Mideast Trip (flight in dotted line)I’m back from the Middle East, and as I was not kidnapped nor decapitated, I consider the trip successful. I’ve noticed that I get three reactions when talking about the trip. First, “Why would you ever want to go there?” The second is “Pretty cool, man.” Number three, inevitably, is “Kev, you really are a spy, aren’t you?” Now the last two I understand, but what about the first? Should I go George Mallory on them and say “Because it is there”?I ended up visiting the Emirates, a small enclave called Madha, Yemen and Oman - quite a whirlwind 2 week tour. That said, the Mideast is rather empty, and I think 4 or 5 weeks would be enough to see everything you’d want to see. Someone more sensible than I would have gone during the winter, when it wasn’t 110 degrees every day, but I reckon 110 is better than the 125 it can hit in Dubai and Muscat by August. The
water in the Persian Gulf can get up to 95 by then!
Indian guest workers in a dusty corner of DubaiDubai is an interesting place - you might call it the first “postmodern” city. I see cities having developed in three phases. First, you have traditional cities where the vast majority of families have lived there for many generations (or at the very least, have been members of the culture of the city for generations). Later, you had cities like New York 1900 or London 2000, where there are enormous numbers of immigrants, but in general, the immigrants are planning to live in their new country permanantly and have assimilated into the culture. Dubai is different in that it has an immigrant population near 90%, but the majority of those people have no plan to assimilate or to permanently move to Arabia. Because of this, no one cares about staggering income inequality; I mean staggering as in two dollars a day for a construction worker versus billion dollar bank accounts for the Sheik. It’s a strange society, and one I wouldn’t want the US to become, which is one reason I think these “guest worker” programs you see floated about recently would be an absolute disaster (and have been so in Europe!).Dubai is also strange in that it’s a Muslim city filled with prostitutes and alc. Being nominally Muslim, the prostitutes asked me if I wanted “a good time” and the wine was listed on menus (by law) as “sparkling grape juice”, but the sin is there nonetheless.
Burj al-Arab: tacky on the inside, great on the outsideOn returning, I’ve been asked if people were friendly, so I have one more Dubai story. The first night, I left my hotel (a very swank Sheraton, thanks to frequent flyer miles!), and found a group of guys playing soccer on one of the few open pitches of grass. I’ve got a couple hundred words in Arabic down now, so I asked a guy if I could join in. He answers back, “no Arabic, no Arabic.” One of them spoke English, though; it turned out they were from Iran! No worries that I was American, of course; they were quite friendly and wanted to show me around the next day.The Lonely Planet, among others, recommends that Americans and Brits might want to “mute their nationalities” (their words) to Canadian or Irish given the political situation. I think this is both ridiculous and insulting. First, just as we in America wouldn’t be mean to a visiting North Korean or Iranian, neither would your average Iranian or Korean be mean to us when we’re in their part of the world. More importantly, though, as a traveler you serve as an ambassador for the people of your country, and helping the more ignorant realize that everyday people, regardless of nationality, are all similar in their humanity is an important duty.
Burj Dubai, at 130 stories so farDubai’s famous architecture was a bit disappointing, though. The city is really built for a car, and though the population is only 1.4 million, it’s 30 miles from end to end. You have a few skyscrapers by the suqs in Ber Dubai and Deira near the creek, then another bunch in Jumeirah (where the famous, sailboat-shaped Burj al-Arab sits), then another bunch ten miles down the road in “Dubai Internet City”. It’s nonsensical because there’s nothing but desert and low-rises in between. As a result, traffic is incredible. The photo above is the soon to be half-mile (!) high Burj Dubai. It’s currently 130 stories and there are still 60 to go. That photo was a bit tough to get because I had to sneak into the massive worksite near dusk.
Old Sanaa, YemenFrom Dubai, filled with expats and guest workers, and bereft of history or culture, I fled to Yemen via Sharjah-based Air Arabia. Sharjah is an emirate built on loans from Saudi Arabia, and as a result is a bit more conservative that the rest of the UAE. As we readied to takeoff, a booming voice rattled the cabin: “Alaaaaahu Akbar.” I was reminded of the God-in-the-movies voice. A second time, extended: “Alaaaaaaaaahu Akbar.” And once more, with a slight variation in pitch, “Alaaaaahuuuuuuu Akbar!” I was just hoping this wasn’t the safety instructions!
Kids in SanaaYemen is quite an interesting country. It contains more than half of the population of the entire Arabian peninsula, is quite poor due to a lack of oil, and has a rather distinguished history (Queen Sheba, the Dam at Marib, the Frankincense route, the mud-brick skyscrapers, and more). It also has very few foreign residents, so it certainly represents one of the few “real Arabias” left (I’ll caveat this in a second). The interior, in particular, is very conservative. 99.9% of women I saw wore the
“gulf-style niqab”, which doesn’t even let one see the woman’s eyes. Most men, even in the cities, carry a dagger called a jambiya. I was also asked “Christian or Muslim?” by nearly everyone I met. Yes, a bit binary, isn’t it?
