First of all, let’s define Arab, a word that has an unpleasant ring to American ears thanks to many years of Jewish media brainwashing modeled on Pavlov’s dogs. An Arab is someone who speaks Arabic. It is a linguistic term, not a racial term, because there’s no such thing as the Arab race. The Arab world means those countries where Arabic is the official language. This includes the five north African countries on the Mediterranean coast and the twelve in west Asia we commonly call the Middle East. Although Arabic is an official language in the countries of the Sahel region of Africa, like Sudan, Chad and Mauritania, which border the coastal countries on the south, I’m not including them because there’s far too much pure black blood and consequently little Arab character, which contradicts what I just wrote, but there you are. I presume that visitors to this site are smart enough to know that Turkey and Iran, though in the same neighborhood, are not Arab nations.
The origins of the Arab people, or Semites if you prefer, is complex and confusing, as are their genetic backgrounds. Thousands of years ago, I suppose, the inhabitants of this region could properly be classified as White, mainly of the Mediterranean branch, and I’ve read that some of the Egyptian pharaohs even had red hair. The engineering marvels that went into the construction of the Pyramids, and contributions to mathematics and astronomy do indeed point to an advanced race. But the physical appearance of most Arabs today betrays a tremendous admixture, across the centuries, with darker races, mainly negro slaves, and Moors, Berbers, Tuaregs, what have you – people of melanin and murky origins themselves blended together with a wide spectrum of complexions, averaging out to a deep tan. Pure negroes, especially in the north African countries, are not that rare, and even more common are those with light skins who at a quick glance appear to be White. Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad comes to mind, his attractive wife Asma an even better example. King Abdullah, puppet ruler of Jordan, has sandy hair and blue eyes, and by any definition his wife, Queen Rania, is a pretty White woman.
If you’ve read my accounts of traveling in Morocco and four countries in the Middle East, you know that Arabs are not my favorite people, though neither do I loathe them. With the marginal exception of Morocco, Arab countries are safe for a solo traveler, relatively civilized and crime-free – much more so than any major American city – and I never came across anyone who struck me as an Islamic extremist, let alone a terrorist. While such creatures do exist in infinitesimal numbers, those stereotypes are nothing more than the usual Jewish media bullshit served to American boobs who mindlessly lap it up. What I don’t like about Arabs is that, compared to everywhere else, they stand out, broadly speaking, as rude and exasperatingly dishonest every time money changes hands. I base this on my personal experience, and thus for many years I would tell people that Jordan was my least favorite country in the world, simply because I had so many negative interactions with people there, though I should emphasize that I never felt threatened in any way. It’s funny, though, how random this can be. Other travelers I’ve met have been astonished at my feelings about Jordan, telling me that they were always treated well there, and distinguishing that country from Egypt, where they had dealt with many nasty and aggressive individuals. Yet I didn’t have a single unpleasant experience in Egypt, and found the people really friendly, surprisingly so. So as you can see, one’s impressions of a country can be a matter of hit or miss.
By contrast, however, my experiences in the oil-rich nations of the Middle East have always been positive, so much so that I had to re-evaluate the entrenched opinions I’ve had about Arabs for more than forty years. Putting aside Yemen and the Zio-American wrecked nations of Libya and Iraq, there are six Arab oil sheikdoms, or emirates, or sultanates, or kingdoms, or whatever you want to call them, in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman. They’re loaded with natural gas too. I’ve visited the latter three for a combined eighteen days.
There’s a thing among some seasoned travelers, who like to disparage others who are into “ticking off” countries just to fill in their scorecards. Me, I’m a country collector, I love all those stamps in my passport, and it especially makes sense to tick another one off when the airline I’m flying stops there anyway for a connecting flight and it’s easy to stop over for a few days in a place you wouldn’t otherwise visit. That’s what I did in 2016 when I visited Iran, flying all the way at hardly any extra cost on Emirates (the flag carrier of the UAE and a superb airline) from New York to Dubai to Shiraz, then returning Teheran to Dubai – where I spent two days – and finally back to New York.
Before visiting Dubai for the first time in October 2016, I knew virtually nothing about the place. I only had a vague notion that it was much wealthier and more cosmopolitan than any other city in the seven Arab countries I’d already visited at that point. As I explain in my Iran travelogue, my original plan was to stop there on the way to Iran, but due to unforeseen circumstances I had to change things around and so I stopped in Dubai on the way back home, which necessitated sleeping on the floor of the airport terminal to catch my early morning flight to Shiraz. My first surprise was that this place rocks around the clock. It’s as busy at 3AM as at any hour of the day or night. I later learned that it’s the world’s busiest airport, and the hub for all destinations in north Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia. It’s also as modern and glitzy as any airport I’ve passed through, but to my amazement I was jolted awake at 5AM by the muezzin’s call to prayer. That’s what I mean by quirky.
So I scrambled my dates and stayed in Dubai at the end of my trip. I had switched my reservation dates at the 2-star President Hotel for a small fee, but it still came out to $170 for two nights, quite reasonable for an expensive city. I was on my own. I hadn’t read anything about Dubai, had no guide book, and figured I’d pick up some literature, some printouts or brochures, in the hotel lobby, which is what I did. But I need to backtrack.
Upon arriving in Dubai, I had no idea how to get to the city, so I headed to the information kiosk in Terminal 1 where a young woman, eager to help – and nearly everyone in the world with this kind of job speaks fluent English – did a quick check and found that the President Hotel was a short walk from the ADCB stop on the red line of the metro – what we call the subway – which I could pick up right there in the airport. That’s what I like doing and that’s what I did, getting to the President and checking in without a hitch.
A word here about the metro systems I’ve taken around the world as compared to the subway stations in U.S. cities, of which I’ve used only two – those in New York City and in San Francisco (BART, for Bay Area Rapid Transit). Nine years ago I made an overnight trip to Philadelphia with my son, and I thought about taking in a baseball game the night we were there; the Milwaukee Brewers were in town playing the Phillies, and Citizens Bank Park was just two subway stops away from our hotel in downtown Philly. But I decided against it. Every large city in the U.S. is a racial tinderbox, Philadelphia being particularly bad, and as far as I’m concerned, danger lurks with every descent into a subway station, especially one you’re unfamiliar with. Your blood pressure rises because you have just left relative safety and are now in the African jungle, an area where you’re trapped, whether on the platform or on the train, and there’s a small but real risk of encountering a deranged or violent Negro, or a gang of them. That, I’m fairly certain, is the reality in every American city big enough to have a subway, and probably in many European cities these days as well. Why do I bring this up? Because having taken the subway/metro in Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Tashkent, Santiago (Chile) and elsewhere – and now here in Dubai – it always struck me how utterly safe and routine it was, without the slightest worry, in total contrast to the American urban landscape.
