Image via WikipediaI pootled off to Ajman City Centre this morning to get some bits and bobs. Imagine my surprise to find the road diverted at Gulf Craft, the big flyover on the Ajman/Umm Al Qawain Road has been totally sealed off and is surrounded by acres of red and white striped concrete blocks, flapping safety tape and bollards. The diversions are enormous, utterly counter-intuitive and the signage has been organised by someone who obviously believes in some arcane school of thought transference rather than anything as mundane as clear written communication.The result is a most marvellous chaos, a cross between Wacky Races and the Gumball rally as drivers try and Get In Lane (without really knowing which lane to Get In), jostle for position and change their minds at the last minute when they realise that the signs that say 'Centre of the City' don't actually mean 'City Centre', they mean the centre of Ajman. Every now and then, bemused-looking policemen have been deployed, presumably just so there's a witness to what chaos looks like when slathered thickly on a substrate of chaos before being topped with chaotic, Brownian hundreds and thousands.
Eventually I slow down for one particularly nasty snarl-up of bemused and increasingly irritable drivers (some of whom have by now become quite familiar to me) to call out of the window, using my finest Ten Word Arabic, at a policeman. He shrugs his shoulders and laughs, agreeing that this is all 'too much problem'.
So there you go. Avoid Northern Ajman. It's a total mess.
