Paradise Found

A scene like from a paradise wallpaper, and just as tranquil as it looks. It's on the East coast of the UAE, in the emirate of Fujairah - and one of the places I visited during the trip I mentioned in earlier posts. I decided to just sit and simply exist for a while there.

People are very friendly here. I greeted two men in passing at the beach pictured above and was promptly invited to sit with them, have something to drink and a talk. It turned out one was from Fujairah's defense ministry, the other a high-ranking police officer - who proudly showed pictures of himself in uniform, looking real grim and intimidating, and groomed like an actor minutes before the next take for a Hollywood movie at the same time. No messin' around with me!, it said. But being in his spare time, he was just nice and told stories about the trips he's doing every year in summer when the weather here becomes so hot and humid that many leave the country for a while, drew a map to his favourite fishing spot for me and paid for my drink.

By the way, it appears that it is not unusual to meet people involved with government in Fujairah. I was told the authorities are one of the most important employers there.

The Badiyah Mosque

The tiny village of Badiyah, about 40km from Fujairah City at the East coast of the UAE, is home to the country's oldest mosque. Apparently, it dates back to 1446. As you can see, it features no minaret - something many think is an integral part of a mosque.

In fact, it only takes three things for a place to theoretically qualify for a mosque: purity (it has to be clean, quite literally), a mihrab (a prayer niche facing Mecca), and enough space for people to gather and pray. The minaret is a feature added later, when dwellings grew larger, so that the calls to prayer could be heard by everyone.

Peaking inside during my road trip last weekend, I saw a simple square room, laid with colourful little carpets, some holy books and niches. So a quite different impression compared to Jumeirah mosque.

But beautiful exactly in its simplicity.

A Taste of Luxury

For a few hours, I got a taste of the life of luxury that money can buy you here when I went for a cocktail at Burj Al Arab's Skyview Bar recently. A place quite beyond my world, usually.

Of course I did NOT try the world's officially most expensive cocktail being sold there. For obvious reasons. The "27.321" (the price tag in local currency Dirhams) costs a whopping 5690 Euros per glass. The Burj Royal I tried was pricy enough. But yummy.

The picture was taken in the famous hotel's lobby, shortly before I took the lift up to the 27th floor of the building. Great to see this place for myself, and a memorable experience.

However, I guess I'm still more the Small-Cafe-Sort-Of-Person.

Bull fighting at the East coast

This weekend, I went an a road trip to Fujairah, the most Eastern of the seven emirates making up the UAE. I arrived in time for a very entertaining and unique local spectacle.

Friday early evening (ask five different locals and you get five different starting times), there is a series of bull fights in a place close to the beach. An enthusiastic crowd of several hundred people - mostly locals, mostly men - gathers around a sandy arena to see bulls fight each other, pitting their strengths against the other animal until one gives up. A jury decides about the winner.

It's an experience very different from the bull-fighting you may know from Spain - it's less orchestrated, the bulls are hardly hurt, it's not man against animal, but animal against animal; and, above all, the whole thing has a refreshing amateur-style "let's just meet and have fun" feel to it. There is no betting, no big winner ceremony - the winning bull just becomes more valuable and its owner gains reputation.

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The really entertaining bit is when the men have to try to separate the bulls after the jury has decided about the winner. The animals can be hard to control and even harder to predict in their behavior, leading to some almost cartoon-ish but also breath-taking scenes. Sometimes, up to 20 or so men rush on the field, grabbing for the bulls' rope and pulling the fighters apart. Sometimes they have to run for their safety, escaping the agitated bulls' horns only by a few centimeters.

But no one was injured. This time...

Camel ride and shark visit

I went on a camel ride last weekend, as part of another trip into the desert including dinner in a fake bedouin camp, belly dancing, and shisha. The riding position is not that bad - you sit quite high up, so you feel like a little king; but be careful to come out of your daydreams the moment this animal gets on his knees to let you down, that's quite rocky and you really need to hold on...

I also went to Dubai Mall; mainly because of its sea water aquarium, which is, of course, the world's largest one with 10 million litres! It's inhabited by hundreds of fish, from sting rays to more than a dozen sharks. You walk through an underwater tunnel which enables you to see these animals close up. The aquarium opened Sept 08.

Confounding oracles of doom

I read an interesting comment in The National today. The author asked the same question I and others have also occassionally asked themselves about Dubai: "Over the years, I have often wondered whether the pace of Dubai's development was sustainable."

The interesting thing is that, again and again, projects have proven the author that Dubai is capable of doing amazing things, despite his own doubts: "I have also become aware that there is something about Dubai that means an idea that might seem at first glance inconceivable, impracticable or simply impossible, could actually come to pass."

As he concludes: "The Dubai of tomorrow may be different from the one that appeared to be emerging a year ago, but there will be a tomorrow".

I have no doubts about this. Yes, there's a crisis - but what sparked and sustained the development of the past 20 years or so is here to remain. It's not just the geographic location or the long tradition of trade. It's in the people. There's just too much Obama spirit here to fail, especially among the decision-makers.

Maybe there will be a bit of a re-focus now. As I wrote earlier: many people I meet see their life here as something temporary. And it appears to me, as an outsider, that there's quite a gap between those who can afford to participate in what the growth produces, and a number of people who work hard 'at the bottom' to help enable it. So maybe there will be even more thought in the future on how to make people actually want to stay here after Dubai has attracted them from all corners of the world.

Personally, I think that could be a good idea.

Reaching for the stars

Big is not big enough. Even though Dubai already has one large international airport, the Emirate is already building a second one here. (See the construction site from above here.)

Now called Al Maktoum International Airport (JXB), it is forecast to be the world's largest when it is completed in 2015, with operations starting in 2010 already. Surprised, anyone? Not really, I would guess. In the end, the US$ 8.1 billion facility, which includes six parallel runways, will have an annual cargo capacity of 12 million tons and a passenger capacity of 120-150 million passengers per year. As a comparison: In 2007, 68 million people used London Heathrow, Europe's largest airport. By the way, Dubai already has the world's largest man-made port, Jebel Ali...

And there's even more than just the usual superlatives. There are rumors that Dubai is in discussions with Richard Branson, head of Virgin and pioneer of commercial spaceflight, that Virgin Galactic, 'the world's first spaceline', might have its very own space terminal at the new airport (if you want to book your spaceflight for as little as $200,000, go here).

If it were actually true, that could be a perfect match - Branson has always been dreaming big, and Dubai is probably just the right place for something like that.

Who said "The sky is the limit"? And what date is it today?