The Passing Of The Tracks, The Pressing Of The Mountains

I wrote in the summer about the 'passing' of the Hatta/Al Ain track. It's inevitable, both the passing of the wadi tracks that have enlivened so many of our weekends and my old gittiness resulting in much 'I remember when that was all sand' whinery.

And yet, painfully aware that progress doesn't need the railing of old sticks in the mud to mark its march, there's a certain poignancy to it all. The landscape of the mountains is not only being altered, it's being literally smashed apart.

Time was when there was only one road through to the East coast of the UAE from the west: the Sharjah/Dhaid/Masafi road. It, too, started life as a track - the old route up from Fujeirah, past Bithnah and into the Wadi Ham before coming down from Masafi to the plains and through the desert to Dhaid. Running alongside it were aflaj (the plural of 'falaj'), underground aquifers dug out by ancient hands to create long waterways dotted with wells that snaked down from the mountains to desert oasis towns.

You could go north from Masafi to Dibba by following the deep bed of the wadi, but a road was blasted through the rock so that Masafi became the knot at the head of a lasso that stretched out from the giant hand of Sharjah to loop through Dibba, down the East coast along past Bidaya (the oldest mosque in the UAE sits here like a little meringue) and Khor Fakkan to Fujeirah before looping back to Masafi.

The road to Hatta was first constructed by Sheikh Rashid in a search for cheap concrete and stone to fuel the breakneck development of Port Rashid. As in so many other things he did, he was to set a precedent of tremendous proportions. Ever since, the Hajar mountains have been providing the concrete, gravel, stone, aggregate, hardcore and rock for the coastal towns' expansion.

After the Hatta road was extended down to the Omani coast, the epic journey through the precipitous passes into Wadi Bih was the Third Way. It never became blacktop - has, in fact, been closed by the sealing of the inland borders with Oman and, in any case, superceded by the Truck Road from Dibba down to join the Mohammed bin Zayed Road (the E311) as it touches Ras Al Khaimah's southern border.

The Mileiha Road was the first of the new road networks to smash their way though the mountains, at first blasting its way through the rocky promontory that gives us Fossil Rock south of Dhaid, then darting through the plain to the mountains where it drills through to twin exits in the mountainside above Kalba like a vampire's bite.

The Munay/Huwaylat track used to wind its way North of Hatta, taking you eventually to Fossil Rock (passing through the lovely wadi/oasis of 'The Sultan's Gardens'). We were wadi bashing one day when we suddenly found ourselves in a building site and then snooping our way up a smooth tarmac surface that halted in the middle of a mountainside, blasting underway ahead of us. Today that road is dwarfed by the new road from Hatta to the Sharjah/Mileiha/Kalba road - a route so new that it was still un-numbered when we drove it at the weekend. The mountains around it are gashed with tumbles of freshly hewn grey rock contrasted against the sunburnt browns and purples of the undisturbed peaks. Mountains have been flattened, hacked into by slab-sided quarries. Lorries rumble out of the crushers to weighbridges down the road towards the plains.

There's a new road being built from Daftah (a couple of kilometres East of Masafi down the Wadi Ham) to Khor Fakkan, as well. It's going to take five tunnels to make the final crossing, the longest of which will be 2.6km (it will be the longest tunnel, when it's finished, in the UAE). Only the first is complete, the road punches its way through the mountain and then peters out, joining a recently built track tumbling down into the East Coast mountain village of Shis. Where before you had to climb up the wadi to reach the legendary pools of Shis (the village is lit by lamp posts in the wadi, each of which has a switch on it), now you can drive down alongside them. Shis is partly Omani - straddling a strange doughnut-shaped enclave of Oman called Madha, nestled in the UAE and itself containing a little bit of Sharjah, the village of Nahwa. It's a rare example of an enclave and counter-enclave.

