1,000 Things You Can Do With A Masafi Bottle. Number 82...

E(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This piece in today's Gulf News had me chuckling - not because it is inherently funny, but because it reminded me of an event almost twenty years ago.

I should add that the piece relates to Dubai Municipality's latest - and highly laudable - scheme, an eco-friendly insect trap. We've seen a spate of recent stories in the UAE after illegal pest control companies' activities have led to a number of poisonings and Dubai  Municipality's got a point - a Masafi bottle with the top cut off and inverted then filled with some sugary water would, indeed, create an effective, simple and inexpensive insect trap.

But my chucklesome thought was back to the days of yore, when colleague Matt and I first arrived with our respective partners to set up a publishing business in the wilds of Ajman. We spent the first six months living in temporary accommodation, then found ourselves nice spanking new apartments just on the Ajman, Sharjah border in the Al Hamrani Building - at the time, the tallest building in Ajman (at five storeys!).

If there was one fly in the ointment of our contentment, it was that there was no plumbing for a washing machine in our apartments. I elected to pay the plumber who had worked on the building to install such plumbing in our apartment. Matt refused to pay the man's usurious price.

Quite apart from unerringly drilling a hole into one of his own pipes (a truly comic jet of water in eye moment) and running a plastic pipe across the wall at 45 degrees then across the kitchen floor to the overflow, the result of the plumbers labour was at least functional. We hadn't yet learned to shrug and move on when it came to aesthetics, being freshly out of the UK.

Matt's solution was infinitely more ingenious. He merely ran the outflow pipe from the washing machine to the overflow. Perfect. Except that pipe actually has to go above the level of the drum in order for the pump to work. Never daunted, inspired by Heath Robinson, Matt tied the outflow pipe to his iron, perched on top of the machine. Now the pipe was raised above the drum and the pump worked. Except now the pipe was too short to reach the drainage hole in the floor.

Channeling Mr Robinson, his teeth grinding and a wild look in his eye, Matt cut the base off a Masafi bottle, then cut little splines around it, pushing the bottle into the drainage hold in the floor. This allowed the outflow pipe to be jammed in the neck of the Masafi bottle (they were vinyl in those days, none of yer posh PET).

The perfect solution. We went out for a drink to celebrate Matt's undoubted genius. On returning, he discovered that hot water melts vinyl bottles and his apartment was consequently full of warm, soapy water, the only drainage hole being blocked by a melted vinyl bottle.

Which is why that insect trap had me chuckling...

The Passing Of The Thorban Pottery

The oil fired kiln at Thorban

There used to be just the one road out to the East Coast of the UAE, a lasso-shaped affair that snaked up into the Hajjar Mountains from Dhaid and bifurcated at Masafi to snake around to Dibba and down the coast past Tayyiba and Khor Fakkan to the sleepy and delightful Emirate of Fujairah. The road back from Fujairah to Masafi takes you alongside a deep wadi, in fact a 3,000 year-old route to the interior from the East Coast, with megalithic grave sites to prove it.

Just after you pass the Manama turnoff from the Dhaid-Masafi road is the village of Thorban, long home to the mildly famous Thorban pottery. You understand we're not talking Clarice Cliff here, the Indian potters who made the cluster of ramshackle cinder-block godowns just off the main road their home produced rough terracotta pots using time-honoured techniques. The kiln they built was wood-fired, each new batch of still-damp pots placed in the kiln and then covered with soil to let the charcoal do its work.

The Thorban pottery became a must-visit destination for any group of visitors we took around the Emirates and was always busy, potters working away on their wheels or mixing new batches of clay, a couple of chaps in lungis front of house to ask for ridiculous prices from the feckless tourists, signalling the start of the long process of bargaining that would end up at half the price and still leave you wondering how much further a skilled negotiator would have got. Latterly, we arrived there to find stacks of cardboard boxes and asked where they were headed. 'Liberty in New York' was the answer!

It was around this time the oil fired kiln appeared. Thorban was thriving and appeared to have found itself a ready export market, as well as popularity with any batch of curious holiday-makers headed East to Masafi's Friday Market and beyond.

We went East for a wander at the weekend, spurred on by the discovery of the huge changes we'd seen in our recent wander around Umm Al Qawain. And yes, the East has changed in almost exactly the same way. Piles of rocks line the Dhaid road, occasional lorries with broken backs buried in the roadside sand dunes tell of the constant flow of heavy trucks down from the mountains. Ras Al Khaimah, Fujeirah and Hatta have become centres of quarrying, mountains slowly being broken down to feed Dubai's voracious appetite for rock, gravel, aggregate and cement and the road down from Masafi is still, downturn notwithstanding, dotted with a procession of groaning lorries capped with green tarpaulins.

Mirroring the story told in Umm Al Qawain, you can see signs of feast and famine: the downturn that halted Dubai's meteoric construction boom almost overnight had its consequent effect in the mountains. Shuttered shops and abandoned date plantations catch the traveller's eye on the road across the wadi plan from Dhaid. Communities that had expanded have contracted again. What used to be the police check point for 'illegals' trying to enter the Emirates from the East Coast is now an office for the Mining Affairs Department. There seems to be another rock crusher every few hundred metres.

