Ten things you probably didn’t know about the United Arab Emirates

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gosh, the UAE is 43! The UAE celebrates its 43rd National Day tomorrow, the 2nd December 2014, marking independence from Great Britain and the foundation of the Federation of seven emirates.

As always, the streets will be filled with hooning, happy people parading to celebrate their nation, not a sight you tend to see much of here in the Middle East, generally considered to be something of a tough neighbourhood.

It occasionally strikes me as odd to live in a country that's younger than I am. I'm also struck now and then to find people saying things like this place has got no history or culture, which is clearly twaddle - it has an unbelievably rich heritage which is rarely less than fascinating.

Here are ten geeky things you probably didn't know about the place.


Fujairah was the last emirate to become a Trucial State.

The UAE was founded out of the Trucial States, a number of sheikhdoms (emirates) on the east coast of the Persian Gulf which signed treaties with the British (Hence ‘trucial’) who in turn recognised them as sovereign powers. The last of these emirates to be so recognised was Fujairah, which only became a Trucial State in 1952 because British oil company Petroleum Concessions Limited (PCL) needed someone to sign a concession with.

That same year, the independent emirate of Kalba (recognised as a Trucial State by the British in 1936 as they wanted to build a back-up airstrip for the new Imperial Airways route that stopped overnight at Sharjah) became part of Sharjah. But for that, there’d be eight emirates today.

Mind you, small child Louis from Sarah’s class at Sharjah English a couple of years back had the solution to that one. “I know an eighth emirate!” he announced to the class when Sarah had named the seven emirates.

Mystified, Sarah asked him which Emirate that would be?

MALL of the Emirates! He piped, triumphantly.

Fair enough, actually…


Nahwa is a small Sharjah mountain village in Oman in the UAE. Whaaaat?

This exclave of Sharjah is actually nestled in an exclave of Oman called Madha which is itself entirely within the UAE, bordered by Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah.

Another example of exclave madness is Hatta - to get to Dubai exclave Hatta from the city of Dubai by road, you have to pass through Sharjah, Oman and Ajman!

It’s all because the UAE’s boundaries were set in 1971 based on a survey by the British Political Resident in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Julian Walker, who spent five years asking local tribal leaders which territory they considered to be theirs and which Sheikh they recognised as ruler and then drawing nice, comforting British lines on a map. The report he compiled stretches to over 4,000 pages. And it’s pretty much what we have as the UAE today, including mad doughnut-shaped exclaves.


Abu Dhabi phone numbers start with 02, Al Ain with 03 and Dubai with 04 but there’s no UAE 01 telephone code in use today.

That’s probably because the original constitution of the UAE forged in 1971 envisaged the creation of a new capital city to be called ‘Karama’, to be built between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The +971 code was originally issued in 1967 to cover the ‘Trucial States’ and so the 971 being the last three figures of the year of independence was just a coincidence. Dooodeedooodooo Dooodeedooodooo. For a time from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Dubai and Abu Dhabi were actually assigned their own individual international calling codes, +978 and +979 respectively.


It all took just a handshake…

The creation of the UAE was famously made possible by a handshake between Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai, which took place on 18 February 1968 at the little village of Semeih on the Dubai/Abu Dhabi highway.

Except it didn’t: the roadside location was felt to be too noisy (even though it was little more than a desert track at the time) and the two rulers decamped to ‘Argoub El Sedirah’, a hill on the (rather fuzzy) border between the two emirates, now a few minutes’ drive south of Jebel Ali.

As the two men sat in a tent together discussing the idea of Federation they were served coffee by Sheikh Rashid’s dutiful 19 year-old son: Sheikh Mohammed.


The founding of the UAE required a window exit.

The UAE’s independence and status as a nation were confirmed by the signing of a treaty on the 2nd December 1971 in the round building located in Jumeirah One known today as ‘Union House’. Because of the press of the crowd, the signatories (The British Political Resident and the Sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Qawain and Fujairah - Ras Al Khaimah didn’t join the UAE until the 10th February 1972) had to leave for lunch after the signing by exiting through a window.


The first days of the new nation weren’t all easy going.

As if things weren't bad enough with Iran choosing to strategically invade the disputed Tunbs Islands on the eve of the UAE's foundation, the period after 2 December 1971 brought a great deal of uncertainty and instability as people worked out quite what all this meant to them. There were skirmishes between aggrieved parties, one of which saw 22 people killed on the east coast before the newly formed Union Defence Force could restore the peace. There’s no doubt, it all took a great deal of resolution on the part of the UAE's leaders to keep everything together and must have taken pretty much all their persuasive powers, too.

The instability after Federation was to take the life of Sheikh Khalid bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, who was killed sometime in the night of the 24th and early morning of 25 January 1972 when his brother Saqr, who had previously been Ruler of Sharjah and removed from that position, attempted a come-back coup, less than two months after the new UAE nation Khalid had helped to found was born.

Khalid had previously attempted to erase his unpopular predecessor's memory by destroying Sharjah Fort (Al Hisn), an act his younger brother Sultan managed to rush back from his studies in Egypt to stop - just in time to save the last tower. After Khalid’s death, Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi became Ruler of Sharjah and, in 1997, had the fort rebuilt using the original windows and fittings he rescued from the ruins.

The last surviving UAE Ruler to sign the UAE founding treaty died in 2010. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammed Al Qasimi of Ras Al Khaimah was the oldest reigning monarch in the world at the time of his passing.


The remote and tiny village of Manama, actually an inland exclave of Ajman, used to issue its own stamps.

In 1964, an American philatelic entrepreneur called Finbar Kenny travelled out to the Trucial States (which was actually quite a feat of derring-do at the time!) and did a deal with the governments of Ajman and Fujairah to franchise the production of the respective emirates’ stamps. He made something of a specialisation of signing up governments in out of the way places around the world and then releasing gaudy series of stamps aimed at the lucrative collector’s market.

I think he probably did deals in Umm Al Qawain and Ras Al Khaimah too, but info on this stuff is pretty scarce, so I can’t be sure.