As the roads open up new fissures through the ranges, so the crushers are grinding them down, one peak at a time to feed coastal construction. It's a strange movement of matter: as the mountains are diminished, so the cities of the Gulf rise.

And as the roads open access to mountain communities, they are drained of their young people moving to the towns down those new roads that let them back at the weekends to visit their ageing relatives...

The Dubai Canal - Is The Archive Doomed?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Work on canal to start within weeks", Gulf News gushes this morning. Signed off last year as a slightly less fancy version, but now with an added crescent, the Dubai Canal project links the Business Bay waterway system out to the Gulf at what is now Jumeirah Beach Park. The canal will cut into the park and also into the margins of nearby Safa Park, one of the oldest and most established areas of calm and relaxation in a city famed for having little time for such things as it embarks on the much more important pursuit of making money.

The mega-project, for that is what these sorts of things are called, is up from last year's announced Dhs1.5 billion price tag and currently stands at Dhs2 billion. That buys a 'sprawling' (according to GN) 80,000 square metres waterfront walkway and leisure area around the canal, four hotels and 450 restaurants. With six kilometres of beachfront and a three kilometre canal, the development is also, and this is the part that chilled me to the bone on the instant, going to 'transform' Safa Park into an 'integrated leisure destination'.

An integrated leisure destination. And just what is it right now? A muddy field? It's lovely right now, is what it is. It's peaceful, charming and relaxing. It doesn't need to be transformed, believe me.

Now many will know that Safa Park is home to a little building, a transformed toilet block in fact, called The Archive. It is a place of which I am immensely fond. It's a lovely idea, a community artspace, café and a growing collection of books on Islamic and Arab architecture, design and art. It sits in the tranquility of Safa Park's green sward, the path to it often takes you past playing schoolchildren or groups of leotard-clad women doing tai-chi. It's a very nice place indeed.

With the passing of The Pavilion (it's being turned into a sales showcase for one of Emaar's new mega-projects, apparently), The Archive is the only free wi-fi welcome to come here and work and meet or do coffee or whatever floats your boat space left in this part of town. And I have the horrible feeling that transforming Safa into an 'integrated leisure destination' isn't going to include leaving some scrubby little 1970s toilet block sitting there to clutter up the views of the 50,000 metre shopping mall.

The designs for the new canal show a much-changed Safa park, with the current lakes giving way to a single lake close to entrance five, extensive replanting and new walkways throughout. Few of the current buildings seem to form part of the new scheme. They might just leave The Archive as it is - irritatingly, Gulf News has slapped a label over its location in its 'infographic', so it's hard to tell. The Archive might be replaced by a new, more modern building with all sorts of facilities. Might. But I can't say it looks good from where I'm standing.

Whatever the outcome, the whole area is going to be a building site for the coming three years. Now the weather's cooling, The Archive comes into its tranquil own. I'll be spending as much time down there while I still can...

Dubai Is Bouncing Back

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chatting with pal +Ashish Panjabi on Twitter... hang on a second. I just typed Ashish's twitter handle - @apanjabi - into the blogger CMS and it suggested his Google+ handle instead and replaced the text for me. That's getting way too spooky, Google - and surely in your bid to MAKE us love Google+ and adopt it over all other religions you're now crossing the 'do no evil' rubicon. When you use Gmail and write 'I've attached a photo of your bottom' and forget to attach anything, Goog comes back and asks you if you're sure you want to do that. It's part cutesy, part useful and part scary. But linking everyone I know's social profiles to Google+? That's just plain scary.

Anyway, back to the point. Ashish was complaining about the traffic on floating bridge on Twitter this morning and used a memorable phrase as we chatted about the situation: 'Dubai is bouncing back'. It's not really news as such, the signs are there for all to see. But in black and white, the text sort of hit me.

