Ancient Monument

No, not me - don't be cheeky. I posted the other day about UAE attitudes toward personal privacy and included an anecdote about the day I was nicked for snapping puddles (a bonus anecdote always adds such value to the 'standard' post one finds) in Sharjah. A late spring clean the other day took us to our old photo box and lo and behold, didn't I find the very film I was nicked for clicking? So here's Sharjah's Ramla area neatly underwater:

You'll note the lack of women in the shot. In its day, before the big drainage program was put in place, Sharjah used to look like this all over - particularly at that time when the rains were very heavy and even Al Wahda street sank without trace into the looming puddle that covered the city. Only four wheel drives had unfettered access, the mortals in their cars had to hug the central reservations and even then many didn't make it and conked out, leaving their owners to strike out for dry land and wait for assistance. It was all rather fun, hence the urge to record the whole thing for posterity!

Another old piccie we unearthed is this one. I didn't take it (I could not, for the life of me, tell you who did), I blagged it from a newspaper archive for some project or another I was working on way back when. It's Flame Roundabout, the eternal flame which used to burn in front of what is now the intersection between DNATA and Deira City Centre. Flame, together with 'Clock' and 'Fish', formed the city's  complement of decorative roundabouts. Clock had a clock on it and I'll leave you to fill in the final blank.

I don't even have a precise date for this snap, although it would likely have been the very early 1990s. I can only tell you that Flame was constructed, judging by the dumper truck in the picture, by big UAE construction company Khansaheb, which translates rather prosaically as 'Mr Khan' after its founder, Mr Khan.

Flame is no longer a roundabout, but the monument has been preserved and moved and the eternal flame still flickers in the vee of land as the airport road splits to take weary commuters to either Garhoud or the Floating Bridge.

We also dug up loads of pictures of us being young and silly and, if I have to confess, painfully gawky. It was all great fun to wade around in for a while. And no, I'm not sharing the gawky stuff. If youth today lives its life online that's youth today's choice. I, for one, am rather glad I can keep my memories of being younger and considerably more stupid (I know it's a stretch, but you'll have to just take my word for it) in a box to enjoy in private.

The Middle Way

Image via WikipediaThere's some interesting localised chaos breaking out in Sharjah as people start to get used to the new 'middle road' which starts by the Mahatta Fort museum and snakes out to cross the Emirates Road and then merge with the Mileiha Road. The problem is that this merging takes place not with a nice, sensible clover-leaf exchange but with a traffic light. The volume of traffic skipping out of the central city on its way to the E611 Dubai Bypass (the only truly clear route into Dubai of a morning) is increasing exponentially daily.

The accidents are starting to pile up quite nicely. The access to the 'schools area' from the Middle Road is already creating a daily tailback of quite alarming proportions. And the traffic merging into the Mileiha Road does so just outside the gates of Sharjah English School. Adding to this growing chaos, Sharjah's elite Anjad police force have started to pitch up and muck around with various experiments to see what can be done to improve things. This means you never quite know which route to take as U-turns are blocked, roads diverted and sundry other manifestations of Anjaddery take place.

What could be nicer than to surround a busy little school with snarling, choking throngs of heavy, aggressive commuter traffic? When you add the earth-movers, heavy lorries and bulk carriers escaping from Sharjah's industrial areas, the chaos only grows. At least we can take some comfort that the whole road network, including this little piece of madness, wasn't planned and built by a world class and highly respected British consultancy and construction company that should, surely, have known better than to join two arterial roads with a traffic light outside a school.

Oh...

Privacy and the Law

Image via WikipediaGulf News reports today on a Russian pilot who posted a piece of video shot from his phone of a traffic accident up on YouTube and whose month in jail and deportation sentence has been reduced on appeal to a fine.