Wholly irrelevant to the places they purported to come from, Kenny’s stamps flooded the world’s collectors’ markets and eventually devalued themselves. Two other companies also signed up franchises to produce stamps and the flood of these, plus a number of ‘illegal’ issues meant the Trucial States’ esoteric and almost worthless issues became known to collectors as ‘Dunes’. Some catalogues refuse to even list them.

Nine editions were published from ‘Manama, Dependency of Ajman’ after Kenny opened a ‘post office’ there. Few collectors in the 1960s would have realised Manama was a cluster of a few mud-brick houses and smallholdings in the barren plains overlooked by the Hajar Mountains…


Dubai’s Salik road toll is not the first road toll in the UAE.

In fact, a toll was levied on crossing Maktoum Bridge, introduced to help pay for the bridge’s construction after it was opened in 1963.

Like the visionary dredging of Dubai Creek that took place under Sheikh Rashid’s watch, the first Maktoum bridge was completed way ahead of any oil money flowing into Dubai (that didn’t happen until 1969). Some way to fund the project had to be found and a toll seemed to fit the bill. The 25 fils tickets were printed on blue paper and sold in booklets. The toll was levied on the crossing from Bur Dubai to Deira.

For ten years until 1973, a wooden toll booth was placed at the Deira side of the bridge and drivers would hold out their little blue tickets and release them into the air as they passed the collector (clearly not bothering to stop and actually hand the ticket over. I mean, why would you? This is Dubai, habibi…). As a consequence, the tarmac gradually turned blue.


Some odd places were once ‘Trucial States’.

The ‘Trucial States’ were forced to sign treaties with the British following two punitive naval expeditions against the warlike Al Qasimi (or ‘Joasmee’ or ‘Qawasim’), a loosely-knit federation of townships on the Arabian and Iranian coasts, including Lingeh. The Al Qasimi not unreasonably considered the waters off their coast to be theirs. The British branded them (probably unfairly) pirates and a great deal of harrying and smashing things up followed. The Brits buddied up with the Sultan of Muscat and in 1809 a big expeditionary force hove to off Ras Al Khaimah and beat it up with brio.

The whole exercise didn’t put the local boys down, though and had to be repeated in 1819, when a WG Keir led a force that razed RAK in a C19th Shock and Awe display that reduced the whole town to blazing ruins and generally made everyone nostalgic for Albuquerque and his gang of piratical Portugese nutters, who were by now seeming a damn sight reasonable than they had at first looked.

(“Albuquerque? He’d nail your head to the table, but he was a fair man…”)

The result was a treaty signed in 1820 with the local rulers of the ‘Pirate Coast’ turning it into the 'Trucial Coast'. This was followed by a number of other treaties leading up to the Perpetual Treaty of Maritime Peace, signed in 1853. This allowed the Gulf’s pearling fleets to operate peacefully and ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity for the coastal townships. It actually began to be seen as a good thing to have a treaty with the British and so trucial status became desirable.

A little known fact is that the Sheikhs of Khatt, Jazirah Al Hamrah and Rams (today suburbs of Ras Al Khaimah in the interior, south and north respectively) were signatories to that first 1820 treaty as Rulers in their own right. By 1892, when the Exclusive Agreement was signed by the Rulers of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain to conduct their foreign affairs through Britain in return for British protection, these ‘sheikhdoms’ had become subsumed into Ras Al Khaimah and were Trucial States No More. Two strong leaderships in the towns of Al Hamriyah and Al Heera variously declared independence from Sharjah or generally misbehaved, but neither was accorded trucial status by the British. Fujairah, as mentioned above, took its time to join the party…

Incidentally, the flags of the different emirates, all variations of a red motif on a white background, were originally specified by the Brits in that 1820 treaty in order to recognise who was responsible for a given boat sailing the Gulf at any time.


The place where I live once invaded Ajman.

I like this one, a lot.

The head of the Al Bu Shams tribe in Al Heera (currently a coastal suburb in Northern Sharjah), Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Muhammad, briefly deposed the ruler of neighbouring emirate Ajman on the 15th June 1920 by invading Ajman Fort. At the time Al Heera was quite a large coastal pearling village of about 250 houses.

He was ousted by joint forces of the Rulers of Ajman and Sharjah but Abdul Rahman was promised safe passage by the British residency agent as he owed money to a number of British subjects. He was prevented from returning to Al Heera by the vengeful Sheikh of Ajman but after spending time in Ru'us Al Jibal in Oman and Al Khan in Sharjah, Abdul Rahman was finally allowed to return to Al Heera by the ruler of Sharjah in 1921 in a settlement at least partly enforced by the presence of the British ship Triad offshore.

Continuing to be a troublesome subject, Abdul Rahman was suspected of an attempt on the life of the British Residency Agent in October 1925, causing a major clash between the British government and the Rulers of the Trucial States, specifically Ras Al Khaimah, whose ruler refused to give Abdul Rahman up to the Brits in 1926. Abdul Rahman went on to rule Al Heera until his death in 1942, when the township once again became part of Sharjah.

Ajman Fort is today, incidentally, a charming museum and well worth the visit.

Happy National Day!

How To Drool A Frog - More Weird And Wacky Searches

(Photo credit: thms.nl)

I occasionally dip into Sitemeter, the natty little analytics widget I don't use very much, to see what people have been searching to land themselves on this mouldy sub-corner of the Interwebs. I took such a dip today because I couldn't really get into the swing of writing for a while and decided to play a bit until the fancy once more took me to recommence my story of The Simple Irish Farmer, which is my WIP of choice.

I found that not a few people are clearly concerned about whether or not they put plastic in Subway bread - in fact thousands of them have Googled the topic and found themselves reading my take on the whole thing - their searches for truth leading them here. I find it very odd that a silly little blog like this can not only rank so high in search, but draw so many searchers for both this and the Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee is junk post. I am similarly pleased to say I have offered succour to thousands of punters who have been tearing their hair out at Chuck Norris the Trackpad on their Samsung S5 Ultrabooks.