On the one hand, bouncing back is no bad thing. There's little doubt the UAE has been the best place in the world to be over the past few years - sure, it's been quieter around here, but there has still been opportunity and trade goes on. Modern Dubai was founded on trade and once we'd got rid of the estate agents, it was trade that saw the city through. You forget these things, but compiling blog posts for Fake Plastic Souks The Glory Years took me right back there to 2008 and the overheated Dubai that preceded the GFC.

You couldn't get a school for your kids. You couldn't move in the city, the roads were a constant jam of snarling, honking traffic. The sewage plants were so over-capacity they were digging holes in the desert to store the stuff and tanker drivers were pumping it into storm drains so the sea off Jumeirah was fouled with human sewage and people were getting sick. The power network was straining. You couldn't get into a hospital and the machine that goes ping had a waiting list. Rents were sky-high, Gulf News weighed 1.4Kg - most of which was adverts charging us to dare to dream and live to love - and the city was filled with pop-eyed yahoos getting drunk and boasting how much money they had. Anything that didn't move had a billboard tacked on it. Hotels made up insane lists of demands before taking a booking - including minimum stays and cash up front for event facilities - if you could get one beyond six months in advance. Taxis wouldn't stop for you or wouldn't take the fare if it didn't suit them. If you could find one. There was a constant miasma over the city, a yellow, sulphurous dust cloud you could see as you approached from inland, a great smudge across the horizon. This had become a really unpleasant place to live.

Now there's no doubt that Dubai's in better shape today, having continued to invest in infrastructure during the lean years. The Al Khail Road's been quietly finished, the new road network around Trade Centre Roundabout's well on the way, Defence Roundabout is an interchange, the metro's up and running and so on. Presumably (hopefully) similar investments in other key infrastructure have been taking place, allowing the city to expand once again but do so in a more prepared and planned way - a more sustainable, manageable growth. Because we've learned the lessons from the boom and bust - particularly from the bust - haven't we? If so, then all well and good. We can Bounce Back all we like.

But if we're talking a return to the excess and insanity of 2008, I fear. I fear for this little city I have come to call home - although it's not home and doesn't mind reminding me of the fact now and then. And the reappearance of daft real estate ads, the talk of 22% price rises and jams on Floating Bridge make me very skittish indeed.

Of course, Gulf News will never be 1.4Kg again. The Internet's seeing to that. So there's no point in using its weight to chart the economy's rise as was possible to chart its fall...

Labour to let

Image via Wikipedia
Driving past the infamous Sonapour labour camp, you can only be struck by the To Let signs up on the accommodation blocks. A closer inspection reveals a large number of the blocks have gaps in the walls where window ACs should be. It's almost quiet on the roads around the camp in the mornings and evenings, where once clouds of dust would be thrown up by manic bus drivers taking shortcuts or slinging their loads of tired workers around the sandy parking spaces around the cluster of blocks that sits north of the big graveyard (the roadsigns used to read 'Labour Camp / Graveyard' until someone finally worked out that this was a form of irony) on the Emirates Road.

We're seeing the occasional 'labourers stranded' story in the local press still, although the worst of these recently, 700 labourers stranded with no money or resources after the Dubai-based construction company's chairman fled, relates to labourers in Sharjah's labour camp, not Sonapour.

A lot of the projects that still went ahead when the recession hit (or, to be more accurate, when Dubai stopped pushing its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala rather than accept a recession had hit) did so because they had gone too far to cancel - it simply made more sense to finish them than kill them off. Those projects are starting to be finished now and as each one does, it is likely that there will be precious little to replace it. So many of the construction workers who got a reprieve over the past couple of years are likely to get laid off and sent home.

That second wave of redundancies will see even more To Let signs up in Sonapour. Let's hope it doesn't lead to another wave of 'workers stranded' stories.

Rubble

This is Satwa and we're just going to see more and more of this. There are families still living amongst the rubble, but life just goes on around the margins of the demolition zone as people walk past the stained sofas and piles of rubble and get on with their daily lives...