So anyway, I was well situated, with a metro stop close by, just two minutes away, along with a supermarket which sold inexpensive prepared meals. I took a walk down the busy street and crossed over on one of those pedestrian overpasses where you go up the stairs on one side and down on the other. A small sign in Arabic and English stated that it was illegal to walk across the street, which would be foolish to do anyway with all that traffic. But still, illegal? Arrested for jaywalking?
I got the tourist information I needed at my hotel and spent a full day doing the tourist thing by way of one of those open air, hop-on hop-off buses on a route easy to understand and navigate, making for an enjoyable day. One stop was at the Dubai Mall, by some accounts the world’s largest, which was adjacent to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. I was unaware of both these facts, though not to be outdone, the Saudis are now constructing the Jeddah Tower, which will top the Burj by 558 feet. That fits in with my impression of Dubai – that these countries are awash in so much oil wealth that they can throw money away forever on the most senseless projects. I rode that Dubai bus for miles and miles and we passed countless modern shops, hotels and restaurants that, like the luxury stores inside the Dubai Mall, appeared to have very few customers but no one cares because everyone is rich, except for the expats from poor Asian countries, mainly India, who comprise more than 80% of the population and do practically all the physical labor. From the little that I’d read about Dubai, I expected it to be the most artificial and soulless city on earth, and that was my exact impression. Yet it also has a Western veneer, drawing athletes and celebrities from Europe and North America – the Beach Boys were scheduled to perform soon when I was there – and more recently weirdo mongrel singer Beyonce gave a private concert to commemorate the grand opening of Atlantis The Royal, an ultra-luxury resort. She was paid $24 million, a record sum for a single performance.
There are people who are into this sort of thing, just like there are people who get excited about New York City. On a website called theculturetrip.com, a Jessica Harn wrote, “Dubai is one of those cities that just never fails to impress. Its location, the huge population of expats, the riches, the traditions, and the vibrant culture are just a few of the reasons why so many people are drawn to this dynamic city.” Hey, why not stay at the St. Regis Saadiyat Island for $35,000 a night, gawk at Lamborghini police cars, and for brunch sip on a gold-infused coffee – that’s right, coffee with gold in it. Yet, quirkily enough, despite Beyonce’s blatant decadence, homosexuality is illegal in the UAE, as it is throughout the Islamic world. In fact, I read somewhere, “In 2021, the UAE was ranked amongst the 20 most dangerous places for LGBTQ tourists,” so I guess it can’t be all bad.
When people ask me about New York, I tell them to see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and leave. Two days is enough. And that’s exactly how I felt about Dubai. Two days was plenty. But seven years and six months later I was back in the UAE, only because I was headed to Afghanistan, and I’d heard that the UAE was one of only two countries in the world, the other being Pakistan, where you could get an Afghan visa at one of the few embassies run by the Taliban with little fuss, even the same day. This turned out to be true. This time I flew nonstop from New York on Etihad, little sister of Emirates, to Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s little sister even though A.D. is the capital. I arrived bright and early and zonked out on May 4, 2024. U.S. citizens do not need a visa to enter the country. “First time here?” the official asked me as he flipped through my newly issued passport. “No, second time,” I said. “I was here in 2016.” But he was testing me, eyes on his screen. “Yes, I see. You left October thirtieth.” I was taken aback for a moment. These countries are in the forefront of every kind of technology, including surveillance. And they’re not exactly what they appear to be. This time I was armed with a Lonely Planet guidebook of the region, and in the introduction they summed up each country in a sentence or two. They certainly had it right about the UAE: “Liberal exterior hides a conservative core.”
I had booked two nights at the 4-star Novotel al-Bustan only because it was within walking distance of the Afghanistan embassy. At $125 a night it seemed like a good deal. Hell, that’s cheaper than just about every budget motel I’ve stayed at in the U.S. in recent years, though the curry smell is always free. My plan was to get my visa right away, and leave the next four days open to explore deeper in the country, or maybe even visit Muscat, the capital of neighboring Oman, which would involve a long day of travel each way. But on May 2nd, the day before I left home, I got an email from priceline.com, the online agency I’d purchased my air ticket from, informing me that Kam Air, the Afghan airline I’d be flying round trip Abu Dhabi – Kabul, had canceled their Saturday flights on this route. Priceline, without consulting me, had rescheduled my flight to Kabul from the 11th to the 12th. I didn’t like this one bit because it created a problem meeting up at the beginning of the tour in Kabul. On their site, Priceline states that they aren’t responsible for any such changes, which must be taken up with the airline – good luck trying to contact Kam Air – and in any event, I could not get a real person on the phone when I called Priceline, which is based in Connecticut. Goddam this inhuman high-tech world. Just before I left for JFK on the 3rd, I spoke on the phone with Joe Sheffer, owner of the tour company Safarat who’d be our guide in Afghanistan – he was in London at the time – informing him of my dilemma. He was understanding but insistent that I arrive in Kabul on the 11th the latest. The way I left it was that, after arriving in Abu Dhabi, I’d head to the Kam Air office in Dubai, 90 miles away – they don’t have an office in Abu Dhabi – and try to straighten this out. Kam Air still had a daily flight from Dubai, so I could shoot for either the 10th or 11th. What a pain in the ass all of this was, especially for someone who’s proud to be the last traveler on earth who carries no communication devices.
In any case, I wanted to get to the Novotel, but not with any of the taxi drivers who accosted me in the arrivals hall. I’m wary of every taxi driver in the world, especially in Arab countries. That may not be fair, but I still suffer from Morocco-itis, the dread of being insanely overcharged, a driver demanding $30 for a ride that should cost $5, and an ensuing violent argument. That never happened to me, but similar things did. Read my Morocco travelogue on this site, if you haven’t already.