Similarly, Sri Lanka Gems is a popular search term - and to my mild shock, my post about the gem and spice sales scams of Sri Lanka is number six result on Google. In the world. I mean, how mad is that? "Gemstones Sri Lanka" gets the same result, which I guess has Klout running around saying I'm influential about gemstones. A subject about which - I hasten to add - I am pretty much utterly bereft of knowledge let alone authority. A similar mind-boggling search anomaly is to be found in the phrase, "where did Nokia go wrong" which features this post on the first page of search results. And that's bonkers. Truly.

Somebody in Pakistan searched the Interwebs for the interesting-sounding "picrs sixi porn salik 17 21" which just led him here, which I am willing to wager a considerable sum was not the result he had in mind. Or even she, come to think of it. Apparently, online onanistic fortune favours the literate. And another rube got here by Googling "marage night fack movie". Were they after a fake movie or a fu... oh, never mind...

Search "online onanistic fortune". It's mine, all mine, precioussss...

Someone else was looking for a cartoon character curry - searching for "tom and jerry masalas", presumably to accompany a nice Daffy Duck Dosa. The searcher, rather worryingly based at Nokia's corporate headquarters over in Finland, got here instead. I say rather worryingly because you'd think they'd have a future to concern themselves about rather than playing about on Google looking for silly curries.

Another person arrived at La Blog by Googling "salmon farming in saudi arabia".

It's Yemen, dunce.

Then there are the surreal. I mean what did you think you'd get when you slammed "www.indianheroinafack blogspat.com" into Google? Blogspat. Love it. Interestingly, the 'perp' works for the Miller Brewing Company in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was using a crappy old Nokia 5.0 browser. They got this for their troubles...

My favourite of this particular batch was the search term 'How to drool a frog' which really makes the mind boggle just a tad, but led its searcher to this post about HSBC's drooling incompetence. Which wasn't, I'm sure, what they were after. And no thank you, I don't want to know what they were actually looking for...

Any of them, come to think of it.

Dubai Traffic On The Increase. Whoopee.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The car dealers are rubbing their hands, gleefully cackling and singing 'happy days are here again' in their broken, wheezing voices. As miserable a bunch of avaricious hunchbacks as you'll find, the saggy-skinned troglodytes in suits are hearing the sound of tills ringing and they have pronounced the sound To Be Good.

It is within the pages of the mighty Gulf News today we are told that Dubai has increased new vehicle registrations by 10% year on year. That's presumably a sign that we're seeing a 10% increase in vehicles on the road - a total of 1,240,931 vehicles were registered with the RTA this year. Car dealers in Dubai and Sharjah have apparently told the newspaper of increases in new car sales of up to 40% and anticipate a continued strong growth trend.

Even Gulf News made the connection. That means more cars on the road which means more traffic which means more congestion which means more jostling with aggressive dolts in lines of glittering metal blowing out billowing clouds of choking fumes and general bloody misery.

One place there are less cars to be found than last year, incidentally, is the Sharjah/Dubai highway. Although it still gets gummy here and there, the traffic volumes are undoubtedly down as traffic concentrates instead on choking Al Wahda street because everyone's trying to leave at Al Khan and hoy off over to the 311 (The road formerly known as the Emirates Road but now renamed the Mohammed Bin Zayed Road) to avoid shelling out Dhs4. I am constantly amazed at what lengths people will go to in order to save Dhs4 - including spending Dhs5 in extra petrol.

So Salik (the name of Dubai's traffic toll system and Arabic for 'clear') has lived up to its name. Who knew?

The question is whether the expansion of the UAE's road infrastructure will keep pace with the expansion in traffic. There's a new arterial motorway planned to link the 311 down to Abu Dhabi, while a new road system around the Trade Centre Roundabout - started before the bust and now completed by Italian company Salini, which has somehow managed to ride out the recession and its significant exposure to Dubai - is opening this week. The conversion of the National Paints Car Park into a functional road appears to be nearing completion, too - it'll be interesting to see if any number of new lanes can bring clarity to what was the UAE's most notorious traffic bottleneck.

Meanwhile, property prices in Dubai rose by more than anywhere else in the world, according to a piece in The National, which identifies a 28.5% rise in the first nine months of the year.

Oh, joy. Groundhog day.

Salik Cap Doffed

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The RTA's been and gone and removed the daily cap on its popular Salik road toll, so now if you pass through more than six of the cheery little RFID-enabled gates, you're going to have to pay, baby. This has led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the local papers.

There are now three sets of Salik gates in Dubai - two placed on the arterial Sheikh Zayed Road at Safa and Barsha respectively, two on the Maktoum and Garhoud bridges and now two on the main roads to Sharjah at Al Mamzar (Ittihad Road, AKA 'Murder Mile') and the Airport Tunnel (Beirut Street).

There are actually two gates on the Ittihad Road, but they charge as one - as do the two gates on the Sheikh Zayed road IF you pass between them both within one hour (the one hour limitation doesn't apply on the Ittihad Road, so you can pass under one gate, camp overnight and then carry on without incurring an additional charge.).

Nevertheless, if you want to drive from Sharjah to, say, the Jumeirah Beach Residence and back, you're going to get hit for six tolls, currently by a huge coincidence the maximum Dhs24. Now the cap has been removed, any further Salik teasing will result in Dhs4 a time being deducted with a satanic giggle from your Salik account. The alternatives are, practically, the E311 and E611 bypass roads although with some fancy footwork you can get through Qusais and onto the Al Khail Road.

This route is massively congested during rush hours mainly because everybody and his uncle is trying to save Dhs8 each way (they gets you in the road in and they gets you again on the bridge). Caught up in that snarling traffic, cars cutting in, jostling and changing lanes as they cut you up, slumped listlessly over your steering wheel as you wait for the next creep forward and admire the shimmer of the heat on the metal tightly packed all around you, you could be forgiven for wondering what part of 'clear' does the Arabic word salik mean to the RTA.

