Clary's Travel Digression

You know my host here was poisoning sumacs yesterday since they threaten to take over the garden.

There are sumacs, and then there are sumacs. I have a non-descript variety hanging over my vegetable garden and its' seeds sprouted in the garden. A couple of days ago I pulled up babies by the dozens and dozens.

Home again. I had withdrawal symptoms for 2 days, pining for the open road; I sure can't agree that east west, home's best.

So this thread is closing down for the present. Hoping to travel again with you all very very soon!

The Pen Is writes like cicerone. LOL

And looks like him, too.

As a followup to this post, I thought you might enjoy this, from today's NYTimes -
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/nyregion/30violin.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I take up the thread of this thread again, as I am now in Dubai, Do Buy, a place of extremes...
walking to the long, sandy beach from my son's shared 'villa' (I would call it a groundfloor flat, but they don't), there are big wide roads and pavements, with occasional tracts of sand and neglected lots, but mainly dotted with substantial houses set in walled complexes with fearsome gates, reminiscent of the suburbs of Hong Kong. Vegetation is sparse, the occasional bougainvillea spilling over a garden wall, a dusty palm tree, a large-leaved lumpy tree with aerial roots like an unrefined banyan. The beach is peopled with Russians, some locals, Americans and various people of unknown linguistic origins. Mostly couples or men, it's a working day so families don't abound. There's a pleasant park alongside the beach, with fast food outlets (but service is surprisingly slow all over the place) and showers. It's a perfect temperature, 32 or so in the day, the sea warm without being gluey, a slight breeze.
Walking back from the beach, it's a different view. Modern Dubai is gleaming rather malevolently a couple of miles away, tall darkish skyscrapers in the haze, including Burj Dubai, nearly finished and going to be the tallest in the world; so tall they haven't revealed the number of storeys yet so some can be added if anyone tries to top it. The summits of the buildings are still bristling with cranes, and many have fanciful shapes to cut the skyline into jagged beige tangram pieces.
I only arrived yesterday, so this is a brief impression.

We (son, fiancee and I) are going camping tomorrow in my son's pride-and-joy new jeep, over the border into the Musandam Peninsula http://www.geocities.com/suonnoch/Oman/Musandam.htm for a complete contrast.

No camels then?

Good for you, Clary. Felicitations from rainy and soon to be freezing England.

Have a safe trip Clary, shall be following your exploits with interests.

Dubai!

So that's where you are, Claire!

Thanks for this first post & I'd be really interested in hearing more. It's a place I know so little about & it's wonderful to read your 'first hand' accounts.

Lovely to see you again!

How are you?

Please excuse the long lapse; there seems to have been a lot to do.
We didn't make it to Musandam last weekend, as the poor damn workers in the family, Rustom and Lucie, slept till about noon... so we did a car tour of Dubai, taking in the Palms, developments still in progress in the charming but impractical shape of palm trees jutting into the gulf. Impractical because they only have one road of access, yet they are going to house thousands. There's a lot of 'thinking outside the box' in development here, which makes you realise why there was a box in the first place.
We saw the Burj al Arab hotel, http://www.key2dubai-holidays.co.uk/dubai_hotel.asp?hotel=Burj%20Al%20Arab&seref=adwords_burj_al_arab&serad=2 which is a landmark, but you won't get me up in one of those things. Rustom is taking 2 kiwi friends up for a drink to the zillionth floor, costs arms and legs, this weekend but I declined. Terra firma for me, and a balanced budget.

Dubai is immense, takes up loads of horizontal space and now vertical as well.

On Saturday we drove down the coast to Fujairah, another emirate, and had lunch and drinks on idyllic hotel terraces in perfect temperatures; not wonderful food I have to say, but perfectly acceptable.

R and I went to a lovely south Indian restaurant in the Mall of the Emirates, speaking of food, superb fish curry. This mall is huge, marble, like the big malls in HKong, or most anywhere in the east, plenty of famous names YAWN. But also some local Arabic shops with beautiful clothes but only 4 colours of soft furnishings, it seems = deep burgundy red, bright sugar pink, brown, beige. I was hoping for some green cushion covers, maybe green's not IN this year.

I went to Ladies' Day on the beach on Monday, and watched large and ebullient Pakistani and Indian schoolgirls in long tunics over trousers get their feet wet - while it was perfect swimming weather and I'm sure they'd have loved to go in.

I found two good agents for my school!!

I took buses. This deserves a special mention because The Authorities obviously don't want tourists to do this, since taxis rule, and are relatively cheap. Bus stops are few and far between, and on zinging multilane roads whose pavements are actually 'under construction' so plasticked off from mere pedestrians, who take life in hands and walk alongside the thundering traffic, mostly SUVs and trucks and buses... private buses. But should you be lucky enough to find a bus, a public one, you will (if a woman) be able to get one of the specially reserved front seats for the fair sex, pay the equivalent of 30 pence for an air-conditioned journey, and have the chance to talk to the local Filipinas and Indians, and in one case, a completely floor-to-ceiling burqa'd woman from Leicester who was on holiday and chose to wear the said costume. Interesting, I quizzed her on it and she was very open and just said she preferred it.