Deadly

Three of the landlord’s maintenance team, all Keralite bandits who had taken up building maintenance as light relief after their previous careers as Indian Ocean pirates, were gathered in my kitchen hacking at a lump of asbestos which they wanted to use to back a fuse they were repairing. They were completely flummoxed at the fuss I made, were rather put out to be thrown out of the kitchen, asbestos chunk and all, and even more confounded at my point blank refusal to let them use the material in the house at any price. To them, this stuff was the most brilliant construction material of all time: easy to cut, strong, light, fire-proof and infinitely flexible. I was being utterly unreasonable, obviously. And the very thought that it could cause disease had them rolling their eyes and giggling at me: I'd obviously been pegged as the local English eccentric.

We’d arrived at a major cultural disconnect. In the UK, even the word asbestos is enough to bring in teams of environmental health officers dressed in biochemical hazard suits, carrying canaries in cages and shouting 'Stand clear!' into high powered bullhorns. And yet asbestos is still not only manufactured but used widely as a construction material in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, it is also still widely promoted – even if we have substituted the word ‘asbestos’ for ‘fibre cement roofing sheet’.

You can start to see why the landlord’s guys were so puzzled at my horrified reaction. Amazingly, it is still a subject of debate in India – with an active lobby calling for a ban in the manufacture and use of the material – and seeming to have something of an uphill struggle, too. Meanwhile, in the States, asbestos litigations have been estimated to have reached an overall value of $250 billion, involving in excess of 750,000 litigants. That’s a lot of sick people.

I suppose the question I was left with was how the hell they were importing the stuff into the Emirates. You know, with the world class strict building regulations and standards we enjoy and all that. How much of this very nasty material is being used in the houses we’re living in? Take a close look at any grey corrugated roofing you see around you – but don’t take too deep a sniff! As of 2006, asbestos was one of the top five imports to the UAE from the Czech Republic, one of the many places around the world where the material is still made – for export to developing markets, obviously, not for domestic use. It's far too dangerous for domestic use, after all!

It is, when you think of it, just a little bit evil, isn’t it? European countries selling materials that are known to be highly toxic (and that are banned in the EU) to ignorant, eager consumers in developing world markets. Including this one.

Threnody

So the Dubai Lands Department is slowly rolling up all the available real estate in Dubai’s delightfully eclectic and rather human Satwa area, making compulsory purchases that are causing howls of pain from landlords who believe (not unnaturally given the current trend in prices and the likely land use) they are entitled to a great deal more.

The tenants, a rather quieter voice, are being slowly ushered out – in cases this is happening before the rent cycle has finished and cheques are still being presented for rents on houses that people are being evicted from. Of course, in this instance, the tenant has no rights at all in terms of stopping these cheques: the landlords often ‘discount’ the post-dated cheques that tenants have to give for the coming year’s rental period, which means the landlords sell them to a bank in return for a percentage of their value in order to get cash up front. A cheque’s as good as cash in the UAE, so you can’t stop a cheque and if you fail to meet it, you’re immediately in the ‘wrong’ in the eyes of a legal system that likes to deal with simplicities to a degree of absoluteness that often descends into black farce. So if you default on a cheque, the beneficiary has the right to go to the police and have you arrested. The police won’t be interested in why you defaulted: the fact of the matter is that you did. So the tenants have to choice but to pay and then try to get their money back from the landlords. And, as anyone who’s had more than 10 minutes experience of living out here, that’s harder than getting your kid back from the Social Services.

I was down in Satwa Friday morning: I had to pop by the office. It’s wonderful to see the place waking up (which it does a great deal later on a Friday than on a weekday): the smells of cooking from the various restaurants and the garish shopfronts of the Dhs10 shops; the car accessory places already hurriedly slapping sheets of tinting on impatient customers’ Patrols and Altimas; the growing bustle in the supermarkets as an often bewildering array of people from all over the world wander along the sunny streets past the hanging displays of plastic toys, saris, second hand televisions and cooking pans. It’s a marvellous place, a real place: one of the few areas of Dubai that is truly organic.