I must confess that I live in the past, and just can’t shake my old way of traveling. And so I came unprepared again. I pictured getting a complimentary street map at the tourist information desk, or buying one at one of the shops in the airport concourse, but no such luck. I’ll tell you how it used to be. I’d arrive at any airport in the world, ask around, and take public transport, usually a bus, into the city. The bus would stop at a transportation hub, that is, a bus or train station, or else a major hotel or some other landmark, and having a rough idea where I’d be staying, though not having made a reservation, with map in hand I knew where to get off and start searching. And at the end of the trip, in a different city, I’d return to the airport the same way on the good old airport bus. Never more than five bucks, usually two or three. Simple. I’m pretty sure it still works this way in most of the world. But not in these oil sheikdoms, though the metro served me well in Dubai.
There’s no metro in Abu Dhabi. There are buses from the airport to downtown, if you can call it downtown, twenty miles away. But I had no map and no one could tell me which bus to take to get to the Novotel. People were familiar with al-Bustan, which is simply the name of a district, so the best I could do was get on a bus which, I was told, went in that direction. I sat in the front, telling the driver I was headed to the Novotel on – wait for it – Sheik Rashid Bin Saeed Street, and to let me off at the closest stop. Looking out the window, I couldn’t get my bearings on anything. He eventually called over to me in some outlying area. He told me what I had to do, cross over, walk to the intersection, go right for two blocks, then go left and catch bus N22 to al-Bustan – or something like that. He spoke excellent English, as most people in these sheikdoms do (except, from what I’ve read, Saudi Arabia), and was very polite and helpful, but I had no idea where the hell I was. There was a pedestrian overpass right there and I walked to the other side, wondering how I’d get to my hotel. I’ve learned to travel very light, taking nothing more than a day pack, but since we’d be spending a few nights at high altitude in Afghanistan, and camping a few nights as well, I was lugging a duffel bag which contained my sleeping bag and some warm clothes. Here, now, it was in the low nineties and please don’t tell me, “Well, it’s dry heat.” Hot is hot, I was tired, jet-lagged, 70 years old, and fed up with all this shit. I wasn’t about to walk a mile or two and get more lost. There was a lay-by which I assumed was for taxis, and a fair amount of traffic. I stood there, trying to flag down a car, any car, and after two minutes one stopped. It was an unmarked taxi. First things first: I told the driver I was headed to the Novotel and asked him how much it would cost. He told me the ride was metered, pointing to the meter, and said it would be roughly thirty AED (Emirati Dirhams), about eight dollars. It turned out he was honest, and I’m glad I took a taxi; it would’ve been a long walk, or a wild goose chase on buses going God knows where.
Reception couldn’t believe me when I told them, after they asked for my mobile phone number, that I didn’t have a phone with me. Word eventually got around to everyone in the lobby whom I dealt with – front desk, security, tour agent – and for the length of my stay, which stretched to four days, I was cordially treated as a likable nut. I was grateful for the two computers in the lobby, which I could easily switch from Arabic to English, and I was able to keep up with world events on the net, but unable to log into my email account, which didn’t surprise me.
The booking I’d made in the U.S. did not include their buffet breakfast, so I asked about this. It cost $21, rather steep, and I thought about sticking with a healthy grab-and-go meal at the small supermarket just steps from the hotel, but I decided to treat myself. I can only describe their breakfast as otherworldly. I started at the coffee machine, where there were eight choices. There was a pitcher of freshly blended carrot juice, and a table piled high with oranges with a knife and a press to squeeze your own juice. Next was the egg station where four cooks made customized omelettes. The tables were covered with wonderful breads, cheeses, pastries, tropical fruits, and a line of chafing dishes with all kinds of specialties from Egypt to India. All you can eat. The only snag was no bacon; after all, it’s an Islamic country. Maybe you’ve stayed in fancy hotels that have buffets like this, but I never have, and being an incorrigible foodie, you could easily talk me into getting on a plane to Abu Dhabi tomorrow to do it all over again. I dove into that feast every morning at the Novotel. It was the highlight of my second trip to the UAE.
I ate breakfast in a room off to the side of the main dining room. A woman wearing a black abaya, sitting alone at the table next to mine, returned to the buffet, leaving her pocketbook on the table out of sight for a few minutes. Another woman at another table did the same thing with her laptop computer. Can you picture this at any American restaurant?
There were quite a few people staying at the hotel, even though it was well past high season and approaching the summer months when the heat is unbearable and everyone stays inside. God help anyone without air conditioning, but everyone seems to have it. The Asian Ju-Jitsu championship was taking place, and among the hotel guests was a contingent of athletes, some of them wearing their track suits with their countries lettered on the back. I saw several from Laos, Iraq and Mongolia. It was nice to see this token of normalcy among the first two countries, large areas of which were obliterated by our air terrorists, and I was tempted to pull up a chair with the Iraqis, introduce myself as an American, and get their side of the story regarding “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” but I didn’t. As to the Mongolians, their faces gave me the creeps. Generally speaking, the eastern half of the Asian land mass, not counting most of India and Russia, is the home of the slant-eyed races, but in my observation, Mongolians are more slit-eyed than slant-eyed. They’re a cruel-looking subrace. I can usually distinguish them from other Orientals, even though I’ve never been to Mongolia. I can only imagine the horror they aroused in Germany when their raping, murdering hordes, egged on by Jewish Bolshevik hate propaganda, swarmed in from the east in the closing months of World War Two.
My plan was to head to the Afghanistan embassy first thing on Monday morning and get the visa taken care of, then figure out the rest. Around 5:30 that morning someone slipped a sheet of paper under my door, then knocked. It was an email to the hotel addressed to me, sent by Joe Sheffer. I had notified him before leaving home that I’d be staying at the Novotel. He also had my flight information, and had gotten my flight moved ahead one day ahead to the 10th after getting through to Priceline. Bless him for doing that, and curse me for not being more persistent and getting all this nonsense resolved before leaving home. But I still had to confirm the date change, which I did later that afternoon when I managed to get through to Priceline from the telephone in my room. It took the nitwits half an hour to get it straightened out in their system, during which I was put on hold. The call cost me $80, goddammit.
The previous day, Sunday, I had asked the friendly doorman if he knew how to get to the Afghan embassy. He was very helpful, studying his smartphone screen. Cross Sheik Rashid…Street, then walk two blocks, make a right, then one more block and make a left. I wrote down the names of the streets and walked there, just to make sure I’d find it no problem on Monday morning. Locating it was easy enough. It was in a rather bleak area with many other embassies and nothing else. All the streets in Abu Dhabi are signposted in Arabic and English. The streets are not clean, they’re immaculate. That’s because littering is a crime. You can go to jail for it.