When we got to Thorban, what used to be the pottery is no more. Something grey and dusty remains from a spill of liquid, coating the track on the approach to the tin-roofed buildings. There are laths scattered all over the place. And the pottery stands, abandoned, rather in the fashion of the Marie Celeste - there are still pots lying around, moulds on tables and the clay-mixing machine still stands by the door into the main workshop. It's as if they left overnight, taking nothing with them. We wandered around the place for a while, peering into the kilns and, for some reason, whispering.

It was somehow tremendously sad. What had been a thriving little enterprise was gone. The source of all those pots, terracotta camels, foot-scrubbers, mubkhars and candle-holders was no more. And there was no clue as to why it, seemingly so suddenly, came to an end. There's a mobile number on the sign that still stands by the main road, but it doesn't answer.

If anyone knows, I'd be fascinated to find out. 

ADNOC - The Winner Takes It All?

Image via WikipediaGulf News certainly has the bit between its teeth on the ENOC Group story. Today's paper asserts that 'sources in the oil sector' have said the UAE government is 'moving to cancel licenses owned by ENOC and EPPCO in the northern emirates and allow ADNOC to take over the running of the service stations.'

That this move is being discussed seriously is hardly a surprise after the past few weeks' shenanigans, but the discussions (at least, those Gulf News reports) are remarkably wide-ranging. Apparently, the ENOC Group has been arguing that the fuel price should rise to realistic market rates - that would treble the price of petrol in the UAE. Although such a rise in fuel prices would be felt at the pumps, the issue is much wider than that. As a component in economic cost, petrol is an insidious little critter. If the cost of transportation of goods went up commensurately, we'd see some serious rises in commodity prices here, something that nobody really wants right now. Even the suggestion that UAE Nationals receive a petrol subsidy was apparently rejected - and quite, right too - they wouldn't be immune to the rise in the price of basic foodstuffs and other daily needs that would be triggered by unleashing a 300% increase in petrol cost.

Besides, if Abu Dhabi's ADNOC can profitably refine fuel at the current capped prices, why buy the stuff on international markets at all?

However, worryingly, for the last three days my local ADNOC hasn't had any Masafi, just Al Ain water. Please don't tell me this whole scenario is about to be repeated in the bottled water sector - I only drink Masafi...

Masafi - Greenwash or just a spin cycle?

Image via WikipediaI have been a happy Masafi customer for over 20 years now. I can remember when the stuff used to come in vinyl bottles (Crumbs, vinyl! What were we all thinking back then?) even. A friend who is an analytical chemist did an analysis of the UAE's bottled waters and consequently would only ever buy or drink Masafi.

Me too. It's a brand I have incredible faith and trust in.

Reaching for the green-handled six-pack at Spinneys today, I found myself lifting a jute bag with not six but eight bottles - a green gift from Masafi! Good stuff, chaps. I'm mildly supportive of green things (although have to confess this comes with an almost irresistible urge to flick tree huggers' nipples) and thought this was a good idea.

Turns out the extra two bottles are free. Daft, really, I'd have bought the 8-pack happily. Does Masafi, easily the premium brand in this market (discounting madly expensive imports like Evian or Voss) really face competitive pressures sufficient to necessitate a 25% giveaway and a free jute bag? I'd say not, but then I'm perhaps an unusually  loyal punter.

It turns out when I get home, that they're actually a six-pack that's been shrink-wrapped in 'ordinary' plastic, rather than the normal bio-degradeable packaging. The extra two bottles have been Sellotaped to the six pack. This makes the whole lot very hard indeed to get out of the snug-fitting jute bag, which is just the right size to squeeze eight bottles into. Then you have to unpeel the two taped bottles, which leaves a big sticky band around them. Trying to lift the wrapped bottles, the shrink-wrapping burst leaving me having a wee sweary in the middle of a muddle of rolling water bottles.

It all left me thinking, rather irritably, why didn't they just put the eight damn bottles straight into the jute bag  (which, by the way isn't a 100% jute bag and appears to contain quite a bit of plastic in itself) and save all the wrapping and packaging? Because in the end, the whole bundle isn't very green at all - in fact, arguably less 'green' than the standard six pack wrapped in biodegradable plastic.

I thought it an unusual misstep from a company whose marketing has never been less than deft...

Fi Masafi?

Masafi has done it again: another brave marketing move that simply provokes admiration: it's rebranded and brilliantly, too. Cleaner, fresher logo colours, smarter packaging, lighter and 'bluer' boxes and bottletops.

Sadly, the website at the time of writing still carried the old brand, so I can't simply share the digital delights of the new Masafi - undoubtedly the leading bottled water brand in the Emirates where bottled water is consumed in vast quantities and at incredible prices - a 1.5 litre bottle of Masafi still costs less than 20 cents.

What's impressive about the Masafi rebrand is that the company had no need to rebrand at all: there was no new challenger brand, no major change in the market. Its series of fruit juices had just been launched, a run of flavoured water products just rolled out: the core brand was as safe as houses. Brilliant, really.

During my brief time joining the evil Tim Burrowes on Dubai Eye Radio's weekly media chucklefest The Editors, we talked to Masafi marketing man Tarek Megahead. Tim chatted away to him, pronouncing his name 'MegaHead' as in MegaTop or MegaByte.

During a break, the poor man implored Tim: 'It's pronounced Me Garhed, not MegaHead!'

Bucket, bouquet. Whatever. One of Dubai's few deserved MegaHeads!