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Published: February 3rd 2009
Day 1 Thursday 29 Jan Winchester to Dubai
Sitting writing this in bare feet in D & E’s garden in Dubai with a coffee and a cig. Got to bed at nearly 3 am (a very civilised 11pm GMT) after a bit of a long day on the M3, Terminal 3 and on an Emirates 777. What a bummer at Heathrow. Marooned at Terminal 3 for the morning. Every other flight seems to be leaving Heathrow more or less on time, but ours with Emirates to Dubai, is four bloody hours late. Delays to and from Dubai are pretty rare, and not usually cos of fog. I ask you! Fog in Dubai! For months I’ve been checking the weather in Dubai come shine, come shine. You don’t see photos of camels and construction cranes in the fog, do you’? Certainly you don’t see a lot of swirling mist in the photos on Emirates’ website.
Flight comfortable enough. Legs in reasonable shape. Mini crisis with stomach after long delay before eventual take off at 2pm. Woman in front of me did not realise how lucky she was not to have had her seat eaten before our lunch eventually arrived
somewhere over Greece.
Remembered dialogue:
Me:
Scuse me. I’m really hungry.
Smiley female in red and beige uniform (looking very customer-caring):
You’re angry?
Me:
No, I’m hungry. Can you tell me when you’re serving food? SFIRBU:
In about ten minutes.
Much vaunted Emirates entertainment system was excellent, provided you didn’t want to hear anything to go along with the images of the 300 films on offer. If technology is available to keep 300 people in the air at the same time and stop them hitting the ground somewhere between Gaza and Baghdad, then a sound system which allows me to listen to Penelope Cruz as well as drool over her should also be a possibility. Drooling is not as enjoyable when you’re straining your ears at the same time.
Emirates cabin crew stylishly dressed (well, more stylish than me) and polite when spoken to, but seemed more interested in private in jokes than making sure we knew what to in a plummeting situation. No matter - I expect you’d forget how your alarm whistle worked when you started your lifetime’s best plummet into the sea just off Iran.
First view of Middle East - arrivals area at the recently opened Terminal 3 at Dubai Airport. No expense spared in providing soaring mass of white swirling concrete, curved chrome features and (what a relief!) an advert for Harvey Nicholls. Shopping can wait. Where’s my golf bag?
Day 2 Friday 30 Jan Dubai
Leisurely al fresco breakfast in D & E’s garden, drive to Radisson Hotel in city centre, long air-conditioned lunch overlooking the creek, walk around the souks, drive home to inspect the traffic and the gob-smacking daring of the construction of the city.
It’s easy to like Dubai, particularly on the first real day of your longest trip ever, in brilliant blue sky 25 degree sunshine, knowing that at home it's about 20 degrees cooler and people are working. Our Friday afternoon was spent slowly eating our way through an all you can eat multi ethnic feast. Sushi, prepared before your eyes by a lovely man with a very sharp knife , tempura, Italian lamb with a blueberry risotto, followed by an eclectic plateful of Arabian sweetmeats and fruity tartlets.
All this with a view down and across the creek from the floor to ceiling third storey window. The Dubai Creek has echoes of the Grand Canal in Venice. Tourists climbing on a tour dhow, working dhows not moving too much (it’s Friday) and, across the water, a skyline which includes the usual mixture of city centre office and hotel stuff, punctuated by the hazy outline of the world’s tallest building in the distance and of the minarets and dome of the main mosque of Dubai.
If central Dubai and Deira, which face each other across the creek, have a bit of Venice, then further out, it’s Las Vegas, New York and every other city that has to compete with the rest. No building site is ever pretty and when everywhere you look there’s a crane (or seven), a new shopping mall (Come in, we’ve got Waitrose!) or a stretch of multi-lane highway bordered by some ordinary, but some very beautiful skyscrapers with the let’s-put-some-curves-in-it-design, you’ve got a mixture of metropolitan mess and breathless beauty.
The new Metro system (70-ish kilometres in three years) is designed to get some people out of their Hummers and on to the platform, to get to work and play. When petrol is 25 p a litre shot, the metro is going to have to be pretty special and damned cheap to do this. Don’t want to sound negative about this, as the metro is brother Dave’s reason for being here and hence ours.