I had my visa by noon, and by then, knowing that I’d be having one less day in the UAE than originally planned, I was leaning towards staying in Abu Dhabi for the remainder of my time. As I said, I wanted to see more of the country – a small country, the size of Maine – and I had picked out the Liwa Oasis, which seemed fairly interesting beyond the tourist hype of dune bashing and camel rides into the sunset, but I was wary about showing up without a reservation at one of the few resort hotels, and the pricing was unclear, as were the exact locations in relation to the bus station, which itself was a mystery. The city of al-Ain sounded alluring, particularly its daily camel market, but was it worth the hassle? As for Muscat, with one less day, that was out of the question but reflecting on it now, I can’t believe I even considered it, so rushed I would’ve been getting there and back, not to mention unforeseen delays in crossing the border in either direction.
Public transportation was the root of the problem for any option, and actually it’s a problem in the entire region for anyone like me who will always be a budget backpacker at heart. Even though there are hardly any railroad tracks and no passenger train service at all, except in Saudi Arabia, and even though the roads are excellent everywhere, there just aren’t that many buses that cover even relatively short distances. Nor could I get a straight story from any helpful hotel employee, or from the internet, as to a schedule, whether a reservation was necessary, whether collective taxis or minibuses ran to Liwa, and so forth. Not only that, but no one could tell me for certain whether buses departed from the central bus station, or how to get there, or from Musaffrah or al-Shahama, names of other stations I got off the net – or were they just bus stops, not stations? It was hopeless, so I said the hell with Liwa.
I decided to book two more nights at the Novotel, and the final night at the Premier Inn, located right next to the airport, just for peace of mind. Also, there was a falcon hospital I’d read about in my guidebook that I wanted to visit, close to the airport and far from the Novotel. The only other place that interested me was the Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque. But visiting even these two places, right in the city, was difficult unless you wanted to hire a private car. There was a plump, friendly Indian man at the tour desk who always smiled and said hello to me, the weirdo without a smartphone, each time I walked past him to take the elevator to my room. I sat down with him to discuss inexpensive tours of the city, and all he had was a flier, which I’m looking at right now, for one of those hop-on hop-off buses. But unlike the same thing I’d done in Dubai in 2016, this one was confusing in every way, beginning with where I had to go to pick it up, and it didn’t even stop at the Grand Mosque and the falcon hospital. And of the fifteen places that it did stop none looked interesting, and most seemed downright dull.
In the meantime I had to check in for two more nights. There was a sign indicating room rates in the local currency, AED. When I calculated it into dollars, I almost fainted: $720 for one night? For a room I’d booked in the U.S. for $125?? But when I brought this up with the receptionist, who was probably Thai or Filipino, she said that was the high season rate, and booked me in for slightly less, actually, than what I’d already paid for the first two nights. Still, I couldn’t believe the price discrepancy, and that they’d charge that much for a room that was perfectly adequate for me, but was nothing fancier than what you get at Motel 6. So just now as I’m writing, late November, high season I guess, I checked their website, and sure enough, you’re looking at $680 a night. Quirky, eh?
I hated the idea of hiring a car and driver for $150 for a half-day tour of Abu Dhabi, especially as there seemed to be no chance of splitting the cost with another hotel guest. It’s just not who I am. I’d only done this once in my life for something truly special, a full day tour of battle sites in Vietnam in 2013 for $120, which was worth every penny. But, well, I’d never be coming here again, and there was nothing else to do but stay in the hotel and read a book or diddle on the computer for two days, so I had Rahm arrange a half-day tour which would take in the Grand Mosque, but not the falcon hospital because there wasn’t enough time, and I wasn’t about to shell out $250 for a full day.
My driver was a Pakistani named Ahmed, and our first stop was an “art gallery” where all the exhibits were for sale. Oh boy, what a way to start. Pakistanis aren’t Arabs but I guess they learn fast. There actually was a lot of nice stuff there, including silver jewelry, but I made it clear to Ahmed and the “curator” that I wasn’t buying anything. “No buy, just to look.” Yeah, I’ve heard that one before, in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan….They were disappointed – no sale for the curator and no rake-off for Ahmed – but they accepted it graciously. The curator even said, “Thank you for your time.”
Ahmed wasn’t a bad guy to talk to, to get a foreign worker’s perspective on the UAE. He worked nine months, sent most of his earnings to his family in Pakistan, and returned home for the summer months to escape the lethal heat, though most of Pakistan is no bargain in the summer either. He liked the UAE because there was very little corruption compared to Pakistan, where corruption was out of control, he said. We drove around as he pointed out various buildings, including the forgettable presidential palace. We drove along the corniche, the long promenade separating the Persian Gulf from the skyscrapers, which also was boring and a poor choice for a relaxing stroll though it’s pretty much the only option. Here and there were skyscrapers with really odd architecture which faintly interested me, though I’ve since asked myself what goes on in those gazillions of square feet of office space. It seems like you can fit the entire UAE population in them with room to spare.
Aside from the Grand Mosque, which I’ll come to, the only other place I remember is Heritage Village, an Arab version of Colonial Williamsburg, though much smaller, where they’ve recreated what life was like in the old days, that is, before the discovery of oil which transformed the entire region. There were even a few goats and camels. On the floor of some of the open-air exhibits I saw those blue Covid stickers telling people to stand two meters (six and a half feet) apart but happily they were relics of the past worn out by foot traffic, and no one was paying any attention to them. Heritage Village was okay, and I would’ve liked to linger a bit longer, but it was so damn hot out, around ninety-five, and I was anxious to get back in Ahmed’s air-conditioned car.
The highlight of the day was the Grand Mosque. It’s gleaming white, absolutely enormous, and extremely beautiful on the inside and outside. All kinds of superlatives describe it. Yet I’d never heard of it before coming to Abu Dhabi. Now why would that be? Perhaps, as I discovered to my astonishment, because it was built only recently: construction began in 1994 and was completed in 2007. It has no historical significance whatsoever. Beautiful as it is, it appears to be just one more example of an Arab sheik keeping up with the Joneses, and doing them one better. You get to the mosque only after going through tight security and a labyrinthine ultra-modern shopping mall below it. What this has to do with religion I have no clue but it certainly is a money maker. Everything here was expensive, just like at airport shops. One of my goals in life is to cover my refrigerator door with magnets from around the U.S. and the whole world, a hobby I started only eight years ago. I’m about two-thirds of the way there. I couldn’t leave Abu Dhabi without adding to my collection, but really, ten bucks for a friggin’ magnet?
