Travel with Indigo

In 1965, the Emirate of Dubai was a sleepy sandbox of a place. That year, RAF pilot Lt. Terry Michaels flew a mission there requiring him to land at its airport, a single sand strip hardened by oil sprayed over its surface. Following protocol, he made a low pass over the strip to be sure no camels or goats had wandered onto it then landed. What he encountered was empty, blistering desert and a small town along an estuary, called Dubai Creek, from which pearling, fishing and trading had long been conducted. There were no buildings over two floors and few paved roads. Most inhabitants, including the Sheik, preferred spending their time in tents far out in the desert herding camels and goats just as their immediate forebears had done. Nothing Terry Michaels saw when he climbed out of his plane could have foretold the Dubai of today.

The year after he landed oil was discovered and everything changed from that moment on. Most of the world thinks that Dubai’s boom is the result of those oil deposits but that’s only indirectly so.  Its reserves are tiny by Mideast standards, but it has used those reserves wisely to create infrastructure for trade, manufacturing and tourism and it is these that today power the Dubai economy.

As recently as 1979, Dubai, with land area equal to that of Rhode Island, had a population of just 276,000 and a single building over 300 feet high, but that early investment in the essentials of a modern economy began paying off. Today it has 1.5 million people and 434 buildings over 300 feet with 322 more presently under construction. Among the seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates–Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and five you’ve never heard of– Dubai is the second wealthiest. Ninety-five percent of its GDP is not oil-based but derives from that early investment in infrastructure.

My impression of the place, based on spending several weeks wandering about in the desert, in hotels, malls and nightclubs and talking with ex-pats and locals, is that Dubai is not so much a city as it is perhaps the world’s grandest, and certainly its most grandiose, real estate development project. Here are a few of its more notable recent enterprises.

Dubai has what is claimed to be the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai, although the height is held secret against the day when the height of New York’s planned Freedom Tower is announced. I suppose the needle-like pinnacle atop the Burj could be telescoped upwards to exceed whatever height is announced for the Tower.  Adjacent to that is what until recently was the world’s largest shopping mall, the Dubai Mall, exceeded now by the Mall of the Emirates with 1,000 shops and parking for 10,000 vehicles. Not far away is the Burj al Arab, the world’s tallest hotel perched upon its own man-made island. The Palms, a collection of islands dredged and filled and arranged into the shape of a palm tree, as until recently one of the largest man-made developments in the world. Two even grander palm island projects, the Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira, are under construction. Work is well along now on three hundred man-made islands each in the shape of a country and arranged in the shape of a world map. You buy your own “country” in The World at prices that range from $10 to $45 million. The project will require 426 million cubic yards of sand and a 17-mile long breakwater. Ski Dubai is the world’s largest indoor snow park, containing 6,000 tons of manufactured snow and five runs of which the longest is a quarter of a mile.  At more than twice the size of Disney World, Dubailand, when completed in 2020, will be the world’s largest entertainment attraction. There is also the world’s largest retail store under one roof. And on, and on it goes. Dubai, as these projects attest, is a land of superlatives.

Everywhere you look there are new buildings. Condominiums, hotels, offices, and retail stores have sprung up from the desert, many arrestingly modern in both their exterior and interior design and impressive in their scale. Set against the cloudless radiant sky of the Arabian Peninsula, they mark Dubai as the business, shopping and entertainment center of the Middle East, the sprawling, random, visually incoherent Los Angeles of Arabia.

Set as it is upon a wide, flat desert and strung out along the Persian Gulf, you would think that site planning a fine new city for Dubai would not be all that taxing. Apart from Dubai Creek, there are no tortuous waterways flowing through it or mountains around which it must wind. A simple grid pattern would have done nicely. But Dubai is as orderly in its arrangement as a plate of spaghetti.  Roads twist and turn and meander, local streets and expressways collide and crisscross, and all are laden with hopeless snarls of dense traffic. Anyone foolish enough to suppose that brilliant engineering and planning could forestall the traffic jams common to large cities everywhere would be disheartened when driving around Dubai. The place is a transportation mess.