Post-lunch we walked through the gold souk. Essential visit. Reminded me more of Lourdes than Bond Street, or at least of the street in Lourdes where you can choose from a hundred shops all selling the same things. In Lourdes you search out the Pope barometer or the St Bernadette ashtray. In the gold and jewellery shops in Dubai you wonder who is behind these businesses - Cartier or Gerald Ratner. There must be some quality here, otherwise they would have been rumbled by now - they’ve been doing things with gold, legal or illegal, for centuries, so it can’t all be dodgy. Passed up several chances of buying a new watch in the street. Why ask me? I’m wearing my M& S cream chinos and deck shoes, to blend in with locals and still they seem to assume I’m a tourist. Still, a good chance to practise the Arabic for ‘No thanks, I’m fine for watches today’. Much more interesting than putting the phone down on some poor teenager selling house insurance from a call centre.
I like Dubai. First impressions are always important. They make you either go, stay or come back again. I wish we were staying longer. As a visitor in an air-conditioned car you don’t get under the skin of a place and appreciate its essence - you only see your own take on this, but the feel of Dubai is all positive so far, at least from the outside.
Day 3 Saturday 31 Jan Dubai and Al Hamra
Day out with D & E and friends at Al Hamra Golf Resort. An hour up the motorway north of Dubai, past Sharjah. First look at non-urban landscape. Flat beige sand changes to redder dunes, sprinkled with green scrubby bushes. There’s been rain recently, so there’s the impression of a newly seeded lawn struggling to emerge. Big blue sky with a temperature rising to upper 20s. The odd camel visible, mooching and plodding around in the scrub. A long line of construction trucks stacked up for a couple of miles waiting for post-rush-hour permission to move south towards Dubai’s cranes.
Al Hamra Fort is past another cement works and a huddle of construction workers’ multi-storey accommodation, reminiscent of blocks of flats on the edge of East Berlin. Suddenly it’s into 5-star luxury and smiling Filipino service at the golf club. White marble floors inside, black marble facade outside. Shining new chrome handrails and heavy glass doors being constantly polished. Efficient smiling welcome and golf bags transferred in seconds to our golf carts. The word ‘Sir’ tacked on to every utterance.
Dave and I joined by Martin and Barry. Great company. All had usual mixture of good and bad golf with nail-biting matchplay finish on the 18th. Sky Sports News will carry the result along with the Desert Classic being contested down the road. Come on, Justin!
Rosie, Eileen, Celia and Carol turned down the chance to sweat in the sun on the golf course, choosing to sweat in the sun on the hotel’s beach with the help of a lounger, parasol, and a waiter or two. Don’t ask me about the waiters - I had a golf match to win.
R and I both spent the day pinching ourselves in our separate paradise.
Day 4 Sunday 1 Feb Dubai
Dave back to the office, weekend over. Kicked off the day with Eileen over a coffee and a chocolate cake in the Mall of the Emirates (yes, that’s the one with Harvey N. ) Rosie managed to resist all temptation, having seen the prices. When it comes to clothes shopping, in my opinion the dire exchange rate is one of the positive spin-offs of the post-credit crunch world. According to a recent poll, this view is not unanimously held in our household.
Took the Big Red Tourist Bus on the Dubai city tour. All day hop-on, stagger-off arrangement. Top deck vantage point in hottish sunshine as we were driven from gigantic mall to even more gigantic mall towards the old town and the creek. I don’t usually spend my day gazing at building sites and admiring the architectural splendour of, say West Quay or the Bull Ring , but in Dubai, you see the whole range and enormity of stuff and you wonder who needs all these shops, offices and apartments. Maybe the designs (which generally are brilliantly daring ) are what were found on the floor at the end of a mammoth Christmas party for drunken architects.
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Upside down? That’s not upside down! Don’t be bloody silly - we can build that! -In Birmingham? -No, yer silly bugger. In Dubai. (Gets on phone to hedge fund manager) Jonty! Hello! You’re my best mate, you are.....Have you got a crane? Maybe my knowledge of these things is a bit simplistic and naive, but my dad’s phrase, or indeed most people’s dad’s phrase ‘more money than sense’ doesn’t translate easily into Gulf Arabic. Maybe the climate is no good for hedge funds cos hedges are too bloody hard to grow in the desert.
Stupid musings maybe, but when you see the Al Hamra golf course ringed by about 700 or more new build empty houses, more than 80%!o(MISSING)f which are unoccupied or unfinished and which have currently no chance of a sale, it makes you think that there has been money sloshing around this world which just needed to be spent - on anything. This global pass the parcel of debt game has resulted in some Al Hamra investors holding some pretty useless parcels. Nice golf course, though, and I played pretty well.
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alan
non-member comment
Can't wait for Day 5
Thanks Mike, great to think of you two living it up in the sun! As ever, your writing conjures up a real image of what it must have all looked like On to Melbourne!