Signs along the pleasant gardens that surround the mosque urge visitors, as everywhere in Arabic and English, to be patient and tolerant. One thing I must say about the UAE is that they’re tolerant of foreign visitors wearing shorts (though never inside mosques), more so, I believe, than anywhere else in the Arab world, though personally I never do in any Islamic country out of respect and because you never know who it may offend – and shorts are definitely a no-no in the most conservative countries. On the other hand, there is no tolerance for public displays of affection between men and women, and if you doubt that, there were signs illustrating couples embracing with the customary circle and slash mark. So let’s see: in the UAE you can be arrested for being a queer, for badmouthing President Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed, for littering, for failing to use a pedestrian overpass, and for hugging, kissing or even holding hands with your wife or girlfriend. As a homophobe I like the first one, and I can live with the rest. Just behave yourself and you won’t have any problems.
Ahmed gave me an hour to explore the Grand Mosque on my own, which worked out well. He told me he’d meet me out at the Starbucks in the underground mall and he showed up right on time. We were now three hours into the four-hour tour we had agreed on, but I’d seen enough of Abu Dhabi and saw no reason to drive around for another hour. He was happy to cut it short and take me back to the hotel.
I like a challenge and I like to save money, so the day before I left for the Premier Inn I determined whether I could get there by bus rather than taking a taxi. The doorman again tried to help, telling me I had to catch a bus on al-Zahiyah Street, and how to get there, but I couldn’t find the bloody street. There was a bus stop directly across from the Novotel so I waited there until one stopped. Taking only one step in so the driver wouldn’t drive off, I asked him if I could catch a bus to the airport at this stop. No, he said, there’s another stop down the road where bus 53 or some such number goes to the airport. Can I pay cash after boarding? I asked. No, he said, cash isn’t accepted. I needed a ticket, which I could buy at a Lulu supermarket, a local chain. I had no idea where the nearest Lulu was. I was getting annoyed with all this, but just for the hell of it I stayed there and waited in the scorching sun for another bus to stop, to confirm what I had just been told. This second driver gave me completely different instructions on where to catch the airport bus. Enough was enough. I’d enjoy the rest of the day and tomorrow take a taxi.
The driver was a likable young man from Nepal. Like seemingly every Asian guest worker in the UAE – and they make up the great bulk of the population – he had left an impoverished country to earn money to support his family back home. I remember that we had a lively conversation about out of control technology. He lamented that his two-year-old son back home was always preoccupied with electronic gadgets.
I guessed that there was a vacancy at the Premier Inn but I had no idea. If worse came to worst – if it was full, and if the price was too high – I could always crash on the airport floor, leaving my duffel bag there during the day and finding something to do. But they did have rooms available for $129 a night with breakfast, not bad at all, and while the breakfast next morning didn’t compare to that of the Novotel, it was still pretty good.
The only thing on my wish list now was to visit the falcon hospital, which according to my guidebook was near the airport. There was a row of taxis in front of the hotel looking for business, so following protocol I approached the front one. The driver opened the door and told me to get in. He was so ugly that I balked at first, but I did get in. He was from Bangladesh. His English was difficult to follow and I just plain disliked him. Furthermore, it seemed like we were driving a long time on desolate back roads and I wondered if he was doing this to jack up the fare. When we finally arrived he told me the fare was five AED higher than what the meter showed because it had started at five. Was he serious? I rounded off the fare and gave him a lousy tip. He asked me if he should wait to take me back to the hotel and I said no.
I had read that you had to make a reservation online to take a tour of the hospital, but I strongly object to that policy and took my chances by just showing up. I’m glad I did. I only had to wait fifteen minutes, and the only other people on the tour were a British couple. The tour was educational and enjoyable. There were five or six veterinarians on duty, both men and women, wearing blue scrubs. They were all Arab or otherwise Asian and appeared to be caring people. There were about twenty falcons wearing cute leather helmets and standing on perches in the large operating room. All were obviously accustomed to humans and relaxed. As we watched and listened to an explanation, one of the birds was anesthetized before having its claws clipped and undergoing a minor procedure. A few concerned falcon owners were milling around. It was clear that they cherished their birds.
From what I understand, and I might be wrong, falconing is the nearly exclusive preserve of wealthy Arabs. I don’t recall seeing any in the countries of north Africa, or in Syria and Jordan. They can be trained to hunt, of course, but there isn’t much in the desert that a falcon can catch and bring to the table. It’s more of a hobby. A word, incidentally, about pets in Arab culture. Arabs, generally speaking, are not dog lovers. Offhand, in my travels through the Arab world, I don’t recall seeing anyone taking a dog for a walk. In fact, calling an Arab a dog is one of the worst insults imaginable. On the other hand, they have a real affection for cats. It’s common to see them traipsing around inside shops, and there are many strays. The people seem to take good care of them, often leaving food scraps on sidewalks or other areas where they hang out.
I had the receptionist at the hospital call a taxi to take me back to the hotel. One arrived in ten minutes. This guy was a Pakistani, who I disliked only slightly less than the guy from Bangladesh. He told me he arrived in the UAE only recently and was new on the job. He said he hadn’t eaten in 24 hours. Your company can’t even give you a sandwich? I asked. No, he said. It was May 8; he said he wouldn’t be getting paid until June 15. I guess I was supposed to believe all this. I would’ve tipped him better if he hadn’t been such a liar.
As with the Novotel, I was struck by the politeness of everyone who worked in the Premier Inn. Based on my earlier travels in Arab countries, I had concluded that, by and large, they are the world’s rudest people. Now I had to reconsider. Even the no smoking sign in my room was polite. It began: “We’d like to ask you nicely….No smoking. (Please.)” But below that, it got down to business:
“Our smoke alarms are super sensitive and will go off. Smoking anywhere in this hotel will result in a 500 AED charge.”