A month in jail and deportation for filming an actual incident and posting it online may appear madly draconian, but the UAE (and the Gulf in general, actually) has always had a fraught relationship with photography and video when it comes to personal privacy - professional photographers have long been used to having to obtain release forms and there have been many, many cases over the years where people have objected to having their pictures published - particularly GCC nationals, who value their privacy highly. The issue becomes highly charged when it comes to local women, whose modesty is assiduously preserved in public.

Many years ago I was with a friend taking photos of the enormous puddles that had resulted from heavy rain in Sharjah. A magnificently bearded policeman decided to take exception to my actions and ran me into the station for 'photographing women'. His pals at the copshop obviously thought he was being as batty as I did and much barely disguised hilarity at his expense ensued at my proposed solution - he could develop my film at the twenty minute shop and if there was one woman in it he could bang me up with my blessing but if it turned out to be as woman free as I claimed, he could pay for the processing. The eventual compromise was to force me to sign a 'chit' promising never to photograph in that place again.

The fact that the accident the chap filmed actually occurred (and that the video was therefore, presumably, an accurate representation of the event) arguably plays no part in the judgement - although it would perhaps seem perfectly logical that a video of an actual event would be permissable - it is the right of an individual to privacy that takes primacy. If you filmed someone in the course of a criminal act, for instance stealing or committing an egregious traffic violation, you would be expected to hand that film over to the authorities rather than make it public - particularly if there are identifiable individuals in the footage.

What at first appears (at best) strange is actually something rather laudable - total respect for the rights of the individual and the role of the law, rather than the mob, in ensuring justice is done. Thinking about it, it's sort of odd that we find this stance odd!

Mind you, I can't wait for the Google Street View team to land here. They'll be eating biryani three times a day within seconds flat...

Sad Day

Today precisely five years ago, suicide bombers detonated their ball-bearing packed bomb belts in the Grand Hyatt Amman. In simultaneous attacks, the Radisson and Days Inn hotels were attacked. I have always thought the Days Inn attack was a terrible piece of black humour - I think they were supposed to attack the Holiday Inn and got it wrong. The Days Inn is hardly high profile...

The lobby and all-day dining area of the Hyatt were completely decimated. Our offices at the time were in the Zara Center, part of the Hyatt complex - and a friend was standing at reception when the bombs detonated, the concussion wave tearing out the front glass panels and doors of the hotel and miraculously leaving her unscathed. Sixty others weren't so lucky - they lost their lives.

A week after the bombing I flew to Amman in support of an art exhibition to protest the bombing and remember the victims, 'Into the Light' - two of the pieces from that exhibition still decorate my house, fantastic, clever black and white calligraphies of the names of the victims. I felt very brave coming out and then very silly for feeling brave, but it was a time of great trepidation.

I'm sitting in the new Hyatt lobby typing this just before I head for the airport. It's a  wonderful act of continuance and defiance. All the waiters are different, many of the chaps I knew for so long before didn't make it through that night. But the lobby's funky, enlarged, the restaurant's bustling and stylish and the bombing is so far behind us that I was shocked to see its anniversary in today's Jordan times and stand looking out of the back of the lobby feeling sad for all those poor people.

The Tent Next Door

Image via WikipediaAmerican President Lyndon Johnson once memorably said of J. Edgar Hoover, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."

It's a quote that often comes to mind when I see the behaviours of the UAE's newspapers. A journalist on one of the Arabic papers many years ago told me memorably that the trick to being an Arab journalist is never to piss in your own tent. Always do it into next door's.

It's remarkable to compare the coverage of the Sharjah Taxi Crisis in today's Dubai-based Gulf News with that in the Abu Dhabi-based The National. I posted about the issue earlier this week - basically Sharjah taxi drivers are being charged to drive at a rate of Dhs0.52 per kilometre, rendering their ability to make money, already limited by fines, charges and high commission targets, almost untenable.

Gulf News buries the story as a side panel to the page 3 piece, 'Abu Dhabi taxi drivers' protest continues'. In the side panel to the main Abu Dhabi story, GN avers that residents are having problems getting a cab as Sharjah taxi drivers 'refused to work for a third day in a row'. The story is also way down the pecking order on the website - Tom Cruise gets a great deal more coverage. I can't find the Sharjah nib on the website at all. But the extraordinary lack of detail in GN is neatly exposed by The National's reporting.