The RTA has been quick to point out that the change to the cap will only affect some 5% of drivers, but couriers and logistics providers have been most unamused at the scheme. Probably because that 5% of drivers include them - and they will very easily knock up tens of journeys through those gates a day.

You waitses, preciousss, just you waitses for the outcry when they sneaks in a raise to Dhs5 per gate. Oh noes, you might say, they'd never be mad enough to do that!!! I leave you, then, with this parting thought from super-duper tabloid-tastic newspaper 7Days' report on the whole shemoozle:

"The RTA declined to comment when asked by 7DAYS for more information on why the move is being implemented - and whether there are plans to introduce any more Salik charges in the near future."

Sharjah - Radar Down

(Photo credit: brizzle born and bred)

As eagle eyed observers will recall from earlier posts, Sharjah has been suffering from a mysterious and expensive spate of radar shootings.

Someone has been regularly taking out the traffic radars on the Mileiha Road - the arterial route that leads from the notorious National Paints parkabout all the way out to the delightful East Coast littoral of Khor Kalba across on the other side of the Hajjar Mountains. It's a delightful drive, BTW - and you can pop across the border to Fujeirah for a bite to eat for lunch before coming back, say, over the Masafi/Dhaid road.

This morning's drive to work took me along the road from Sharjah Airport to junction 2 on the aforementioned Road To Mileiha. That connecting road contains, among many other things (including a co-op and loads of huge palatial villas) two radars.

Standing by the second one was a copper and a couple of puzzled looking blokes. The radar on the northern carriageway (one of the expensive new models) had been pretty comprehensively smashed. If that was a bullet, it presumably means the perp's still at it. Now all we've got to wait for is Gulf News rehashing that quote they use every time they report on a new radar 'kill':

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

It's no laughing matter for Sharjah's finest, by the way - that's now a total of 15 radars ruined and, at Dhs250,000 apiece, we're talking about almost four million Dirhams. To give it a sense of perspective, that's almost four days' revenue from the RTA's Sharjah-bound Salik gates!!!

When they catch him, the radar shootist is undoubtedly in for the high jump in no small way!

Emirates ID. One Card To Rule Them All...

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is going to be interesting to watch in October. Apparently, by then, the Emirates ID National Identity Card will be used to access all Dubai government services. That's according to a report in Gulf News. The first phase of the MyID initiative will open up 20 government departments to the use of an Emirates ID rather than individual logons and passwords for each government entity.

Which is a good thing, right? Rather than having 20-odd IDs and passwords, you can just whip out your trusty deicer  National ID card and proudly cry, "This is me! Open up your services to me, government department!"

Except that most of us don't need to access 20 government departments. I guess RTA for Salik payments, Dubai Police for registration and naturalisation and immigration for labour cards, visas and Emirates ID cards is probably about my lot. I suppose the NMC and Ministry of Youth and Culture when I'm publishing books. Oh, Ministry of Health for the biennial blood test.

And if they get just that lot together, functional and inter-operating seamlessly with the National ID that in itself will be an achivement. If they get all 20 working by October? I shall be sore amazed.

I'm not saying Dubai can't do it. You should never say Dubai can't do something, because you'll more often as not lose your shirt on it. But then the Emirates ID has amassed considerable form in the "announce now clarify tomorrow" stakes.

We can only wait and see...

Sharjah Salik Gates. Dubai's Hundred Million Dollar Baby

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in 2007, when Dubai's Salik road toll was first talked about, there were rumblings and mumblings that the Al Ittihad road linking Dubai and Sharjah would be one of the locations for toll gates. The feared gate didn't materialise at the time. In fact, Dubai's Road and Transport Authority was at pains to dampen speculation regarding a 'phase two' which meant, of course, that phase two was just around the corner.

When it came, phase two added a gate to the Sheikh Zayed Road and one to Maktoum Bridge. Both of these, as the original gates, were avoidable, but only by taking a more roundabout route. In fact the RTA, which likes to trumpet its green credentials (even going so far as to award a silver-plated cow's aorta for sustainable transport), has created a system of tolls that lengthens thousands of commuters' journeys each day by taking the most direct route.

And so it is with the new gates, which set the extraordinary precedent of taxing travel between two emirates. You'll be able to make a tax-free Sharjah/Dubai journey by travelling out to the E311 (The Road Formerly Known As The Emirates Road), a significantly longer drive than the Ittihad road. This is predicated on the vast road improvement scheme currently underway on the E311, which upgrades the junctions leading up to the infamous National Paints Roundabout and is intended to remove the bottleneck at National Paints. This is scheduled, we are told, for completion in April. I'll be delighted if it is, but looking at the current state of National Paints I simply can't see it happening.

What will happen if the changes to National Paints aren't ready or, worse, turn out not to work? Will the RTA go ahead, turn on Salik on April 15 (the announced 'go live' date) and create massive, snarling jams on a road already comprehensively choked by the large volume of inter-emirate traffic it carries? The move will certainly put huge pressure on a brand new road network in a known and notorious traffic hotspot. But then it's Sharjah's problem, isn't it? Dubai won't care, it'll be too busy counting the proceeds.

Back when it was launched, Salik was meant to raise Dhs600 million a year in fees according to 'traffic expert' and chairman of the RTA, Mattar Al Tayer. It's consistently whizzed past those targets, raising a stunning Dhs669 million in 2008 and 776 million in 2009. Media reports in 2011 told of Salik being used to underpin securitised loans of Dhs 2.93 billion based on its revenues to 2015. Apart from that, we have seen few up to date figures on Salik revenues - but a four year loan of Dhs2.93 billion would be about consistent with 2009 revenues - a tad over Dhs730 million a year. There's no doubt, whatever its impact on traffic has been, it has been an amazing success financially.

Now, with the Ittihad road carrying some 260,000 vehicles a day, an amazing number but one that comes straight from the horse's mouth, the RTA can look forward to raising a cool million dirhams a day or a hundred million dollars a year. According to the RTA itself, the whole scheme is intended to divert some 1500 vehicles per day to the E311 or E611 Dubai Bypass Road. I can see a lot more than 1,500 people choosing to take the long way round to avoid paying Dhs8 per day. Most people around here would buy and sell you for a Dirham.