My flight to Kabul was at 3AM, so after checking out I headed to the airport. I had fourteen hours to kill. I’d brought along two paperbacks that I still had from my high school days and which I didn’t mind rereading: Wandering by Herman Hesse and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I read both from to cover to cover and when I was done I left them on a seat for someone else to read. The airport is much smaller than the one in Dubai, though every bit as spanking new, and even more progressive, since there are no announcements until you get to the gate area. A sign explained that cutting out the noise made the departure hall more pleasant, and I heartily agreed. These people really do have some good ideas. And that was my last look at the United Arab Emirates.
For some reason I regretted missing out on Muscat, and while Oman never tantalized me that much I was still curious about it. Almost never do I take two trips abroad in the same year, but I did in 2024. And I wanted to get it in before our election because I was concerned that there might be all kinds of disruptions at American airports if Trump was elected, though that hasn’t happened. Finally, because I’m eccentric, I was happier than usual to give Oman the honor of being the one hundredth country I visited. Since I was to get there on Qatar Airways, New York to Doha to Muscat, Qatar would be the ninety-ninth. I planned a two-day stopover in Doha, the capital, before flying on to Muscat.
These days, or I should say these years, I never leave home without pre-booking a hotel room for my initial stay after a long flight. I’m not going to go tramping around looking for a place like I did all the time when I was younger and on my own, and there was no internet. I’m getting too old for that. Anyway, I did some ‘net surfing and decided on two nights at the 4-star Gloria Hotel and Suites, which seemed like an impossible bargain at $49 a night, including all fees and taxes.
Unbeknownst to me, I had to buy a tourist visa for $21 at passport control in Doha, and I couldn’t pay cash, only credit card. The woman, in traditional Islamic dress, was a bit testy – these people are never pleasant anywhere, actually – asking me where I was staying in Doha, a question I half expected, but then surprising me by asking for my mobile phone number. I gave it to her, but didn’t tell her that I’d left my phone at home, afraid that this might cause a problem, and among the important things I’ve learned in life is that you should never tell strangers anything they don’t need to know. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the near future, some universal digital law will make it impossible to travel without a smartphone. That’s the day I officially become the last of the Mohicans, and that was another reason I wanted to take this trip in 2024. Anyway, welcome to Qatar.
Doha has a metro with a station at Hamad International Airport, but unlike Dubai it’s hard to find and it’s a long walk from the arrivals hall, where surprisingly I got a street map of the city at the information desk. But it wasn’t very detailed, and didn’t show al-Safliyah Street, the Gloria’s address. I asked some guy where the metro station was, and he pointed the right way, but I still couldn’t find the damn thing which, it turned out, had to be reached by an elevator. This I found out from three young men I stopped to ask, whose badges on their starched white uniforms revealed that they were bakery workers. While I was at it, I asked if they knew how to get to the Gloria Hotel. None of them had heard of it, but all three dug out their smartphones to check, and I was again pleased by how helpful all Arabs in the Gulf countries seemed to be. It took nearly five minutes before one was able to locate al-Safliyah Street and determine that the Gloria was a 14-minute walk from the nearest metro stop, Souq Wakif. That’s about a mile. Bummer. I was hoping it was closer. But all I had was a day pack, and while I could’ve taken a taxi, of course, I found myself in the frame of mind I’ve carried through life: Why do something the easy way when you can do it the hard way?
You had to buy a ticket for the metro, and fortunately there were two pleasant young ladies who worked there to assist knuckleheads like me who have a hard time figuring out how to use those damn vending machines, human ticket sellers having gone the way of the brontosaurus in most of this technologically obsessed world. They even had a small fold-out map of the metro system, which I gladly accepted. So, okay: from the airport take the red line to Msheireb, stopping at Oqba Ibn Nafie, al-Matar al-Qadeem, Umm Ghuwailina, al-Doha al-Jadeda, then Msheiereb, which is a transfer station, then take the gold line one stop to Souq Waqif. Nothing to it – really! With announcements in English, it couldn’t be easier.
Souq Waqif is where the fun started. Ascending the stairs to the street, where it was hot enough to bake a pie, having no idea where I was, I began approaching passersby to ask directions. I asked seven or eight, but they just smiled or shook their heads. A driver must’ve been watching me because he pulled alongside the curb and said, “Where you going?” “The Gloria Hotel.” “Get in.” “How far is it from here?” “Get in, I take you.” I could’ve refused, of course, but at this point I was resigned to getting there by car. “How much do I have to pay you?” “Don’t worry.” Sure, don’t worry, the old Arab line. Well, what can you do?
He asked me my name and I told him. “And what’s your name?” “Arafat.” “Like Yassir Arafat?” He laughed and slapped my leg. Cool, I thought. His parents had named him after the late Palestinian leader, though it did seem like an odd first name. As I had figured, the Gloria was about a mile away, but he took several curvy little streets to get there, and directionally challenged as I am without a street map, I’d still be wandering around looking for it. And unlike Dubai and Abu Dhabi where all streets are signposted, in Doha you’ll find signs only on the main thoroughfares. Arafat wanted ten dollars for the ride. Having changed a hundred dollars into Qatari riyals at the airport, I offered him 25 riyals, about seven bucks, and he was satisfied with that. He offered to show me around the city later and wrote his phone number on some paper I had. I smiled and didn’t tell him that I had no phone, though I wouldn’t have minded using him as a guide.
Unlike any hotel I stayed at in the UAE and later in Oman, at the Gloria guests had to put their bags through an X-ray machine. There were two security men, blacker than my black cat Kochka, and that’s pretty darn black. I guessed that they were expats from some African country. They were friendly and polite, as were all the hotel employees. It was 11 AM, and check-in time was three. The lobby was small but cozy. There was only one couch to sit on. I was jet-lagged, of course, after a 12-hour flight eight time zones away, wondering what to do for the next four hours. There was an old-fashioned newspaper rack in the lobby, something I hadn’t seen in years, with papers in both Arabic and English. I had a look at the English language version of the regionally published Gulf Times. It was the most boring thing I’d ever seen, even worse than any brain-dead American rag. It was filled with pabulum from countries around the world, though there was a small article on the flood devastation in North Carolina. There was only one brief, neutral story about Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, recently murdered by the Israelis, and nothing else about what was happening in Gaza. The prevailing attitude among Gulf politicians and journalists, and even ordinary people, seems to be “We feel terrible about what’s happening to our fellow Arabs, but Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are far away and it’s not our problem.”