'Hundreds of cabbies quit over new fuel deal' is The National angle. A bit more dramatic than residents finding it hard to get a cab, isn't it? The National story is well worth a read - according to the paper over 400 cabbies have walked out and the regulator is quoted as saying that 'not even a quarter of the 4800 cabbies are on strike' which I take to mean, because I love phrases like 'not even', that at least 1,200 cabbies are refusing to work.

I don't know if I'd be brave enough to go on strike if I were a cabbie here, particularly if I had a family back home dependent on my remittances. I have posted many, many times about the iniquitous and draconian regime of the taxi companies here, specifically in Sharjah because I have my 'inside man', the lugubrious Mr. G. If you're interested in the full picture, here are those very posts. To actually stand up and defy them must take guts - or desperation.

Sharjah's Gulf Today, of course, merely burbles ridiculously about bus driver standards and training in today's edition because covering possibly the largest labour dispute in the Emirates' recent history is in no way in the public interest (Yes, I know the public interest has nothing to do with it, I'm just saying).

Gulf News deserves to be held to a higher standard than Gulf Today, though. And in this, it has failed. Its silence is nothing less than shameful - and its shame is clearly exposed by The National. Which itself fails to mention the ongoing dispute between Cars Taxis and its drivers in Abu Dhabi, now into a second day of strike action according to Gulf News.So The National hardly holds the moral high ground here.

The lesson in this is clear, though: if you want to find out what's really going on these days, pop over to the tent next door for a gossip. But don't forget to wear rubber-soled shoes.

Iniquity

Image via Wikipedia
We were happily wittering away on the radio this morning, running through the local news (which is normally what we do for the first 10 minutes of the episode of Dubai Today I co-host every Tuesday - podcast here) when I happened to read down a story I'd printed out from Gulf News for us to talk about. It was datelined Abu Dhabi and talks about a dispute between some taxi drivers and their company.

Halfway down the copy lies the real story, however. And it really took my breath away. Sharjah Transport is to charge (yes, you read it right - charge) its taxi drivers 52 fils for each kilometre they travel. The story's linked here. 300 drivers apparently protested the move yesterday.

As it stands, drivers have to raise above Dhs333 per day to achieve a commission rate of 35%. At the current rate of Dhs1.61 per 650 metres, that means they have to travel 134km with a paying passenger every day.

The new regime will neatly punish them for every metre they drive without a paying passenger. Travelling 134km with a paying passenger will now cost them Dhs69.7, which means that a perfectly efficient taxi that spends not one second empty could make its driver Dhs47 per day.

Driving every day for a month with no days off (which they do anyway to try and make ends meet) now means a Sharjah taxi driver could earn himself if he travelled not one metre with an empty cab the princely sum of Dhs1,410. That's less than I paid my company driver when I first moved out here 20 years ago. And he got a 9-5 job with weekends.

However, if you look at a more realistic 50% empty 50% full run rate (for instance, an Abu Dhabi job means travelling all the way back to Sharjah empty), our driver ends up owing the company just under dhs23 per day. In fact, in order to make money, he'd have to travel something like 75% of the time full. And then he could look forward to earning a marvellous Dhs 12.16 per day (or Dhs364 a month)

GN talks about a protest by 300 drivers yesterday. It's not really a surprise.

I checked it out with Mr G and he confirmed it. He also pointed out that with too many taxis on the street and the bus services undercutting them, they're already finding it hard. And with no allowances for uniforms, accommodation, food or medical they're also finding it impossible to work out how they can live. He thinks there'll be more protests tomorrow and, to be honest, I find it hard to blame them.

Please tell me I've got the maths wrong. But if I've got it right, it's simply breathtaking and iniquitous beyond belief.

