Camel-Up
Thursday, December 11, 2008
It's raining outside now. Downtown, the children play on the rooftops and in the streets. The ground doesn't stay wet at all, it just perks down immediately beneath the dust. We are get about 4 days of rain for the entire year. It was even a little cold outside for a while.
National Day was a few days ago. OMG it was craziness in the streets. It's never taken that long to get home from work. Lot's of cars, actually SUV's where painted for the 37th UAE Independence Day. I'm certain it was 37 because 37's were painted everywhere. Long stretches of road were lined with illuminated 37 signs. Skyscrapers were blanketed in white, green and black lights.. Check out my pics.
http://picasaweb.google.com/wingfold2001/UAE#
Many SUV's were decorated with hearts and star stickers and featured images of the Late and current rulers of the UAE. Sheikh Zayed and his son Sheikh Kalifa respectively. Sheik always has the same pose with one eyebrow raised and Sheikh Kalifa looks like Jon Belushi. These images of the Sheiks were made with the same material you see on billboards or city bus advertisements. They did not look cheap and were probably installed by professionals. They were on almost every SUV that I saw last night. Most were full of young Arab dudes or chicks – always in separate vehicles. They were driving absolutely reckless. I saw 3 accidents, one was serious.
A popular thing for the locals to do, is to rev the engine hard, deep into the red while parked. These are BMW, Mercedes, etc. with stock motors so even though it was powerful, the sound was more whiny then throaty. That's one of the worst things you can do to any vehicle. They were sounding off air horns and spraying silly string in gridlock traffic. The guys would sit on the window or just ride on top of the cars blaring Arabic superstar music. There was to be the biggest fireworks display in the world so I wanted to get to downtown as soon as possible. We heard the opening salvo at 8:30 but we were still stuck in traffic. Eventually we made it to the apartment and parked. The sidewalks were also packed with people. We negotiated a park which let people in but didn't let people out the other side so we had to back track a little. Finally we made our way north to the Cornish which is a famous boardwalk along the beach. The show was good. We saw the last 20 minutes of it. It was the most gold colored fireworks I'd ever seen. It didn't exactly live up to the hype, the final shot was a smiley face but it came upside down. I felt sorry for thousands of people who had to fight their way back home.
We went golfing the other day. There are no "greens" here they're called "browns". It's a mixture of sand and petroleum that needs to be raked when you walk on it like a sand trap. They couldn't spare any grass for the fairways. You departed the club house complete with a round of Astro turf. You are supposed to put the ball on the round before each shot. It worked well enough. My game was solid. You couldn't get any kind of roll or bounce from your ball in the sand and they were sometimes really hard to find in the whitish sand. The sand traps were the best I've ever seen! Walking 18 holes in the sand is great exercise.
We did a traditional Bedouin caravan in the sand dunes complete with 2008 Toyota Land Cruisers. It's a popular sport to tear around in the sand dunes. I discovered where all the cops in this town are. They are bashing around out there all day in their patrol vehicles. Our guide was from Iran. He was not happy about the situation in Iran at all. He had been guiding for years and years in the UAE. He said all the newer Model SUV's are crap. He hated the Toyota Land Cruiser we were all in. He showed us the owners manual instructions for putting it into 4WD. It was 11 steps including shutting the car off. He said the best new ones are the Hummer, not surprisingly, and the Iguana which is more like a dune buggy. He said earlier model Land Cruisers and the SUV's from the 70's and 80's are much better. He said performance is very important because the river beds are prone to very dangerous flash floods. I wanted to get more details but his accent was heavy and he was speaking at top speed because it was his favorite subject.
We visited a camel farmer before 4 wheeling. The male camel was separated because he bites. He was worth $50,000 because he was racing quality. His harem of females were very curious and friendly. They move silently. I was taking pictures of a 3 day old baby camel and I didn't realize a huge camel walked over to me until she nudged me. The camels ate hay and heavily irrigated, bright green grass.
Our guide was chatting on the phone while driving in the technical roller coaster of the sand hills. We would come so close to tipping over and rolling but he deftly swerved and followed the contour perfectly. It was wild fun. The whole time he was just kicked back in easy conversation on the phone. Sometimes quickly sticking the phone in his cheek and shoulder and furiously wrenching the wheel. We stopped and walked around for a while taking pictures of the infinite sand dunes at sunset. We finished our trip to the Bedouin style camp. The tents looked to be made out of very large wool blankets. The blankets and carpets were the highest quality fabric I'd ever seen. The carpets were very dense and thick. They were not pliable like a normal carpet but they were very soft and comfortable.
They're was a large hill outside the camp with a rope anchored at the top and crappy snowboards at the bottom. I grabbed one and ran as fast as I could straight up the hill. The rope was nice to have after about half way, it became a necessity near the top. By the time I got to the top my lungs were screaming and I collapsed for about 10 minutes. I went down the hill as fast as I came up on that stupid snowboard.
We had a traditional Arabic dinner. Chicken, lamb, hummus, fish and tabule which is an Arabic salad with chopped greens and vinegar. All of it was very tasty. Afterwards, there was tea and shisha tobacco readily available in the fancy hookahs. Shisha is pretty harsh. Technically it's pure second hand smoke. I've heard shisha is 600 times worse then cigarettes. It is fresh tobacco soaked in syrupy oil flavored with strawberry, apple, mint etc. A red hot coal is placed on top and you draw the smoldering smoke through water. It's smooth death. I had a hangover from it.
It was a cool and clear night. They turned the lights off and we could see the stars while lounging on those carpets. Everything was perfect except the tiny bug I saw in the moonlight close to my head. I sat up and remembered about camel spiders. They are huge hairy and very aggressive spiders that live here. I was told that they are called camel spiders because they attach to the undersides of camels and embed themselves into the hide. It's not true. They do love the dark and people claim to be followed by them but the spider is just instinctively attracted to your shadow.
~Joseph S.