That's effectively a hundred million dollar tax on travel to and from Sharjah. Neat.

It also means you're paying Dhs28 straight away to any taxi to take you to Dubai before the meter starts ticking and Dhs36 if you cross any of the 'internal' Salik gates. When I first came here, you could get a cab to Chicago Beach from Sharjah for Dhs25. Ah, me, but those were the days, eh?

We're Back, Baby!

delete (Photo credit: M i x y)

You can only begin to imagine the look on my face when I pootled over to the blog yesterday to put up a post for the day (I was going to whinge about the new Salik gates, for what it's worth) and found the cheery words from Google (in Arabic, of course, because they insist on showing Arabic content to someone whose account preferences specify English) that my blog had been deleted. To give Google some credit, it was thanks to Google Translate I was able to find out what the hell the note the Space On The Internet Formally Known As My Blog (SPOTIFKAMB to IT people) meant.

Deleted. Gone. All of it.

It took a while to sink in. This blog has become a part of my life in ways I would never have thought possible. I've been feeding it words like a remorseless Tamagochi since I started it (as a frustrated writer who missed journalism) in April 2007, when I posted about the Arab Media Forum (This here post, in fact) to a readership of approximately three. I've been posting more or less regularly ever since - a body of work that stretches back, I realised as I made my way to the Blogger Forum to try and get some help, six years now. In all, over a thousand posts from rants about mendacious food companies through half-baked observations on the state of our media to book plugging now populate this dusty corner of the Web and I have become quite fond of it.

Every day a few hundred or so people pop by to hang out and most of them use the ashtrays and everything. Some posts have attracted thousands and thousands of readers - the ones where I expose the crap people put in their food and drink are posts I am particularly proud have attracted such attention, because I think it's important more people are made aware that Subway bread contains gunk, Aquafina is tap water and other great truths.

Why did Google do it? They never do tell you, but an educated guess (fuelled by some panicky reading yesterday) would be some sort of spammer/hacker exploit that meant a number of blogs (the UAE Community Blog and SeaBee's 'Life In Dubai' were also affected and a number of other blogs were complaining of unfair deletion about the same time I was) got trashed.

A number of people kindly suggested on Twitter that I migrate to Wordpress. Thanks for the suggestions, but it did feel a little like when you tweet about a PC problem and all the iZombies come crawling out to intone 'Buy a Mac' in their little, dead zombie voices. I like that blogger is the Barney of the blogging world, a sort of Little Tikes easy to use thing in nice, primary colours. Wordpress is far too complicated for me and I have neither the time nor inclination to build my own templates and other stuff. I gave up playing around under the bonnet of technology years ago and have no hankering to go back.

I did come away from the experience with the definite feeling that Google's fighting a 24x7 bot-war against the hackers, spammers and other manifestations of absolute evil. Occasionally that results in a few carbon based life forms getting squished. The only thing I can say is they unsquished me pretty quickly - so thanks to Nitecruzer, the entity that seems to do most of the management of anguished bloggers at the Blogger Forum. He could perhaps be politer, but this is a man tested with a constant dialogue with pissed off bloggers, so you can see how he might be occasionally inclined to testiness.

Anyway, drama over. Back to the usual hooning around and complaining about stuff... Move on, people, there's nothing to see here. Come along, now. Let's be having yer. And take those shinies with you...

NEW SALIK GATES? ARGH!

Image via WikipediaGulf News today reports that a 'study' by the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority has led to them proposing two new Salik gates - one on Al Ittihad Road (AKA 'Murder Mile') and one 'in Al Ghusais' says the paper, being a tad coy about the precise location. We can only presume that 'in Al Ghusais' means 'on Beirut Street', the second major arterial road into Dubai from Sharjah. (although Damascus and 24th Streets get pretty tasty in rush hour, too)


I have to confess to finding GN's story that this proposal comes after extensive studies somewhat hard to swallow. When Salik was first 'on the anvil' to use one of GN's more memorable phrases, any study would surely have included these two routes - you don't need a study to show that Al Ittihad Road is the most congested road in the Northern Emirates and has been such for the 22-odd years I've been knocking around this place. Every morning a snarling snake of metal belches fumes and induces coronaries from the Sharjah border to Dubai, a pattern reversed every evening. In fact, the Ittihad Road traffic is actually a great deal easier these days since we lost so many people to the joys of the downturn and the bursting of the Great Dubai Property Bubble. It's even reasonably clear outside the major rush hour periods.

Similarly, Beirut Street gets pretty lousy in the rush hours but isn't too bad outside them. I've always been fond of Beirut street - it used to be the sandy shortcut I took to get to Dubai and avoid Ittihad.

Salik gates on Ittihad and Beirut will undoubtedly force traffic out to the Emirates Road (E311) and the Dubai Bypass Road (E611) where Sharjah residents will be burning three times the fuel to make the same journey. So much for the RTA's 'green' lalala...

The Emirates Road is already notorious in rush hour. In the morning, traffic backs up to the Sharjah/Dhaid road intersection, in the evenings you're starting to stop at Sonapour, the labour camp area. It's horrible - jostling, lane-swapping traffic, heavy lorries and cars vying for that little advantage, that little selfish creep ahead of the next guy's bumper. The culprit is the infamous National Paints roundabout into Sharjah where the Emirates Road narrows to three lanes from Dubai's rather more generous seven lane stretch and where the side roads introduce a tiny, but telling, clog factor with joining traffic. I do often wonder if being strongly associated with shitty traffic jams has been good, bad or neutral for the National Paints brand...

I have long had fun posting about Salik (some posts passim linked here), which has been a constant joy to me since it was first announced. The RTA, which had 'no immediate plans' to expand the scheme back in 2008 has in fact already expanded the original gates - this will be the second 'expansion' of the scheme. The pretence that Salik is about traffic management is one I find interesting given the obvious and immediate consequences of this next move (to completely stuff up the Emirates Road), especially coming as traffic volumes and congestion have reduced considerably from the heady heights of 2008. Laughably we're told by the RTA that this is because Salik has succeeded, rather than being because something like 20% of the population has nipped off home to avoid being banged up by banks bent on basking in boodle.

