The UAE and London

Masalaam alaikum, habibis,

Hope you're all well. I'm currently tapping this out on a laptop in London's southwest, with rain misting down outside and the BBC news anchors pumping out breathless updates on just how flooded Wales currently is and how much doo-doo Gordon Brown is in for not agreeing to handouts for struggling pensioners this winter (in both cases, very). A dark and stormy time for all here, apparently.

But enough of that - I promised an update on what I've been up to since leaving fair Bristanbul and, yea verily, I doth deliver. Unfortunately for you, Les, this is two paragraphs long already so I'll say ciao to you and move on with the details for all the rest of you stayers :p Read it in chunks if you need to. Most of you know how I write anyway.

United Arab Emirates: Amazing. Interesting. Fun. Disturbing. Dusty. Go see it for yourself if you haven't already, if only for the chance to see what unlimited funds, masses of cheap labour and very few building restrictions can get you. And where else in the world can you pull into a carpark filled with vehicles that cost more than your average Inala duplex and look like they've been made from pale yellow sand, I ask you?

After a murderous 12-hour flight (Peasant Class, long legs, you get the picture) I was met at Abu Dhabi airport by Mitch, a mate from my Enviro Planning degree. Mitch now works as a Project Environment Officer for Nahkeel, one of the biggest property developers on the planet and the company responsible for those shining examples of enviro-friendly sustainable development, The Palms and The World (amongst others). Over the course of the next day and a half, Mitch acted as my tour guide throughout the UAE and over the border in Oman.

Mitch lives in Dubai, an hour down the road from Abu Dhabi, so we drove there in his company-supplied 4WD gas-guzzler, with Mitch explaining his role and pointing out interesting buildings and interesting billboards showing where interesting buildings are soon to spring out of the desert in an interesting fashion (there were more of the latter).

To summarise Mitch's role, he gets to snorkel and scuba dive every week on Nahkeel's dollar, going out on company boats for days at a time to check the impacts of The Palms and The World on the surrounding marine environment. He also gets to drive all over the UAE examining and reporting on similar issues for Nahkeel's other projects, such as desalination plants and massive waterfront canal estates, and generally pulling up any workers doing anything dodgy or harmful to the environment. It may sound like a hiding to nothing to some of you, but it actually inspired me a tad - Mitch is finally getting to use the enviro science skills of our degree, something I haven't really had a chance to do as yet, and he's loving it.

Dubai itself, bizarrely, resembles the Gold Coast when viewed from the beaches. Only with taller skyscrapers. And more dirt-poor Bangladeshi workers welding things at the top of the beach. And much warmer, saltier water from the gargantuan desalination plants just up the coast. Honestly though, I sat back in the water and looked up at the skyline and it looked and felt strangely familiar. Aaaaanyway.

It was the first day of Ramadan when I arrived, so the streets weren't as busy as usual, therefore making them only twice as busy as Brisbane's streets. We went into the old section and the soukhs, took a few bumpy, jostly wooden dhow trips over the Dubai 'Creek' (which is wider than some rivers I've seen), bracing for each collision with other boats or the pier. Fun stuff.

Mitch flashed his credentials and we were onto the smaller Palms development, which is mostly finished. The massive arch-shaped hotel halfway out along the 'trunk' there (can't recall the name) had just had a major fire that morning (Mitch said that sort of thing gets covered up all the time) so we weren't allowed out to the end, but we explored some of the 'fronds' instead. Picture, if you will, endless rows of McMansions on steroids, packed in at twice the density than originally planned................and nothing else. Long curving roads lined with these massive $15 million 'villas', some with the odd dust-covered Lamborghini or Rolls Royce Phantom parked in the driveway, and nary a school, shop, hospital or police station in sight. It felt strangely "I Am Legend" once we got out to the finished sections with no workers in sight.

We also checked out The World (similar) and the incomplete Palm Deira, the larger of the two Palms - now I can say I know what 2million cubic metres of reclaimed sand looks like. It stretches 12kms out from the shore, and most of Dubai's towers are only vague shadows in the dusty distance when you're at the end. There's nothing but lots of heavy machinery and sand out there at the moment. And pipes. And large hills of aggregate everywhere. I saw a front end loader carrying a 20m section of 2m pipe (unsecured) nearly tip over when it came over a rise in the sand and the pipe overbalanced and started swinging up and down like a seesaw in the scoop. Amazing. Got video footage of a few things which I'll send tomorrow if I can figure out how.

The rest of the day was spent over the border in Oman. We went out into the real desert, miles from anywhere, and off-road up into these jagged, bone-dry razorback mountains to get to a wadi (waterhole) that Mitch sometimes camps at with mates. Spectacular.
The wadi was actually a series of waterfall pools in a narrow, near-vertical gorge high up above the plains below that you could plunge into from 4 metres above with burning feet and play with the desert frogs that lived there. We had an awe-inspiring view, framed by the walls of the gorge, to the huge cliffs about 500m away. I got some more footage there, and also turned the camera on when it started belting down with rain while driving through the desert. Mitch couldn't believe it.

When we got back to Al Ain (city on the border of UAE and Oman), all the roads were flooded because they don't have draining gutters or stormwater systems. Because IT NEVER RAINS. So the water just sat on the bitumen in huge pools and steamed.

We also went deep country to a tiny farming village where Mitch's uncle used to own a weekender shack, with Mitch explaining the phlanges (long concrete water channels) they use to irrigate their crops to me and chatting to the friendly locals in Arabic. Real earthy types, old traditional dress and these amazing weatherbeaten, chestnut-coloured faces and hands, eyes that sparkled - it felt like I could've been in Arabian Nights. Finally, approaching sunset, we went up a massive mountain (Jabbar Lafie I think) that has one of the Emirate's palaces perched on top like a Carnivale headress on a beggar. The view was phenomenal because (a) the rain had washed the dust out of the atmosphere and (b) its flat as a tack.

The scale of what's proposed for the UAE became clear up there. We were an hour's drive from Dubai and even at that distance there were 10km-by-10km squares marked out by rows of date palms and roads, ready to be filled with more water-hungry buildings and water-hungry people, as far as the eye could see, marking out the landscape in a series of patches. Mitch says that the goal is total development of the UAE. As in filling the place up. Seems a bit ambitious to me, but then again I don't earn 16 gajillion dollars a week from the rising price of oil, so what do I know?

Next morning I swam in the Gulf before we had to leave for Dubai, coming out salt-encrusted and feeling like I'd helped flavour a titanic soup. Then we were off, past all those billboards ("Nakheel: Adding 70km to Dubai's Coastline!!!") and all that desert, and to the airport. My impressions of the UAE? Some wonderful architecture and places, and mind-boggling career opportunities, but they're in a world of hurt if they don't start making buildings that don't require the equivalent of a Greenbank power plant each to run their airconditioning. The whole sustainability concept has been let in the door and then used to wipe over the glossy brochures for these mammoth white elephant developments to give them a smidgen of green, but that's all it really is.

Anyway, I'm here in London now, got in Tuesday night, and have been staying with a friend of a friend after wrestling my 30 kilo suitcase on and off numerous commuter-packed tubes and trains (How To Make Friends In London Tip 1: Hit them in the shins with your luggage. Multiple times. It's a winner!). Nothing huge to report yet as I've been sick (Etihad thinks their passengers need chilling to prevent them from going rotten, apparently) and busier than a Georgian UN representative. But I do still love London. Amazing place. I haven't done anything exciting as yet, but hey, the weekend is imminent. I'm sure I'll have something of note by next week.