out was due the following week, and I wouldn't be able to reach Almaty on time for my flight. Unless I got in on that monday, the chances of getting a
Dubai
Burj Dubai
visa before it would close for the week seemed rather slim, since the processing time for any visa was two days. Getting in on that monday proved to be impossible for me, of the 40 people waiting with me outside those gates about 5 were let in during the opening hours, mostly Kazakhs, with the notable exception of the Belgium guy who bribed his way in (as he told me when he came out, apparently he had put a 5 euro note in his passport and gone up to the guard, talked to him, given him the passport with the money and miraculously he was the next one in, with passport but minus the money). Not to be daunted by this failure I endeavoured to come back the next day at the crack of dawn, 3 hours before the embassy opened, hoping to be the first one in. But alas, other Uzbeks and Kazakhs had the same idea and there were people already waiting when I arrived. But the good news was I was number 6 in line, so if I was lucky I would get in. Of course getting in was just one of the hurdles I needed to
Dubai
Nightview of Burj al Arab and Jumairah from my sister's rooftop
cross in order to get my visa, the next was to convince the bureaucrats inside to give me the visa the same day, perhaps paying an express fee. Maybe if they saw my predicament and I showed them the ticket and begged and pleaded they would have sympathy. That proved to be false hope. While I indeed got in on tuesday, I was confronted with a stone cold lady on the other side of the window who did not care whether or not I would make my flight.
'You get your visa next week, or you don't get a visa!' was her reply to any and all of my groveling. There was no express fee, there was no way of getting it faster, no matter what I tried. This is Central Asian bureaucracy at its best, and every traveller I met during my sojourn there had been through it. With little options open to me, I decided to buy a new ticket from Tashkent to Dubai. On a positive note, I saved a page in my passport, the one where the second Kazakh visa should have been. A 200 hundred dollar page, but nonetheless it means one extra visa
Dubai
View towards Mall of the Emirates
along the road, somewhere and at some time, can be stamped into my passport.
The reason I arrived a week early in Dubai had to do with weather, rather than visa problems. While winter was an interesting time to visit Central Asia it also made transport and getting to places a lot harder. And so it happened that as I was preparing to get a shared taxi to the Fergana valley, I looked out of the window and it was snowing heavily in Tashkent. Snow in Tashkent meant the mountain pass to Fergana valley which one has to take if travelling with only an Uzbek visa (the road that goes solely through the valley passes through Tajik territory and is impossible to take without a visa for that country and a double entry for Uzbekistan) was closed. While it probably would have opened up later on in the week, I had had enough of it all and decided to get the first available flight out of the country. This doesn't mean I won't return, in fact I will, only at a more appropriate time, in late spring next year, when the weather is better and all the roads are
Dubai
Dubai sky-line at night open.
So thus I found myself in Dubai a little earlier than expected and I have been happily pampered ever since. Christmas was a joy, and New Year was superb, with splendid views of the fire works at Burj al Arab from the rooftop of my sisters house. Since she is living about 5 minutes from the hotel and it seemed to me that the best of the several fire work shows around Dubai that night was the one at the Burj, you can imagine that we had perhaps the best seats in the house. Combine that with some fine champagne and some good cheeses and other assorted snacks and you have a winning combination.
Between those two dates we managed to visit the ruins of Queen Sheba's palace outside Ras al Khaimah (a very unlikely story though) and go on a cold but beautiful camping trip in the mountains of the Musandam peninsula in Oman.
I shall end this story wishing everyone a rewarding and exhilarating New Year, except those who don't want to be exhilarated, in which case I wish them a relaxed New Year.
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I love Central Asia :)
Visas and beauracracy are what make CA so ridiculous! Great account of it, yes we've all been there :)