Just recently I read a vital book, Understanding the War Industry by Christian Sorensen, which threw light on the subject. With the exception of Yemen, I did not realize how chummy the Gulf countries are with Uncle Samuel, and how much business America’s death merchants, like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, conduct in the region. Saudi Arabia and the UAE seem to be the most closely connected, and all this bears on the fair to good relations these countries have with Israel, their lip service to the Palestinian cause notwithstanding. They want to stay on Uncle’s good side. There are U.S. bases and a U.S. military presence all over the place here, and Uncle’s naval ships call in regularly. Qatar appears to be an outlier in this respect, or at least it was in the past, insofar as the government sympathized with some hardcore Islamist elements, which is the last thing the oil sheiks want in this region. For a while there was bad blood between Qatar and its neighbors. Maybe there still is, even though they maintain normal diplomatic relations. I haven’t looked into this and don’t know much about it.
Qatar is a tiny nipple of a country sticking out of the huge tit of Saudi Arabia. Picture Rhode Island grafted onto Texas. From what I gather, there is literally nothing of interest in this sandbox outside of Doha, and little worth seeing in Doha itself, unless you’re into kinky skyscraper architecture, stranger than anything I saw in the UAE. So there I was, sitting on the couch, waiting for them to get my room ready. Near me was a woman sitting at a desk, doing nothing but checking her phone messages. She was a tour consultant, even though there’s nothing to see in this silly little country. Nevertheless, Doha is a major city, sort of, I had two full days here, so I thought maybe she could arrange a city tour for me now, the first day, so I could get it over with and feel like I’d done something worthwhile in Qatar, rather than just tick it off. That’s a hell of an attitude, isn’t it? I walked over, sat down, and asked her if she could whistle up a driver to show me around, offering $100 for three hours. She agreed. I mentioned Arafat, but she insisted on supplying her own man.
Mohammed was a fun, high-energy kind of guy, fluent in English, but he spoke so fast and his accent was so strong that I couldn’t understand half of what he said, and had to pretend. Nevertheless I was happy to spend most of the time in his car listening to him babble because it had to be 100 degrees outside, and throw in some humidity because Doha sits right on the Persian Gulf. We drove along the corniche, every bit as unremarkable as the one in Abu Dhabi, and corkscrewed back to Souq Wakif, where my metro ride had ended earlier. I hadn’t realized it, but right in that area, the only area where I saw any old, traditional buildings in Doha, the falcon souq and the gold souq are located. (Souq, also spelled souk, is the Arabic word for market.) Mohammed dropped me off here to wander around for a half-hour, and I enjoyed it as much as the hospital in Abu Dhabi, though it was different in character. This is the place to buy one of these regal birds, and several locals were carefully appraising them. I didn’t see a hospital but there was a falcon pharmacy, and also craftsmen making accessories. It’s definitely worth a visit the next time you’re in Doha. As for the nearby gold souq, that’s supposed to be quite an attraction too but I wasn’t in the mood for a visit.
So we drove around, Mohammed pointing out the presidential palace, though I thought he said residential balance. He brought me to the National Museum, telling me he’d pick me up in an hour. I don’t want to sound like the guy who’s seen it all, but I’ve been to so many museums around the world that they all start to look the same and it takes something really special to interest me. Well, this was just that. Exhibits showing natural features and human history in the region, going back to neolithic times, were attractively laid out, but even better was footage showing what life was like in these parts a century ago. It was a hard life of scrounging for survival, and I’m afraid that when the oil runs out, that’s what life is going to return to. This footage was displayed on the widest screen I have ever seen in my life, one for the Guinness Book of World Records. The other section that really fascinated me was one focusing solely on the oil industry, something I know very little about. There were all kinds of pipes, pumps, bits, drills, heads, whatever you call them, used to extract oil from under the earth’s surface. It was very educational, but I had to rush through it to meet up with Mohammed. I wish I had spent another hour there.
The Museum of Islamic Art is also supposed to be superb but I never got there. On my second day in Doha, I did very little, but late in the afternoon I went for a walk. I wasn’t aware of it, but the Gloria was close to a busy street where I could make a mental note of landmarks without getting lost, and when I got there I could see the museum, with its distinctive shape, off in the distance. I could’ve walked there earlier in the day, but it was around closing time now. What can you do?
Alcohol is a touchy subject in these Gulf countries. Apparently locals can legally buy it somehow, though outside of airport duty free shops its availability is extremely limited. I never saw an alcohol product for sale anywhere. Some hotels have bars that serve foreign guests, and some, like the Gloria, don’t. But they did have room service. I looked at the price list: a bottle of one of the familiar international beers, like Heineken, cost $13, a bottle of wine averaged $90, and – believe me when I tell you this – a bottle of Jack Daniels was more than $700! And by the way, being visibly drunk in public in the UAE, and probably Qatar and the rest of them too, will get you arrested.
I flew to Muscat on the afternoon of my third day in Doha. A few final observations. The Gloria was all I could ask for in a hotel – nothing luxurious, a kind of scaled-down boutique-y kind of place, but it had all the amenities that people go for but I never use, like a gym, a massage room, an outdoor rooftop swimming pool, stuff like that. For my tastes, it was perfect. I couldn’t believe it was so inexpensive, and when I opened my Visa bill after returning home I braced myself for a shock, because you never know with these online companies, especially when they compute the local currency into dollars, but there it was, 98 bucks for two nights. The deal of the year. And I was charged $20.88 for my tourist visa, so they were honest about that too.
Finally, all the security bullshit at these airports really irritates me. It’s not quite as bad as in the U.S. with the TSA (Those Stupid Assholes) but the flotsam among humanity everywhere have to find some kind of government job, so if you want to fly in the post 9/11 world you have to put up with it – for now. I wish I had written down the details of what I saw at the security check at the airport, but it was something very close to this. You had to put your carry-on bag on the conveyor belt of the X-ray machine then walk through the metal detector, as in every airport. On the other side of the automated turnstile-gate you walk through was a small screen showing a woman, dressed like a stewardess, with a stern facial expression. Once you clear the metal detector the gate unlocks and she breaks into a gentle smile. As I’ve said, the leaders of these Gulf countries, who don’t know what to do with all their money, love to throw it at whatever the world’s rapidly multiplying techno-geeks dream up. I’ve seen video clips of them sitting in auditoriums, in traditional Arab dress, where all the latest cyborg lunacy is paraded on stage. And that’s all I have to say about Qatar, though I forgot to mention earlier that the UAE has a minister of artificial intelligence. Maybe Qatar does too. Maybe they all do.