When examinig the motivation for expanding Salik, it's perhaps interesting to hark back to the words of 'traffic expert' Mattar Al Tayer, the RTA's Chairman, in 2007 when he predicted that Salik would one day raise revenues of Dhs600 million per year. According to GN today, it's making Dhs800 million, smashing its original target and providing, IMHO, a very real incentive to expand the scheme once again.

This move will also raise the perennial question of quite how much each journey's going to cost us. If one is to travel from Sharjah to Dubai Internet City, for instance, an additional gate would bring the current cost of the trip in tolls alone to Dhs12 (the two gates on the Sheikh Zayed Road charge as one if you pass through them immediately after the Garhoud or Maktoum Bridge gates). Will this be the case, or will we see the 'multi-gate' discount applied to the relief of drivers?

Then again, the whole proposal may just not go ahead. Ittihad Road was an obvious target for phase one of Salik and was passed over for some reason. We can only wait and see what happens this time...

RTA Renews Licenses Online

Image via Wikipedia

"Hello, RTA."
"Hi. I need to renew my driving license. What documents will you require?"
"You can go to the nearest centre, yours is at Co-Op opposite Safa Park, Sir. You'll need the old license, a passport copy, Dhs 100 fees and an eye test. For the eye test, you need to visit an optician and you will require your passport and a photograph of yourself."
"And that's it?"
"Yes, sir!"

Wow!

How much has changed around here? When I originally got the license (way back when, you don't need to know, right?) it had taken a major internationally co-ordinated effort, the resources of three small Latin American countries and the best part of a whole morning hanging around in hopeless queues, processing paperwork and being videoed in large empty rooms filled with smiling policemen - and that was with the efforts of my powerful sponsor's mandoub.

So off I toddled. I got the eye test from a wiry thin Syrian optician whose hacking cough shook his gaunt frame every two seconds.

"Cover your eye. Read the letters."
"E O N F V W"
"Okay, now cover other eye. Read letters."
(puzzled) "Errm. E O N F V W"
Okay. You pass. Dhs 25.

I went upstairs to the RTA centre and proudly handed over my old license, my passport copy, my eye test (with stamped photo stapled to it to prove I wasn't using Gary Gilmore's eyes) and my Dhs 100.

The nice girl tapped on a keyboard and then smiled pityingly at me.

"You must pay twifty-ten Dirhams."
"Whaaat?"
"Yes," she smiled beatifically. "Your traffic fines. Of course you must pay these."

Of course. All the documents I'd need except one omitted vital element. Luckily, the Co-Op is festooned in ATM's, so one cash scoop and about ten minutes later, I was photographed and in possession of my new license - but short twifty-ten Dirhams.

Now Gulf News tells us that the RTA is to introduce an online renewal service. All you have to do is get the eye-test and apply online by attaching a photo and the fee. The optician can send your eye test direct to the RTA, apparently. And your license gets posted to you in four days.

How will they match the applications with the eye tests without losing them or breaking them? How will they handle the payment of fines given they have no e-payment portal worth a hoot? How will they handle licenses 'lost in the post'? We have yet to find out.

But to be honest, given that the Salik portal still couldn't process online payments by Visa last time I tried (and screwed up the time before that), I'd actually rather go the Co-Op route and get a license in my hands in ten minutes more than it takes to go anyway for the eye test - and get a lovely smile into the bargain.

Funny, isn't it, that the 'old fashioned' physical process is not only safer and more reliable than the online one but also faster. Rather turns one's preconceptions about the transactional Internet on their head...

Mobile

So now you can pay for your Salik using your mobile. Whoopee.

I don't need that service, thanks to the Dubai e-government payment portal, which crashed last time I tried to pay my Salik, a couple of months ago. It blew out the transaction with an error message. I tried again, same result. I thought I'd give it a go at 'third time lucky' but it just came back again with a failure and error message.

Next day I had Dhs750 of Salik credit. The RTA blamed the e-government payment portal, the e-government people blamed Salik. Neither would contemplate (against the TOS, I believe, of Visa) a refund of the erroneously credited Dhs500. I sent email after email to the e-Pay people. Nada.

I also raised a complaint to HSBC Visa, who have been brilliantly silent on the matter since.

I remain a Salik millionaire. But I shudder to think what financial carnage could be achieved by the combination of RTA, Etisalat, e-Pay and HSBC, particularly bearing in mind that Etisalat will only discuss a billing problem once the bill has been settled and that the other three won't discuss a problem at all.

A confederacy of dunces indeed...

Traffic

If you've got a 4WD, there's a sandy snicket between Sharjah and Dubai that lets you miss all that nasty, snarled up traffic in the mornings; the roadworks, the congestion, the Salik gates and all that other 'orrible commute to work unpleasantness that are part of the miserable day for thousands of people.

I've been waiting to snap one of these boys for a while, but I got 'im this morning.

It's bad isn't it, when even the 'solution' has to avoid the 'problem'?

(Note for puzzled non-UAE residents: the logo on the car belongs to Dubai's traffic regulator, the RTA...)

Kipp

I do agree wholeheartedly with Kipp's slightly grumbly blogpost about the RTA's adoption of social media.

If they're really getting hardcore about online media, they'd do well to start reading some of the reaction from 'customers' on the UAE's blogs. Although I suspect that when it comes to true 'customer feedback', we're looking less like joining a conversation and more like sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting lalalalalala until all the naughty people go away...

And this at a time when the RTA's Salik website still, a year after the launch of the toll, isn't fully functional and doesn't actually provide a fully transactional service.

A Facebook page doesn't make you cool - but it certainly can make you look like an organisation that doesn't get the dynamics and potential of the Internet but which is ticking the 'things we feel we should look like we're doing' boxes...