Adding to its list of “world’s biggest” claims, Dubai is now what must surely be the world’s biggest real estate disaster. For the recent visitor, what most strikes the eye is the vast number of partially completed buildings and abandoned foundations that stretch out across the desert and line the handsome new roadways. One third of the world’s supply of tower cranes is in Dubai. These until recently went about their tasks twenty-four hours a day hauling building materials into place, now they stand idle. There are hundreds of them perched atop derelict structures reaching out to the horizon like tombstones in a vast cemetery. Malls are nearly empty, shops are boarded up, restaurants are shuttered, hotels are vacant, laborers and office workers alike are departed for home. Buyers of resort condominiums have walked away from their contracts leaving behind deposits and bad memories. There is a glut of homes for rent or sale, owned by ex-pats now unemployed, offered at prices that reflect their desperation. These calamities are common the world over but in Dubai they now define the place. There is little in the way of a solid, established core upon which the city can fall back and no more oil. The Sheik of Dubai has had to borrow many billions from the Sheik of Abu Dhabi and others in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. The world’s biggest real estate development project has gone wrong in spectacular fashion.

The Sheik of Dubai, when before the crash he gazed at himself in the mirror, must have imagined that his is a particularly handsome visage, one so becoming that it should be shared with others. And so the major roadways of the emirate are dotted with quite large, illuminated images of that face, the better to remind passersby of his, now tarnished, eminence. It is a vision, however, from which the average viewer is likely to recoil. Aquiline nose, tight-lipped smirk, jaw line accented by a thin strip of black beard in the style currently fashionable among sheiks, eyes like oysters which have been dead for some time. The hyena whose meal has just been snatched away has a friendlier demeanor.

When staying a few nights at the fine, and in the best tradition of Dubai brand spanking new, Raffles Hotel, it was my habit to visit the lobby bar at the hour when civilized men take the first of their evening’s refreshment. There, gathered in groups of four and sporting the unimaginative dress of the Arab sheik, were coveys of Arab sheiks, all Saudis. At their tables were piled heaps of dates and chocolates which from their girth I concluded comprised much of their diet. None drank alcohol. Just why four grown men would gather in a bar at happy hour and sip fruit juice I can’t say.  To the Western mind it would be much the same as attending a wild party in the company of your mother. Surely the practice contravenes some fundamental Law of Nature.

Each night as I walked past them, and despite their contemptuous glares, I turned on the easy Southern charm for which I am noted around the world and offered an affable “Good evening, gentlemen”, giving them the benefit of considerable doubt on this last matter.  Not one of the supercilious twits had the courtesy even to acknowledge me. They just continued to glare then turned away in barely concealed disgust, a Saudi sheik disdaining an infidel. When I approached one with a harmless question, as a Western tourist customarily would do, he waived me away imperiously as though I were a guttersnipe. It was for such people that the expression “arrogant asshole” was coined.

It is a helpful, and so far as I could tell largely accurate, rule-of-thumb that the civility of an Arab is inversely proportionate to the weals of resort condominiums have walked away from their contracts leaving behind deposits and bad memories. There is a glut of homes for rent or sale, owned by ex-pats now unemployed, offered at prices that reflect their desperation. These calamities are common the world over but in Dubai they now define the place. There is little in the way of a solid, established core upon which the city can fall back and no more oil. The Sheik of Dubai has had to borrow many billions from the Sheik of Abu Dhabi and others in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. The world’s biggest real estate development project has gone wrong in spectacular fashion.

During my stay in Dubai, an article appeared in the local English language newspaper extolling a recently published book by a pious Muslim woman who had worked for some twenty years in Dubai as a marriage counselor.  In the book, the author laments the rather severe marital problems in the Arab world saying that they are caused by the extreme degree to which the genders are separated from early youth until marriage. That separation, she said, led to most Arab men having homosexual sex as their first encounters. She went on to say that the men actually enjoyed this, continued it actively during their youth, and took the practice with them into their marriage. The problem is most severe in those Arab countries in which separation is practiced most rigorously, like Saudi Arabia for instance. Reading this book review put those Raffles sheiks in an altogether different light.

