A few months before coming joining this ship I watched a special on the creation of Dubai, a city that is really only 50 years old (I think it’s one of the youngest cities in existence). The city literally seems to sprout out of the hostile beauty of the desert. Looking out my office window towards the port, you can see a huge stretch of sand dunes and then there are suddenly buildings. Buildings, buildings and more buildings, each more bizarre than the last.
The ruler of the area is obsessed with architecture and at one point, would fund almost any project if it was unique and creative. The result of this is a skyline unlike any you’ve ever seen in the world. It looks as if a very creative child was set loose with a box of giant size building blocks – nothing is the same shape, nothing has a line that you expect, instead the buildings are in all shapes and sizes that challenge the eye and present no real through line. It reminds me of an exhibition at a world’s fair of what they think the future would look like.
In amongst the buildings shaped like sails, like giant blocks of gold, like buildings sawn in half, is one towering jutting spire. As if a huge nest of termites had been let loose to build a hill in the middle of the city, it spirals upwards and stabs at the sky as if challenging anyone to challenge it. The tallest building in the world, it houses a massive shopping mall on the ground floor, and I believe apartments and offices in the upper levels. $100 gets you access to the 200th floor (or something along that line), but such a thing was well out of my price range by this point in the contract.
The strange thing about Dubai though, even stranger than the skyline, is the fact that the city ran out of money in recent years. What has already been built is beautiful and prosperous (the city is very clean, and feels remarkably safe), but what was half-built when the recession hit just stopped half way through construction. So as you drive through the desert you can see all of these half-finished facades that may or may not one day become hotels, or houses, or man-made islands. They don’t look derelict at all, just…stopped…as if the crews that were working on them went for lunch and forgot to come back.
The only instance of this that made me truly sad was the old QEII, the Queen Elizabeth 2 (not be confused with her newer more luxurious sister). She was retired years ago, and was purchased by the royal family of Dubai who saved her from the scrapheap with plans to turn her into a luxury waterside hotel. Then the economy crashed, and now she sits in the terminal dock, still lit at night with smoke still coming out of her funnels (so there must be someone on board taking care of her), seemingly forgotten. A grand old lady denied the retirement she earned by a twist of fate none could have foreseen. Better than the scrap yard I suppose, but still, it made me very sad to see.
My time in Dubai however, wasn’t spent exploring buildings. If you’re in the desert, you may as well see the desert. One of the perks of living below the water line is that you are have the chance to participate in specially organized crew tours at very decent rates. The same tour I went on yesterday cost the passengers a considerably different amount of dollars.
40 plus crew members signed up for the Arbian Nights Safari tour, and we were all piled into 5 luxury off-road jeeps, not what we had been expecting to be honest, at least not at first . When you looked at the jeep roof though, you saw that it still had the double-enforced roll-bars arching across the top, comfortable it might be, but this was obviously a car that could go anywhere. At first, we were slightly puzzled, because we were only driving along a highway, and we weren’t sure whether or not they were going to drop us off somewhere and we were going to change vehicles, or get camels, or what was happening. Then they pulled off the road into the desert and parked and carefully began to let the smallest bit of air out of all the jeep tires. This was when we realized that we were going to be going off-road, because the release of the air is to make sure the tires don’t blow out when you’re going over hot sand and rough terrain.
Then they revved up all the engines, turned up the radios, and started driving. Through, over, around, there were times you were certain the jeep was going to roll over or skid down a sand-dune. You know when you see cars go through water and it all splashes up? Picture that with sand!? Frightening and amazing all at once.
This is also where I got to see Hummers truly come into their own, as there were two them in front of us. Owing a hummer in the city is a waste of gas, but for off-roading? Man those things can drive.
The trip had several photo stops along the way, but finally ended at an encampment in the middle of the desert which consisted of several open-faced dining structures surrounding a central stage area, where they later would have an amazing belly dancing show. There were camel rides and everything, there was even sand boarding – which is like snowboarding only a lot easier –to my own surprise I actually made it to the bottom of the slope without taking a header into the sand.
The only thing that bothered me at the stop, and if I had thought that the so-called handler understood English I would have confront him about it, was the hawks. At every photo stop there was a fellow with a hawk. Now, I have a heavy personal interest in falconry, though I’m not as knowledgeable about it as I would like to be, I know the basics of how to treat a bird. These poor beautiful creatures were not only hooded and fettered (both of which I can somewhat understand given the number of strangers they were around), but *chained* to this stupid little platform so that they could be passed around like some kind of freak-show attraction. You could see the poor bird had no idea what was going on. A proper handler? Would fetter the bird yes, but would have a proper glove that the bird could find its own grip on, and a spare glove for others if they wanted to hold her. But to have the bird not only blinded but chained in place? And then the guy would ride off in an ATV, and heaven only knows where he stashed the poor thing, or if he even unfettered her so she could fly. A proper handler should have enough of his birds trust that he would be able to let her stretch her wings, or at least let her perch somewhere unchained for the trip.
And all these people were having their photos taken, all I could bring myself to do was to touch her feathers and whisper that it would be okay. I couldn’t bring myself to pay money to condone treating such a magnificent creature in such a way.
At any rate…
When everyone had eaten and the belly dancer had put away her shawls and tambourines, we all sat in the cool evening air in the desert and watched the camels being led home over the sanddunes (a once in a lifetime picture opportunity really) and then piled back into the jeeps to drive back to the ship.
The next morning naturally, I was black and blue and aching from being tossed around in the jeep and hiking up and down the sand dunes all day, but it was worth it.
“A fool off [her] guard, could fall and fall hard, out there on the dunes”
You should look into writing Em you really should.