A Dabble At The Dhaid Date Festival

Sharjah's inland town of Dhaid has an annual date festival. Who knew? We were wending (actually, waddling or wobbling might be more accurate) our way home after a particularly pleasant stay at the Hatta Fort Hotel and caught an overhead billboard advertising the Dhaid Date Festival. And we thought, 'Why not?'

We'd been promising ourselves a stay at the newly revamped JA Hatta Fort Hotel since we played chicken there a few weeks ago. I can only report that we had a fabulous time. Quirky, independent and offering service standards and food quality that I would argue go beyond any other hotel in the UAE, the hotel's facelift has preserved the retro charm of the place and yet brought it up to date. It's all rather chic and we went large for the weekend. Hence the waddling.

Part of the reason why Hatta made us fatta...

Dhaid is an oasis, fed by water from aquifers and the man-made network of aflaj irrigation tunnels running down from the nearby Hajar Mountains. It has long been so, reports from ancient Gazetteers such as old 'mutton chops' Lorimer put Dhaid as an important centre for agriculture and the coming together of the inland and coastal tribes. Even today, it's a notable agricultural centre. So the idea of a Date Festival not only makes sense, it quite tickled us. Anticipating a mixture of Killinascully meets Craggy Island's Funland, we made tracks Dhaidwards.

This is the second year of the Festival, which takes place in the Dhaid Cultural Centre. The hall is decked out in shell-scheme and carpets, with a stage and seating as well as a raised diwan area. The stalls are a wonderful mixture and we wandered, wide-eyed around them chatting to a wildly eclectic mix of people. There were date traders, farmers, agriculturalists and, gloriously, apiarists aplenty.

You'd be amazed at the sheer variety of dates grown in the UAE (one of the world's leading producers of dates, if you but knew it) and they were all on display at the festival, from pick and mix stands selling loose varieties through to enormous weighed bunches some ranging above 50 kilos.

We chatted about date palm propagation (as one does) and sampled dates from farms all over the UAE, learning our klas from our medjoul. Everyone was very shy but very friendly and we got the feeling that foreigners taking an interest was a rare and welcome surprise. But the high point for us wasn't the dates, but the honey. Sarah's dad keeps bees and bottles his own honey and we had already come across the bee keepers of Dhaid, but the date festival had brought a handful of colourful figures from further afield. One chap was selling wild honey from the RAK mountains, eye-wateringly expensive, black as night and gloopy.

Then we came across Mr Honey. A bee-keeper with 500 hives in Al Ain and RAK, Ahmed Al Mazrouei cut a genial figure as he showed us the different qualities of honey he'd spun out the combs he'd lifted from his hives, from his black mountain honey through single flower varieties. Dipping little plastic spoons into the jars, he took us on a tour around some of the most amazingly flavoured honey we'd ever encountered.

He had started the whole thing with six hives. Now his two sons work with him and he runs a delivery service through Whatsapp (you can find him on Instagram, too!)

Ahmed Al Mazrouei

Entranced, we bought a little jar of the black stuff for Da back home - honey so thick it piles up when it's dropped from a spoon back into the pot, tasting darkly of liquorice, molasses and deep caramel. I wish we'd bought another jar for ourselves, but now we've got contacts, baba...

A final whirl through perfumes, palm frond weaving and organic herbs and we found ourselves back out in the sunshine, blinking and very, very glad indeed that we'd taken the opportunity to drop in and say 'Hi'...

It'll be on again this time next year. I'd heartily commend a visit, too!

Pinky, Lucky, Latta and Khan

They sound like a subcontinental Trumpton fire brigade, but they're not. They're the rocks of Sharjah's 'antique' trade, those four. Latta's has always been upstairs in the Blue Souk, but Pinky's has moved around a bit since we first came across it in Sharjah's unrestored old central souk area, now known as the 'Heart of Sharjah'.

Named after the owner's daughter Pinky, the shop was a treasure trove of Indian furniture and assorted knick-knacks, from battered water jugs through to carved wooden textile printing blocks.

Our first visit to Pinky Furniture had us stumbling wide-eyed around the stacked jumble. An Indian bench caught our eye. 'Is this old?' Sarah asked the proprietor as we made our way between piled cupboards and dressers.

'Oh, absolutely,' he replied. 'Made just last week.'

How could you not warm to that as a response? We got talking. Mr Mukri had a 'godown' where there was more furniture, Omani doors and the like. And there, baking slowly in the ambient heat, was a wonderful collection of dusty things, some new but many 'original' pieces nestled in the tottering piles of furniture.

There was some sort of family fall-out (to be honest I can't recall any details), resulting in Pinky's spawning a rival - Lucky's. We visited Lucky's once or twice, but it was always Pinky what had 'the good stuff'. The other game in town was Mr Khan, located at the back of the street the Post Office is on, who tended to stock the 'new style' of Indian furniture - the iron-banded browny stuff which made Marina Trading's fortune. We started to see this sort of thing popping up in London, in Lewis' and 'funky' furniture places. The basic rule of thumb on pricing seemed to be what cost a rupee in India cost a dirham in Sharjah and a quid in London.

We were furnishing our first villa, filling the vast yawning white spaces, so we bought benches and other stuff from Pinky, visiting regularly as his stock was topped up by containers coming in from India.

A while later, we'd fallen off the 'antique' furniture buying bandwagon and tended to look to Ikea rather than the furniture warehouses. We visited the brand new Souk Madinat Jumeirah, wandering around the alleyways of the fake new souk and realising that we were among old friends. Sure enough, all the traders were the boyos from upstairs at the Sharjah Blue Souk. After the third or fourth encounter it started to get surreal. 'Why are you here?' I asked one of the familiar faces.
He beamed back at me. 'Here it is fixed price! No haggle!'

It was indeed - the outrageous starting prices of Sharjah had become the fixed prices of Dubai and the tourists were, get this lads, paying them without so much a murmur, let alone a howl of 'Are you telling me that's not worth twenty shekels?'

And so, a while later, when I saw a shop close by Mall of the Emirates labelled 'Pinky Furniture & Novelties' I knew the exodus was complete. Pinky's, too, had clearly fallen for the bright lights and the allure of 'fixed prices'.

Only, as it turns out, they didn't. These days Pinky's is still to be found in Sharjah's industrial estate, run after his death by Mr Mukri's son and daughter, the eponymous Pinky. The Dubai adventure was brought to an end by outrageous rent increases (I mean, would you believe that? Really?) and the realisation that, actually, Pinky's customers are happy to make the journey and also that these days, Facebook is a vastly more powerful shop front.

We went for a visit and a wander down memory lane over Eid and walked away with two cupboards. It was just like old times - and I remembered (too late) how hard it always was to leave Pinky's without buying something.

Here's a pin. You're quite welcome.