Rustom and Lucie have never taken buses in the year they've been here. But the distances are great and they work hard... understandable. And also the government does not publish bus routes, you have to ask around and be prepared to spend time on it.

We shopped in one of the biggest Carrefours in the world. You could get anything, really, but the cuts of meat were odd, big and bony. I go uninterested in those huge hypermarkets, just want to buy a sandwich and go. But actually I ended up buying all sorts of exotic veg, herbs I hadn't encountered before, they were great in the big lamb stew I made yesterday.

You might be able to tell I am hungry, so I shall have some of the vast veggie soup I've just made, it's 9 30 pm and I think everyone is out for the duration. The young!

More when I've done more. Going on the official Big Bus Tour tomorrow.

(I just enjoyed your unofficial little bus tour...)

Fascinating.

I've got some colleagues who lived in Dubai for years. I like reading a 'stranger's' perspective on the place.

Very interesting Clary, things have obviously changed dramatically since I visited the place in 1987. Wherever we went then was under armed guard!

Really interesting, Clary!
(Ever considered working for Lonely Planet for a living? Or your second job? Seriously. You write a mean report! )

Armed guard, Dutchy? What were you doing, bootleg liquor?

I think Lonely Planet is inundated with writers, most of whom do a lot more adventurous things than me, Olga, but thanks for the endorsement, ducky! I have written a guidebook, as you know, but prefer this sort of bloggy approach!

Anyway, I have had a particularly interesting couple of days. The Big Bus tour was fine, Dubai Museum trying very hard to show a richness of culture from the survival living that was the Bedouin lot before Black Gold.

Then 2 friends of Rustom's arrived for the RUGBY SEVENS WEEKEND, a major event in the sporting calendar. They wanted to visit the 7* Burj al Arab Hotel, so R had booked them and himself in for a drink - about $US70 ahead - in the Skyview Bar on the 27th floor. I didn't want to go at all, but was interested to hear their impressions - fabulous views, amazing place etc. We then met for dinner in the Madinat Jumeirah complex which gets my vote as the most beautiful evening venue ever.
Pictures I have found on the web don't do justice to its ambience, set along waterways with soft golden lighting - togther with an ambient temperature of around 22/72 - perfect. We dined in Pisces, a seafood restaurant whose grilled tuna steak was delicious, and because the breeze got slightly chilly, I was offered a pashmina by an attentive Filipino waiter just at the moment I felt it would have been sensible to bring an extra layer - no fault to be found with the service! Without alcohol, the experience would be very cheap indeed, but with the bottle and a half of wine, it came to around the same price as drinks in the Skyview bar - $70 - per head.

In their haste to drink their $70s' worth, and not wanting to keep us waiting, Rustom and his friends had left the Skyview Bar in a heightened state, as it were, and he had forgotten his car keys. What a ruse! It meant that this morning we were able to ring and ask if we could pick them up. So we got to see the place in daylight, and I got in with not a dirham spent!

Actually, it made me sick. Not the lavishness and expense, which of course is a moral outrage in a world of poverty, but the decorations within. The carpets are of such a lurid design, contrasting garishly with the sofa fabric, walls, marble floors, and reflected from ceilings in distorted fashion, that I felt positively queasy walking around the atrium (sorry, I didn't go up in the outside lift to the weeny cabin affair that is the bar, suspended off the side of the 'mast'). There are extraordinarily well coordinated fountains which throw and spew water in all directions, and large aquaria full of exotic fish line the huge escalators from ground level to reception. The atrium was designed by the interior designer to be white, but this won't do for the Arabs, so rainbow colours were painted on the undersides of the stepped storeys.. an unwelcome contrast to the aforementioned carpets. A place for lottery winners and other sheiks, we concluded, as we passed the 6 white Rolls Royces on our way back to normality across the bridge.

Prior to getting the keys back, we had been to the Ritz Carlton hotel for coffee, an OLD hotel, at least 20 yrs old probably, but in the best colonial/tropical tradition, lowrise, spacious, large verandahs with good wood and comfortable sofas and chairs, impeccable service... that's where I would stay if I didn't have a son to sponge off; or was a lottery winner. If you could ignore the dozens of highrise blocks breathing down the back of its neck, you would think you were in the Caribbean or even HK's Repulse Bay Hotel in the 1970s. Very reposeful.

I love these extremes of travelling, bus one day, Burj the next... and thank you for reading!

Various nasty news reports about Dubai: construction workers maltreated, living in terrible conditions with little or withheld pay, bad safety controls. Also "boycott Dubai" website about the way local Emirati are protected by the legal system, things hushed up. The inevitable downside of all the flamboyant projects - reminds me of the Pyramids.

You must be a lady of advanced age if you remember the building of the Pyramids! Saw a documentary regarding the building boom in Dubai on TV recently, in it we were told most construction workers are from India and earning wages unheard of in their own country.

Bummer, Clary.
And such a common story in developing countries after the tourist dollar!

The maltreatment of workers was covered in the documentary I saw (which was the second one I happened upon) and apparently they are protesting vigorously. Apparently the Sheik has made some efforts now to impose some constraints on the developers or to enforce the laws. Have you seen any sign of that?