During my stay in Dubai, I managed to wander about a few of the shopping malls and to spend as I said a few nights at the Raffles. I spent a few more at the hippest new hotel, The Address, located across a man-made lake from the Burj Dubai, which as you may recall is claimed to be the world’s tallest building. The lake is the scene from which at appointed hours each evening a show of dazzling flickers and beams of multi-hued lights and dancing geysers of water, choreographed to booming strains of some musical refrain or another,  assault the senses of innocent bystanders.  One of these unfortunate displays, said to be the world’s largest of course, erupted quite without warning as I was seated in indolent comfort at the poolside bar of The Address Hotel taking in the night air and admiring the latest swimwear. For a fleeting moment, I thought I had mistakenly wandered into an E-Ride in the kiddy section of Disney World until a particularly fetching bit of swimwear walked by and brought me to my senses.

Wafi Mall, attached to Raffles, is said to be Dubai’s, if not the world’s, swankest. Bearing up this assessment, one of our lady crew, almost the only person in the whole place at the time, wandered into a clothing store there, one of whose offerings was a pair of denim jeans priced at $2,000. The sales person said she could be assured that this pair of jeans was one-of-a-kind.  Foolish extravagance of this sort was, until the recent financial calamity, common in Dubai.

On one particularly hot and thus ill-chosen day, I ventured into remote desert where I raced up and down the dunes on an ATV recalling the beach buggies of my youth on the dunes of Pensacola Beach. I then boarded a Toyota four-wheel drive SUV for an hour of what is known as dune bashing, which means more racing about over dunes but in air conditioned comfort. This was followed by a visit to a tourist-friendly rendition of a desert Bedouin encampment, which fortunately differed from the authentic version in that it had an amply stocked bar. Here I was offered the chance to ride a camel. Ever prone to making improvident choices, I nevertheless declined the chance to make another. One look at the beast, an odd assembly of discarded animal parts, cinched it for me. I elected instead to sit on a rug in the sand, adequately refreshed from the bar, and watch a belly dancer perform. In the stodgy Emirates, this is about as close as it’s possible to get to a strip show, and though not exactly robust entertainment it was a considerable improvement over camel riding.

Dubai is now and likely will remain the place in which I paid the highest price I have ever paid for a simple lunch. Wishing to take in the mildly garish interior spaces of the iconic Burj al Arab hotel, which as you will recall is the world’s tallest, and wanting also to see the palm island developments from above, I booked a table at its restaurant on the top floor. For a modest plate of lamb-something or other, cheese and crackers, and two glasses of ordinary white wine, the tab was $300. As for the interior spaces, their essence is captured nicely in a single statistic. Among much else, they incorporate 86,111 square feet of 22-carat gold leaf. No more need be said.

From Dubai, I travelled in luxurious style on Air Emirates to Frankfurt, Germany, where I was met by my long time dear friends, Antonia and Claus Meulenbergh, who drove me to their handsome new home in Weisbaden. There I stayed too briefly but long enough to enjoy their good company at breakfasts in their lovely garden, at a fine lunch in the Rhinegau looking out over miles of vineyards lining the river, and at festive dinners, among much else. We recalled events from our past times together, shared recent experiences, laughed a lot, toured the verdant countryside, and had just a fine time of it. There are no more gracious and charming people on the planet than Antonia and Claus. It was all I could do at my departure to hold back tears of deep sadness as we gave each other heartfelt hugs.  Claus is gravely ill, and I fear I won’t see him again. There is a tiny ray of hope with a new medicine he’s taking, and we rallied around this and made plans to see each other again soon.  We hope they’ll join me in the Greek Islands, maybe in late August. We hope.

PIRACY

In thinking about the risk of a pirate attack, I had done some homework from which I learned that, for example, in the first quarter of 2009 there were 41 attacks on vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden. Of these, only five were successful. What I did not know, because I could find no source of reliable data, was how many vessels transited the Gulf during that period. While I was in Germany, a British naval officer from the Coalition Task Force visited Indigo and met with Captain Watson for nearly two hours to assess the risks. During that meeting, he supplied the missing number, informing the captain that each day on average 200 vessels pass through the Gulf. Now for me this was a startling bit of information. From sensational press reports, I had formed the speculative notion that the risk of an attack was somewhere north of 25 percent or so. Now, with the missing essential piece of the calculation in hand, it became clear that the risk was not 25 but in the vicinity of .02 percent. Put another way, during the first quarter of 2009, 18,000 vessels passed through the Gulf and of these 17,959 did so without seeing a pirate. We were more likely to be attacked by a school of crazed tuna.