Fierce Creatures

Cover of Fierce CreaturesStaying at Emirates' Al Maha Desert Resort and Spa has long been a treat for us. The lavish little 42-room hotel nestles on the side of a large bowl out in the sands between Dubai and Al Ain, every room a suite with its own little infinity pool looking out over a plain edged by rolling dunes. We usually cash in Emirates' Skywards air miles rather than dig deep for the Dhs 4,000-odd you'd have to dole out for a night of bliss in the desert, but this stay was compliments of Skywards after their customer service people unearthed the little disaster that was our attempt to make a booking in August (thank you, chaps).

Al Maha was the first of the UAE's desert resorts - Bab Al Shams, Al Sahra and Qasr Al Sarab have all followed in the wake of the resort's success but none have ever had the appeal of Maha for us. It wasn't, of course, the first 'desert hotel' in the UAE - that honour belongs to the now dowdy but yet still delightful Liwa Hotel. But it was the first place to transform the pleasures of camping in the deep dunes into a world-class luxury bliss-out experience - the suites are all tent-themed and the stiff room rate does include a variety of desert activities as well as breakfast, lunch and dinner. There are few chilled weekend experiences to rival it. It's so good, TripAdvisor (the website that makes hotel GM's break into cold sweats) does nothing but gush about the place. and they're all right about it, too. My own raving about the place has been going on for a good long while now, so you can forget the accusation that I'm only being nice because of the Skywards comp.

One of the most delightful aspects of this delightful hotel is that it's set in the middle of a massive game reserve made up of something like a third of Dubai's total landmass and dedicated to the preservation of the Arabian Oryx - or Al Maha. Camels are banned (they're not actually indigenous to the region, dontcha know?) but a thriving herd of oryx, gazelles and an increasingly rich variety of desert life are not only welcomed,  but assiduously protected. Starting at something like 90 head when it opened, Al Maha's herd of endangered pointy-horned ruminants has grown to over 300 now.

But there's trouble in paradise. Someone, somewhere has decided to remake the John Cleese comedy Fierce Creatures and locate it in the desert outside Dubai.Only this time it's for real.

The globe-spanning Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which is responsible for brands such as Le Meridien, Sheraton and Westin, is to take over the management of Al Maha from tomorrow. I can find no trace of an official announcement,  but the news has led to a number of staff, including some of the hotels' complement of South African guides, chucking in the towel and moving elsewhere. Others are presumably waiting to see what happens when the new bosses turn up with their sleeves rolled up and briefcases bursting with formulas for increased efficiency and resource management.

(Fierce Creatures, BTW, revolved around 'big business' taking over an ailing zoo and the new director deciding to increase the place's popularity by making its large-eyed, furry inmates seem more dangerous and therefore more attractive to the general public.)

Starwood already manages one Emirates-owned property, the Le Meridien Al Aqha  Beach Resort. And there's a lot of sense to an airline focusing on doing what it does best (running the world's largest demonstration of the effectiveness of the 'long tail' principle) rather than running hotels. What's more, the Starwood network would have a huge benefit to Al Maha which, we understand, does tend to suffer from low mid-week occupancy and rammed weekends. But part of what made Al Maha so unique was how very focused everyone there was on customer service and creating a wholly memorable experience that went beyond reason. The million dollar question is whether that experience will survive once the 'under new management' sign has been taken down and the place settles into its new routines and the task of making that management contract thoroughly profitable.

In the meantime, when you read in Gulf News of people being disemboweled by Arabian Oryx or gored by vicious gazelles, remember Fierce Creatures. You saw it here first...

Sara's Ussa

The plan was to use cams to bring Sara from Nablus to GeekFest Dubai last week. We tested the thing earlier in the day and perfection (well, a slightly Charlie Chaplinesque perfection) was achieved. Setting up at The Shelter, it quickly became apparent that the wireless connection was deeply broken. With creaky infrastructure and the lack of a Saadia becoming painfully apparent, we managed nothing better than a freeze frame and a squawk before it all came tumbling down again. Even Gerald Donovan's brilliant cludge of a Samsung Galaxy tablet and my 3G SIM to make an Android-driven 384kpbs wireless hotspot failed because the 3G signal in the cinema at Shelter was rocky.