And they’re going to replace it with yet another copy of Milton Keynes in the sun, another soulless slab of projects with a Prozac-induced strapline tacked onto its beige faux-adobe walls and smoked glass windows. Apparently even Safa Park’s going to go. And apparently Saudi super-investor HH Prince Walid Bin Talal’s the man behind the project. That’ll cheer up the landlords!

What the people doing this fail to realise is that Satwa is part of what makes Dubai interesting and unique: it’s like a rainforest – you might not think it’s terribly relevant, but this is where the oxygen and the material of life and biodiversity comes from. Pretty much every Filipina shop assistant in Dubai lives in Satwa – it’s cheap enough. If Karama is a little India, Satwa is a little Manila. You need places like Satwa for ordinary people to live, work and shop: for people to enjoy restaurants like Ravi’s, still the best Indian restaurant in Dubai, or Pars (Iranian), Al Mallah and Beirut (Lebanese). Satwa is the place where you’ll still find ‘poor’ stores selling cooking pots and charcoal; where cobblers will mend shoes for a few Dirhams and tailors knock up shirts for a few Dirhams more. This is the place where the plant souk rubs shoulders with the pet souk - a confluence that occasionally makes you think you ARE in a rainforest!

Cities need this: they need layers. What makes Cairo or Beirut great cities is that they are like great oak trees: they have the triumphs and scars of the ages written on them like the rings of a tree’s trunk: their walls and roofs reflecting the accretion of years of ordinary human beings living their lives, creating a diversity and tale of the passing years that makes the city so human and real. Even Amman, mostly settled since the 1920s, has layers of history from the past 2,000 years to the present day. So what if Satwa’s only a little piece of the past - it’s Dubai’s past. Which make it a little piece of something that is, in itself, small and rare enough to be treasured.

Dubai, so focused on its future that it has no time for the past, is slowly killing the things that originally made it a city worth visiting. The great Hatta track, like so many of the other tracks through the mountains that used to delight friends and family when they came visiting, is now black top. The beaches are so crammed with hotels that you can’t go camping or have a beach-side barbeque any more. The projects are tens of acres of soulless, squashed-together housing overshadowed by apartment blocks designed by architects from Toy Town. Thousands of hotel rooms and huge swathes of pleasure parks, stadia and artificial tourist attractions are going to stretch out into the desert from the beaches. And anything that isn’t regulated, new and air-conditioned is going to get steamrollered. So they’re going to tear down the Indian cantonment of Karama. And they’re going to rip the soul of of Satwa to give us an air-conditioned luxury shopping lifestyle megalopolis.

And not one solitary person who lives, works, shops or owns property in Satwa today wants this for its future.

Update: Those Lucky Workers!

Here's the link to that wonderful story in Xpress about labour accommodation.

Dubai Workers Enjoy Five Star Lifestyle

This morning's Xpress, the weekly magapaper thingy from Al Nisr Media, carries a front cover story that had me feeling distinctly uneasy.

I'd link to the image splashed across the front page, of four workers 'unwinding in the gym', except the website doesn't have this week's issue on it yet. But believe me, it's there. Four wooden looking blokes who don't look at all like they've just been thrown in there for the photographer, using the latest in walking/pedalling/weight lifting machinery. I'm not quite sure why I find the image staged and unsettling. Perhaps it's because we all see these blokes labouring in the heat and humidity shifting wheelbarrows, blocks and rebar by the tonne. What more could you want after a hard day labouring in the sun than a smashing workout to really get those muscles toned, after all?

The story attached to this worrying image is even more fascinating. Apparently the ETA Ascon labour camp in the infamous Sonapur labour camp area is one of the leading 'top class' labour camps with facilities that 'rival those of the city's exclusive gated communities' according to the paper. While any improvement in labour standards has to be a good thing (and Dubai Municipality has moved to regulate for better standards), one would be forgiven for being rather taken aback at this absurd comparison.