On returning to Dubai from Frankfurt, I unexpectedly encountered a crew, all but one of whom had stirred themselves into a frenzy of irrational fear of wicked pirates, and rather than face the perceived risk instead resigned, effective upon reaching the next port. Even after I carefully explained the now evidently minuscule risks, they adamantly declined to change their minds. To my utter astonishment, they bandied about phrases like, “If I get wounded, I’ll be unemployable”, “My life is worth more to me”, “My mother and father and girlfriend don’t want me to go”. Fear was in their eyes and in the air. Though I committed to hiring two armed security men experienced in guarding vessels in the Gulf, they still refused. So we made our way from Dubai to Muscat, Oman, and there took on a new captain, chef, and stewardess. The engineer would have none of it and remained. The mate and deckhand, after thinking over the matter more carefully, eventually relented and stayed on board.

A French socialist politician is quoted as having said “Europeans are Americans who refused to take the boat. We do not take the same risks; we have a need for greater security.” Of the three departed crew, two were Brits and one was an Aussie, a kind of Brit but from a bigger island. It’s of course unfair to judge individual cases against a sweeping characterization like that by the Frenchman, but it does make you wonder.

ABU DHABI

A hundred miles from Dubai down a magnificent four-lane, divided, lushly landscaped, illuminated and ornately fenced highway is Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates. If Dubai is to the UAE as Los Angeles is to the US, then Abu Dhabi is New York, or more precisely Manhattan, the region’s cultural and intellectual center. There are plenty of tall buildings, hotels and a few malls, but the arrangement of these is more deftly done than in Dubai, more artful, and its general aspect is more pleasing to the Western eye.

In choosing a land over which you and your (male) descendants will be the ruling sheik, it is essential to select an area under which there is a great pool of oil and over which there are few people with whom you are obliged to share it. The antecedents of the current Sheik of Abu Dhabi were extraordinarily lucky at getting it right on both counts. Of all the oil underlying the United Arab Emirates, which together have the world’s sixth largest reserves, 93% is in Abu Dhabi. An ocean of black gold underlies its vast desert making it the Fort Knox of the UAE. With a population of native-born around 200,000 and assigning a value to the oil of say $50 a barrel, the average wealth of each AD native is in the vicinity of $23 million.  Of course, the distribution of the wealth is anything but equal. It is genetic proximity to the ruling sheik that matters most.

In America, the fenced enclave of luxury that we know as a gated community is now a commonplace. In AD, there are single home sites the size of one of these entire communities and these too are commonplace. Driving along a leafy boulevard, I passed one (there are many more) measuring a half-mile along the roadway and the same in depth, about 160 acres. It was surrounded, as are all residences in this part of the world, by enclosing masonry walls, a tradition left over from the days when nomadic Bedu erected rustic wind fences around their encampments. These walls, though, are anything but rustic, measuring about twenty feet high and elaborately ornamented. At the main entry, as with the gated communities of America, are small platoons of armed sentries standing behind locked gates.

The property is owned by one of the many brothers, fifteen I think, of the current Sheik of Abu Dhabi, all themselves sheiks. Inside, I was told, are four identical homes of about the size, and from what I could see of about the same architectural style and elegance, of a middling 1970s airport terminal, maybe 50,000 square feet. Each is the home of one of the sheik’s four wives. In managing more than one wife, the one essential rule is that each must have bestowed upon her a scrupulously equal degree of splendor. Show one even the tiniest of favoritism and even Allah cannot save you from the Hell to follow. More modern, and it must be said wiser, men make do with one wife, if that

At this writing, the cash reserves of AD, which are completely the piggy bank of the Sheik’s to do with as he wishes, stood at around $300 billion and growing. Outward signs of this wealth abound.

Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque is one of these. Recently completed, it rises from a nearly vacant desert blotting out the horizon. Three monumental domes of white sandstone are the eye-catching centerpiece of this house of worship said to accommodate within its interior and courtyard spaces up to 40,000 supplicants. Ostentation is its unifying theme. It houses the world’s largest (see what I mean?) single piece of carpet, hand woven of course, and the world’s largest (and again) crystal chandelier, by Swarovski with whose work the sheiks of UAE seem particularly enamored. For a photographic tour of the place and design and construction details, consult its web site via Google. You’ll be wowed.