Trucked

The scenes outside our local ADNOC have started to become apocalyptic: a line of 45 buses stretches out onto the sand-roads behind the petrol station, blocking access to our house from the main road: the line of trucks on the other side stretches out just as far, curling into a strange mandala of decorated, jangling, garishly painted flat-backs. We’re looking at well over 100 vehicles stacked up for the final approach to cheap diesel: Dhs10 per gallon less than Dubai’s filling stations. For a lorry with a 100 gallon tank, that’s a lot of Mars Bars. Every ADNOC’s the same - a line of waiting diesel consumers stretches around the back, down the road - any which way they can, really!

Lugubrious taxi driver Mr G says it’s because Dubai won’t buy refined product from Abu Dhabi and insists on importing the stuff. Interesting, the thought that this could all be down to a sort of family squabble.

Whatever the reason (and we have been rather short of investigative insight from our trusted ‘analogue’ media sources on that one, so Mr. G.’s speculative take is the best thing I’ve heard), the insane queues continue. It must be awful driving one of those orange tankers queued up outside Dubai Shitty City: ten hours to dump your load and then another five hours to fill up with enough diesel to get through the next day.

Paying Salik would be a relief for them: in fact, I could afford to let both queues cross Salik at my expense and still have credit left over, thanks to the muddled administration of the toll that likes to say ‘It’s not our fault our system doesn’t work’...

Silence from the RTA continues. Gulf News' report on Salik's failings today just makes me feel even better about my chances of recovering the money they took as a result of their screw-up.

GnnnnnNNNNN!

Cleared

Salik is a joy to the hearts of many Dubai residents. There are few things that make me happier than passing under that smashing RFID-tabulous gate and hearing the sound of another four dirhams going 'ching' into the giant cash register that is Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority, or RTA. It makes me happy.

Recently I started to get text messages telling me that my Salik balance was low. And then I realised that I really had to do something about it: I was in danger of triggering... gasp... violations. So I went online to try and pay.

The RTA website is a bit of a mess, if I'm honest. It hasn't really been updated since they launched the whole Salik scheme and much of its functionality remains 'under construction'. Online payment doesn't work if you use Firefox, either - only IE is supported. Which is a little Victorian if you ask me.

So I loaded (with a shudder) Explorer and got on with making my payment. It's enabled through the Dubai e-Government 'Epay' site and the mechanism is a little, well, Victorian. Worse, my attempt to pay 'em Dhs 250 (good for a while, about 62 'chings') bombed out: the transaction failed. I tried again, keying my card details in very, very carefully. Failed again. And then I noticed an error message:

“Server was unable to process request. ---> uspEPayResponseUpd: OKCannot insert the value NULL into column 'dtUpdTime', table 'dbDTS.dbo.tbEPayTrxn'; column does not allow nulls. UPDATE fails.”

This didn't look good. I left it a while and tried again, same error message. Three attempts, three failed transactions. I called 'em, but they won't do credit card transactions over the 'phone, which struck me as a little, well, Victorian.

You know what's coming next, don't you? I logged on to the Salik website next day to see how much trouble I was in with those potential violations and... ta da!!!! I've got Dhs750 credit on my Salik tag.

The RTA call center won't process a refund because it's not their policy and anyway it's epay I have to talk to and not them and is there anything else I can do to help you?

The Dubai government helpline ('Dial one to stick knives in your head, dial two to eat lightbulbs, dial three to speak to a human being and solve your problem. Thank you for dialling three. Sorry, nobody's answering that line. Dial one...') says I should go to the RTA because they took my money. Great.

Having lost the plot with both, both have agreed to 'escalate' the complaint to 'the concerned department'. This has been followed by a long silence, but I'm not giving up. Even if it takes me as long as 187 crossings of Salik to sort it out...

Toll

I can see bloggers' keyboards melting down today: the news that two new Salik gates are to be installed is virtually guaranteed to get 'em going. Well, it's certainly done the trick for this one, as you can see!

The news comes on a busy front page for Gulf News, which is more than usually lively. Kylie's 40, Suu Kyi's shameful detention is to continue, a new Bond novel has been written by Sebastian Faulks (and launched with a bonkers, brilliant, publicity stunt), Bahrain has decided to stop issuing work permits to all Bangladeshis following the murder of a Bahraini by a gentleman of that nationality and a Dubai nightclub is to operate a 'you're in if we like the look of you' door policy (and the difference is...).

What larks, Pip!

But it's still Salik that tickles me pinkest. The new gates are part of the second phase of the Salik system, Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) boss and 'traffic expert' Matar Al Tayer told Gulf News and anyone else who happened to be listening. This is the very second phase that Al Tayer dissembled about when asked about future plans by media back in January: a second phase that clearly had always included more toll gates. Why on earth the RTA cannot clearly and simply communicate what it is planning is beyond me.

One of the new gates is an additional gate on the Sheikh Zayed road, while the other one will add a charge for the Al Maktoum Bridge: the bridge that most people use to avoid the Al Garhoud Bridge Salik gate. Having effectively forced traffic onto Maktoum, the RTA now notes that Maktoum is busy. They really are clever little bears.

Part of the announcement appears to be the undertaking that motorists will be charged only once for passing through the two successive gates on the Sheikh Zayed Road. I'll be interested to see how they implement that one. Will you have a time limit to cross the two gates for no additional charge? And what happens if there's a crash and you're held up?

Gulf News reports that the reason for the second gate on the Sheikh Zayed road is that people have been driving around the original gate, another piece of human behaviour that has apparently surprised the RTA. The new gate is, we are told, "the only solution" to the problem. Although an alternative solution would be to resite the Barsha gate, no?

There are more gates on the way, for sure. Except the RTA absolutely refuses to be transparent (let alone consultative) about its plans and our media appear unwilling to get to the facts. One journalist I know who chatted to Al Tayer following an interview some time ago says he was told off the record that it was Al Tayer's goal to increase the cost of car ownership in Dubai to Dhs 10,000 a year. If it's true, that surely needs to go on the record.

I suppose I'd better do a Salik Talking T-Shirt now...