I have to record that the entire issue was with the Dubai-side infrastructure. Nablus was just dandy all along.

So we missed her talk. Now you can sit back and relax in the privacy of your own home (or office) and catch it, because I got her to record it for us.  She uploaded the files from Nablus and I stitched 'em together before adding the film to the GeekFest collection over at Vimeo. This file took EIGHT HOURS to upload thanks to Etisalat's appalling DSL. Using a 2mbps DSL line, I could at no point get better than 50kpbs upload speed. I tried at home, but watched in horror as a 36kbps upload degraded to 14kpbs before crawling back up to 36kbps. It's truly unbelievable that this quality of service is tolerated by the TRA.

Anyway. Here, at last, is Sara's Ussa. We apologise for the delay and assure you that normal service will be resumed when we have a properly competitive telecommunications market in the UAE.


Sara's Ussa from Geek Fest on Vimeo.

Please do feel free to pop over to Vimeo and embed this video in your own blog/site/corner of the web.
By the way, we're still waiting for an official update on Ola's fund, but it looks like we've raised the $18,000 needed for her life-saving operation in Italy.

UPDATE. Ola flies to Italy November 5th! We did it, folks. It looks like the fund will close over, in fact!

Sad Day

It's a sad day for the United Arab Emirates - the Ruler of Ras Al Khaimah, His Highness Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammed Al Qassimi, died this morning.

The world's oldest reigning monarch and the last of the UAE's 'founding fathers', Sheikh Saqr was 92 and had been in ill health for some time. The newspapers lagged Twitter this morning and struggled to get stories together, but the immediate flood of interest brought down WAM, the UAE's news agency and the source of any 'official' news.
 
Which is why we have the headline, body copy and 'news summary' from The National above.

Ras Al Khaimah means, literally, 'headland of the tent'. The khaimah is the traditional barasti (palm frond) dwelling of the mountain people of the UAE. Typically khaimahs are dug into the ground, lined with stone and then the barasti walls and roof are built above. Sheikh Saqr would remember when these were the majority of buildings in RAK - he had ruled the country since 1948.

RAK joined the UAE a year later than the other emirates, the Federation was founded in 1971 and RAK joined in 1972. I never did find out the precise reasons for the delay, which has always intrigued me.

This really is the passing of an era rather than one man. It's a sad day for Sheikh Saqr's family and the people of Ras Al Khaimah, but it's also sad to see the passing of the last of the men who brought this country from a scattered land of tribal peoples to become a modern nation.

When Words Fail

Image by thismanslife via FlickrToday's soaraway 7Days reports on the American swimmer, Francis Crippen, who died on Saturday during the Fina swimming competition held in Fujeirah. A world class swimmer and an experienced athlete, Crippen had reportedly told his doctor he wasn't feeling well but had decided to continue his swim. He didn't finish the race and his body was found in the water.

The response of the executive director of the UAE Swimming Association, as reported by 7Days, seems almost incredibly unfeeling. "We are sorry that the guy died but what can we do. This guy was tired and he pushed himself a lot." are the words the paper attributes to Aymen Saad.

I have to confess the callousness of the response to an event that the President of Fina called "A terrible tragedy" amazed me. Then I read Gulf News' report of the same official's response to the tragedy. GN quotes Saad as saying: ""The medical report from the doctor corroborates the fact that the swimmer was extremely tired and that is the reason why he lost control during the competition. He died due to the effort he made to finish the race."

The difference in tone is remarkable. From callous, offhand and unfeeling to appropriately factual and sober in the face of tragedy. We have two stark choices here - and I am deeply concerned that two papers can report one man's words so differently. So which one is wrong?

And what DID the official say?