It is one of the few mosques in the Middle East that permits non-Muslims to tour during restricted hours, so I took advantage of this opportunity. Conservative dress is required, which for men means long-sleeve shirt and long trousers. For women, cover is required from the crown of the head to the ankles. To accomplish this, traditional black robes, called abayas, are on loan at the door.  Shoes must be removed before entering.

Its interior, as you might guess, is both monumental and sumptuous. The experience of standing on the world’s largest carpet beneath the world’s largest chandelier under the center and largest of the three domes was something like I imagine it must feel to stand in the gargantuan hanger that houses the space shuttle just prior to launch. It is an impressive structure on a colossal scale and an engineering marvel but devoid of the warm glow of spiritual embrace that you would expect from a place of worship.

Then there is the Emirates Palace Hotel. Of all the fine hotels I’ve ever stayed in, this is by far the most opulent. Built and owned by the Abu Dhabi government (read the Sheik thereof) as a residence for visiting dignitaries, it has the feel more of a palace than of a hotel. During my stay, it was about ten percent occupied yet not a single service had been cut back. There were far more staff than guests. This is apparently not an investment from which profit is expected.

The hotel’s 302 rooms and 92 suites sit on 250 of the choicest and most elegantly manicured acres in the entire Middle East. Each of the rulers of the Gulf countries has their own private suite on the top floor and enters the grounds through a monumental archway only slightly less grand than the Arch de Triumphe. The hotel features its own superyacht marina along with every other amenity that could be imagined. Pure soft white sand was hauled in, from somewhere, Algeria as I recall, for the purpose of building a perfect beach from which footprints are swept daily.  Its two house cars are new Rolls-Royces. In one of its shops, you can buy handmade hunting rifles at $500,000 and up and custom knives starting at $50,000. The walk from my room in the east wing to the spa in the west was six tenths of a mile across wide expanses of glittering marble interrupted here and there with enormous columns topped with capitals trimmed in gold leaf. Where light bulbs would be expected, Swarovski chandeliers hang. I could go on and on but to get the best sense of it see the web site at emiratespalace.com. With it all, the place comes close but never crosses the line between tasteful splendor and philistine flash. I would gladly return there.

Sudden wealth, alas, does not bring with it the refinement of taste the West has been honing now for many centuries. Homes throughout the UAE, no matter how grand their scale, are for the most part merely unattractive, and more than a few are butt crack ugly affairs. Without exception, they are built of cement block covered in stucco, have a flat roof and are enclosed by the ever present wall.  Though mostly painted an inoffensive white or beige, a few reflect their owner’s unfortunate venture into the world of color. In all my wandering around the UAE, I never once saw a home I would wish to call my own, especially not one owned by a prominent sheik.

In the summer months, the UAE is humid along the coast, arid inland and searing in both. Daily temperatures routinely hit 120 degrees rising often to 130 and more, dropping at night to the high 90s and low hundreds.  It’s a pizza oven without the aromas.  Late in summer, around August, the locals say you can drop a plastic cup on the pavement and it’ll melt before your eyes. Water temps in the Persian Gulf hover at around 95 degrees, too warm for a pleasurable swim.

It is the months of October to April that bring tourists to the shores of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Temperatures then decline from blistering to balmy and the humidity becomes bearable. In the desert, nights grow cool enough to require a sweater.

Still, despite the better weather during those months, I would not choose to return to Dubai nor to Abu Dhabi. They are for the tourist seeking warm, sunny beaches too much like Miami or Ft. Lauderdale, big, glitzy, traffic choked places without an offsetting appeal. Brazil and Thailand remain my favorites in part because both offer a simple, nearly rustic, way of life, warm, gracious people, and exceptional local food and entertainment. Neither has condescending sheiks nor the annoying strictures of Islam.

Leaving Dubai, we travelled the Persian Gulf along the north side of the Musandom Peninsula, transited through the Straits of Hormuz, and made our way to the ancient city of Muscat, Oman, where unknowingly we were destined to stay more than a month. It turned out to be one of our most memorable ports as I will describe in the next blog.