Ziggy

Sitting on an Air Arabia flight (perfectly pleasant, incidentally) and flicking through the inflight mag, when I saw an article on the Six Senses Hotel and Spa at Zighi Bay. This bay used to be a great weekend campsite, just off the Wadi Bih track up the Hajar mountains North of Dibba. It was only relatively recently that a tortuous track was cut up the hill past the army firing range that used to be up there, over the hill and down to the fishing village that always, always has me humming David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust.

It was a lovely place to camp or picnic, Zighi Bay. Now I can pay nigh on a thousand bucks to ‘chill out’ on the self same beach.

The thing in the article that jarred with me was the claim that ‘there was a rudimentary, albeit treacherous, road that was regularly washed away by rains.’ The article goes on to say that there’s now a safe road to the bay, developed over eight months by the hotel. It somehow seems to me to frame this as a really positive benefit from the hotel's development, a selfless contribution.

Well, the fact is that there was a graded track up the hill and down to the village that was steep but perfectly serviceable and that I never saw washed away once. The villagers had accessed the bay by sea for time immemorial; they are fishermen. But the track was a fun drive, a tad precipitous, but fun. But it certainly wasn't up to the standard you'd need for hotel delivery vehicles. They HAD to build a new road for their own purposes.

It’s just a tiny thing, hardly worth bothering about. But it got up my nose for some reason.

Baywash.