The chick on the left was banginI decided on Yemen for two reasons. First, the capital Sanaa is quite high in elevation (who knew Arabia was so mountainous? There are near-10000 foot mountains in Saudi, Oman and Yemen). Given that the temperature near the Arabian coasts was up to 110 when I was there, the mountains offered a pleasant respite. Second, Sanaa is home to a nearly-square-mile UNESCO site called Old Sanaa. The site has thousands of buildings from 1600-1800 built in a mud-brick skyscraper style that is very cool. Tbe streets are very narrow (too narrow for cars in most places) and the number of tourists is very low; I walked all day and saw only two. “New Sanaa”, on the other hand, is just a typical, rapidly-growing, dusty, third-world city; I’m of the opinion that the less time one spends in cities of that type, the better!
He let me keep my headMy second day there, I’d planned to go hiking in the mountains near a town called Manakhah, two hours out of Sanaa. Now Yemen is a bit dangerous in parts - not from Islamic fundamentalists, but more from fiercely independent tribes who don’t mind a good kidnapping now and again. Because of this, anywhere much further than Manakhah from the capital requires police permits, and certain areas (such as Marib) require armed escort. No worries for me, however - that is, until my bus sped right by Manakhah because the guy I bought my ticket from (on the bus!) didn’t tell the driver I needed to stop. I finally realized something was wrong an hour after we’d passed Manakhah, and two hours before we arrived at a city on the Red Sea.Luckily, a women a few seats back heard my pathetic attempts at getting an explanation in Arabic, and she happened to speak English. This chick was cool. Not only was she the only person in Sanaa that I met who wore only a headscarf and not a full niqab, but she also ran her own business, and spoke both English and Chinese. Inevitably, we hit a police checkpoint, where I was asked for my permit. She rattled something off in Arabic, the fuzz got off, and we were on our way again. Turns out she told the police I was a good friend of the US Ambassador on official business! Well-played. I ended up chilling with her, her Dad, and some business friends in a mini Arabian palace that afternoon: think Persian carpets all round, couches build into the walls for the whole circumference of the room, with Arab tea and lemonade and shish tarouk being served by the help. Not a bad life.
After Yemen, I returned to the East Coast of the Emirates, and hiked 20 or so kilometers (each way!) to an interesting geographical location. Within the UAE, there is an enclave of Oman called Madha, which is roughly a circle 20 miles across containing a few small villages. What’s odd is that, within Madha there’s one village making up an enclave of the UAE called Nahwa, and being a geography nerd, I felt I had to go. Nahwa is not much more than an electricity plant and a hundred or so houses, but I chilled at the town store for a bit with some Sudanese and Egyptian expats who were likely rather confused as to what I was doing there. The main town in Madha is also noteworthy for holding a great restaurant called the Hilltop which, it turns out, is owned by a Palestinian-American. Stop by on your next visit to the enclave!
Ansel Adams would’ve like the desertFrom the UAE, I bussed it down to Muscat, Oman, which was hit by the first Arabian hurricane in over 60 years the day after I left! Oman, particularly the interior, used to be incredibly conservative. The British explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who spoke fluent Arabic, who had traveled across the Empty Quarter by camel twice, and who was friends with nearly every Bedouin tribe on the Peninsula, was told that if he entered the town of Nizwa, they would chop his Christian head right off. This wasn’t 1800, but 1950! Now Nizwa is no problem: this infidel drove there in his Suzuki and chilled out in the middle of town wearing shorts and a T-shirt and pounding a Coke.
It wouldn’t be the desert without the camel, would it?Oman is hyped as the best tourist country on the Arabian Peninsula (in Arabic, peninsula is “al-Jazeera” like the TV channel), bu tI think it’s a bit overblown. Walking round the empty desert is certainly fun, the beaches are warm, and the mountains (particularly the Jebel Akhdar, or Green Mountains) offer nice scenery, but there is, like most of Arabia, not much history. Oman and the Emirates were thinly-populated, predominantly nomadic countries until very recently; for instance, Oman has two primary schools and 10 km of pavement as of
1970! If there was beautiful scenery to trek in, that would make up for it, but unlike verdant Yemen, Oman (aside from the area near Salalah on the Yemen border) has very brown mountainsides that are covered with scree, making trekking quite arduous. The only small town I really enjoyed seeing was one called Misfah al-Abrayeen, which is located on a cliffside and encloses a date palm plantation. For some reason, few of the tourism guides mention it.I ought not be greedy when there was plenty to keep me occupied for two weeks, nor should I have the story go on too long; do you know the morals of the one-eyed Prince and the 100th Door, or of the Barber and the Tailor from A Thousand and One Nights? I think I should simply be satisfied that, unlike Thesiger, no one threatened to take my head! More photos can be found under “Arabia” at
my Flickr.
Finally, I apologize for that last photo, as I consider “Broken English” to be among the least worthy forms of travel photos; I’ll post more on this later. I can’t resist this one, though. I prefer “sardonic wit” with my dry cleaning, but to each his own!
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