Armageddon

Things are getting pretty apocalyptic around here. There's a dolphin with a flick knife slashing every undersea cable around: the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG cables have both been broken in Egypt, the Falcon cable's gone in the Gulf and now Qatar's managed to lose a cable link as well. At the same time, the weather's screwed, there are earthquakes breaking out all over the Emirates (interestingly, this would appear to be a scoop for arabianbusiness.com - I can't find any other mention of it) and everyone's talking about expanding Salik. Well, to be honest, Matar Al Tayer's talking about expanding Salik, everyone else is talking about what a completely dumb idea that is: over 66% of respondents to an arabianbusiness.com poll have apparently said they didn't agree with any immediate expansion of the scheme.

Quick note for anoraks: SEA ME WE is an acronym for South East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe while FLAG is an acronym for Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe. Falcon isn't an acronym, it's a non-aquatic bird and so obviously the ideal namesake for a submarine cable.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, a Dubai-based lawyer has come to the remarkable conclusion that not having AIDS or hepatitis is proof positive that unwilling, unprotected penetrative sex can not have taken place with someone who does have AIDS and hepatitis. Further findings expected from the city's progressive thinkers are set to include the incontrovertible facts that the earth is in fact flat, the moon is made of cheese and the stars are angels' daisy chains.

The latest Gulf News story on this trial is very unclear and appears to say that the defendant has been acquitted, but that just seems very odd. Any clarity to be had out there appreciated.

Salik. Nyer Nyer Told You!

I've got little to add to what is destined to be a tide of furious blogs on the news today that ten new Salik gates will be built, an expansion of Dubai's road toll system which will ensure that every which way you turn in Dubai, you'll get nailed. Those coming from Sharjah, Ittihad to Garhoud, will get nailed twice.

Mattar Al Tayer, the 'traffic expert', said that RTA was not considering expanding the scheme. I predicted back in July that this was dissembling. I'm sad to have been proved right.

And, again, appallingly communicated.

Some time ago, during the original fuss about Salik, I posted a wholly unhelpful Q&A on Salik. One of the questions was 'What happens if a chance stone hits my windscreen and the tag is damaged?' - of course, God has his way of doling out punishment - my windscreen now has a nice crack right across it from such a stray stone and, a police report, garage visit and insurance claim later, I'm now thoroughly irritated to find I have to buy a new blasted Salik tag. The good news is that they say they can transfer the balance. Let's see...

National Day

Everyone's going crazy about National Day. Not me. I'm going camping. But I'm still generally happy for them all and do derive a great deal of enjoyment from their frenetic (and often quite insane - I mean who, in their right mind, PAINTS their car with a flag for national day?) celebration of nationhood.

I love the story of the formation of the Emirates: the transition from the Trucial States (the Brits made them all sign up to stop bashing each other and raiding unsuspecting passing dhows, hence 'trucial') to the UAE was accomplished in less than three years after a Brit in a bowler hat landed at Sharjah Airport with the news that Her Majesty's Government had (finally) realised the game was up, the Empire was no more and we were generally doing a Pontius Pilate on every obligation East of Suez.

This gave these guys a couple of years to define the constitution, acceptable system of governance, administration and identity of a modern nation state. They hadn't really been, errr, trained for it. The remarkable figures of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed were to play a critical role in forging the United Arab Emirates out of the messy and time consuming negotiations that at one time or another involved Oman, Qatar and Bahrain too.

It was all made worse by the fact that the dirty deed had been done by a Labour government - and the Tories had hinted strongly that they'd undo it. So the Trucial chappies didn't get down to it as seriously as they might right up until it became clear that the Tories were as full of it as the average backed-up septic tank.

The result has been the Federation of states that make up the UAE - clockwise: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Qawain Ras Al Khaimah (which didn't sign up 'till a year after the others) and Fujairah. All have coastal and inland holdings, all have territory nested in each other (Go to Hatta, the inland town of Dubai, and you'll likely cross Sharjah, Ajman and Oman on your way) because the territorial division was done along the lines of tribal affiliations and all have totally separate police forces, municipalities and, in the main, public services. The result is often quixotic at best - but it works, somehow. Eventually. Mostly.

So what if they struggle at times to get things like the legal system to work properly (or even... sharp intake of breath... Salik). They defined a nation in three years and built it in 30 - an infrastructure that is still, of course, being built out in breathtaking, if sometimes slightly crass, style. The Brits were decimalising and worrying about Europe when the UAE was being born. I was personally involved in making my first ginger beer plants and hating girls at the time. I have since, by the way, continued to like ginger beer and considerably improved my opinion of girls. But I can't claim to have built a nation...

So here's a National Day toast: good luck to them, warts and all. We're here because it's better than there, after all.

Aren't we?

Money Can't Buy Me Salik

The potty Salik road toll system continues to amaze me. I ran out of credit a couple of weeks ago and, for one reason or another, I haven't managed to top it up. It's just been a mad time and every time I remember or am near a service station I've either been in a mad tear to get to a meeting or I haven't had cash on me. Because, of course, you can only pay for the blasted toll in cash.

A while ago they announced that you could pay online, so I toddled off to their website (www.salik.ae) to do just that. Imagine my delight when I saw that the module was up and running!

So I entered my account number, PIN code and mobile number and then went downstairs to the car to find the tag number because for some reason the system doesn't know my tag number automatically (a miracle of technology integration, is Salik). And then went to the 'Recharge' option on the menu, entered Dhs 250 as my recharge amount and pressed 'Next' to take me to the egovernment epay service and make my payment.

Nothing happened. Because it doesn't work. It's not broken or anything like that: it simply just isn't working. And I've been going back over the past week or so just to check that it still doesn't work.

So I checked my balance (32 Dhs apparently, but I know that it is -32 Dhs) and my violations (no violations).

No violations? Yes! No violations!

Genius. You can't pay for it, but it doesn't matter because nothing happens when you don't pay for it. Which makes it completely, utterly and totally pointless.

Which is what so many of us have been saying all along, I know...