Akbar Khan, executive director at ETA Ascon, dismisses a suggestion that improvements in labour accommodation are due to negative press about workers' living conditions. Surrounded by pictures of the awkward-looking labourers posed in their bunk beds or outside in the labour camp, the assertion somehow fails to make its mark.

The ETA Ascon camp not only has a gym, ATMs and other facilities. It also has 62 CCTV cameras according to Xpress. I think this fact alone speaks to my general sense of unease at the story.

It would be so much more impressive to see a more deftly communicated proposition from the companies involved, with less staged pictures and less obviously credulous journalism. Then the fact that improvements are taking place would carry infinitely more credibility.

Burj Dubai Not Going to Fall Over Shock Horror

It was interesting to see the piece in Arabian Business magazine this week by Editor James Bennett, who got taken up to the top of the Burj Dubai by Emaar’s Peeaars so that his photographer could snap some neat panoramics.

James’ obvious excitement at his vertiginous treat was refreshing. You spend so much time being told that this or that project is cracking, sinking, broken, over-budget and so on that it was a pleasure to read a straightforward Boy’s Own style account of what it’s like to stand on top of one of the world’s greatest ever pieces of engineering.

We’ve had them, of course: the rumours. That the rock substrate was full of caves, that there are cracks in the base, that the water levels are all screwed up. But at the end of the day, the world’s tallest building is still piling on a floor every three days. And it is now, whatever else ye say about it, the world’s tallest building.

And it hasn’t fallen over yet, either.

But then the Burj Al Arab hasn’t sunk or rusted. And the Palm Islands haven’t been washed away. And the airport terminal hasn’t blown over. And and and.

Much as we like to enjoy the vicarious thrill of the ‘They’ve come a cropper on this one, I can tell you…’ story, you have to admit that we haven’t actually seen many of the dire prophecies fulfilled. Or any, in fact.

Which perhaps makes one wonder why we continue to be so interested in, and ready to believe, these little tales of woe to come from Jim whose mate Phil knows a consultant on the first phase of the blablabla project and they’ve bought all the wrong sort of rawlplugs…

The Revenge of the Rose and the Truck Road

One of the many strange and wonderful inventions to come from the mind of Michael Moorcock, one of the great novelists writing in English today, was that of the Gypsy Nation in his fantasy, The Revenge of the Rose. The Gypsy Nation was an enormous caravan of perpetually motive land leviathans that created a world-girdling road of compressed detritus, a huge pathway created from millennia of the caravan's discarded rubbish.

It was the first thing that popped into my head as we travelled down from Dibba to Sharjah: there’s a new road that snakes out through the foothills of the Hajjar mountains behind the Fujairah Cement plant, past the many crushers and quarries that now dot the landscape, and joins the Manama/Ras Al Khaimah road. And its continuation is a truck road, from Manama to just above Umm Al Qawain on the Emirates Road, that runs across the wide, rocky wadi plain and then carries on through the slowly changing landscape until it rises and falls through the red sands of the Northern desert. Dotted along the margins of this lone, straight pencil-line of blacktop is a constant litter of discarded tyres and occasional heaps of rocks that testify to delayed, and dropped, loads. And on the road itself, travelling both ways, is a constant slow-moving procession of heavy vehicles, laden with teetering loads of rock going south and empty (but still lumbering) travelling back north. It’s a nose-to-tail procession that mimics the constant grind of Moorcock’s Gypsy Nation, seemingly unstoppable, slow-moving and perpetual.

This groaning procession is the raw material that’s feeding Dubai’s frenzy of construction: the cement, stone and sand that are being poured together into the dizzying tower blocks and sea-raping palms of Dubai’s Miracle.

Isn’t it strange that they have to level mountains to build skyscrapers and demolish hills to reclaim the sea?