By any stretch of reason, I should’ve spent much more space in this article on Oman, which is by far the most rewarding of the three to visit, but I’m going to fill you in on just a little, mainly because I’ve written way too much already, flying by the seat of my pants as it were, am unhappy with my jaded tone, and regret wasting all this time on something I suspect will not be appreciated by most readers though I hope I’m wrong. Also, I visited Oman on a group tour, eight days with nine people and an excellent Omani guide named Farid, but I created this page to write about my independent travels, just winging it alone, which is the way I’ve done it eighty percent of the time, though as I’ve gotten older and traveled less, I’ve joined small groups much more often.
Oman is a mellow country which, I’m sure, has more character and more interesting places to go than any other in the Gulf, with the possible exception of Yemen, its neighbor to the west, much of which is currently off limits to foreigners for obvious reasons. We didn’t go anywhere near the border. This is not Trip Advisor, so I won’t bother listing the ten best things to do in Oman, other than to say that we had the authentic Arab experience that I had missed out on, not that I really cared, in the UAE – the bustling fish market thing, the livestock auction thing (cattle not camels), and the camping in the sand dunes thing (where we did see camels). Speaking of camels, everyone knows they’re a part of Arab culture, and Farid told us that camel races are a big thing, and champions are worth a fortune. There’s no betting; it’s all about prestige. Outside of Muscat we passed a race track where a single camel was doing a practice run. Farid explained that jockeys, who would whip the animals to make them go faster (as they used to do to horses in Western countries) no longer ride on the camels, but an electronic whip of sorts is still attached to their haunches and operated remotely. How weird can you get? On the one day that we drove for hours on a sand track through the desert, we saw several camels, all domesticated, some with GPS devices around their necks in case they strayed too far from the encampments where their Bedouin owners lived.
You won’t find any skyscrapers in Muscat or anywhere else in Oman. Farid pointed to the country’s tallest building, which was all of fourteen stories high. Here’s an interesting tidbit: We were in the souq in the historic city of Nizwa, and there was a guy at a table with three rifles on it. They were for sale, and men would drift by and heft them, though I didn’t see anyone buy one. There was also a gun store nearby selling pistols and long guns, where I did some window shopping. I asked Farid about it. He said anyone can buy or sell a gun to anyone else, no permit needed. And here I’m thinking that in America, in most states anyway, we have the most easygoing gun ownership laws in the world. Not so. See what you learn by traveling? Farid said that nearly all guns in the country are used for ceremonial purposes, like weddings, adding that in 2021 there was only one murder in a population of five million. The country is safe, the people are nice, and from everything I saw the government, under Sultan and Prime Minister Haitham bin Tariq, is as benevolent and progressive as a citizen could ask for. But to repeat myself ad nauseum, like the rest of the Gulf, it’s not a destination for budget backpackers. If you want to go there, go on a group tour, or if you’re up to it, rent a car. The roads are great, as are the road signs, all white on blue, all in Arabic and English. On that note, incidentally, drivers are much more civilized, at least in the cities, than elsewhere in the region. There’s very little horn blowing compared, say, to Cairo, which is automotive hell.
I do want to relate the one appalling thing I witnessed in the combined eighteen days I spent in these three countries. Some of us were walking along the corniche in Muscat, with its little shops and coffee houses much more delightful than the drab seaside in Doha and Abu Dhabi. A few cats were roaming around when a big man talking gibberish to himself came along. Without warning he kicked a cat with full force, and the poor thing went sailing through the air like a soccer ball. It ran off limping, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it crawled off somewhere and died from internal bleeding. Three older men enjoying their coffee at an outdoor table muttered angrily. One of them looked at me and just shook his head. No one wanted to confront the lunatic, who kept walking and mumbling.
Going all the way back to 1981, I have now visited ten Arab countries – all except Algeria and Oman, traveling alone, dealing with people in hotels, restaurants, on public transport, occasionally talking with ordinary folks about political realities in the region – so to put it modestly, I think I have a better handle on that part of the world than most Americans. When I’m reincarnated I’d like to visit Libya and Yemen; in this lifetime prospects don’t look good. I have zero interest in visiting the other fabulously wealthy oil sheikdoms. Microscopic Bahrain, I read somewhere, is the world’s most boring country, and likewise, from what I understand, Kuwait is nowheresville. As for Saudi Arabia, which, until it threw open its doors to foreign tourism three years ago, was off limits forever to just about everyone but Muslims and expatriate oil field workers, it holds no mysteries for me. I’m done with the Arab world. It’s been most enriching to see what I’ve seen, and I’ve done my best to wean readers away from the distorted images of Jewish television, and convey what I’ve learned in an entertaining way, in this essay, and in two others on this page, one of which covers Morocco exclusively, the other Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine. In those two more polished travelogues, and in this rambling, slaphappy essay, I’ve tried to put you in my shoes to experience Arab countries as they really are at ground level – the truth of which you’d probably never learn otherwise. I hope I’ve succeeded.
* * *
Now that last sentence would’ve been the fitting way to end this, but troublemaker that I am, I had to add this postscript. Two items about the UAE came to my attention when I was nearly done writing. I’m looking at one on the screen right now, a November 15 BBC article headed “Man traumatised after arrest in Abu Dhabi for bad review.” It’s about a 33-year-old citizen of Northern Ireland named Craig Ballentine who had once worked as a dog groomer in Dubai – quirky in itself, because as I wrote, few Arabs keep dogs as pets, and I never saw one in the UAE, but then Dubai is the world’s most peculiar city. But here’s the wild part: Ballentine had a falling out with his boss and returned to Northern Ireland, where he posted some nasty things about him on social media in 2023, though the article did not quote from it, so we don’t know exactly what he said. In any event, he returned to the UAE in October 2024, to visit friends, so we read, and was arrested at the Abu Dhabi airport for writing the hostile review and held incommunicado for seventeen hours before being released. As I write these words, on December 3, he’s free to move around but he cannot work nor can he leave the country until the authorities decide either to drop charges or put him on trial. According to the article, “….the UAE’s strict cybercrime laws mean there is a chance he could be jailed for the remarks he made in the online review.” Some British politicians have taken up Ballentine’s cause and given it publicity. Of course, the BBC reporter may have omitted some important details, but one thing is perfectly clear: Ballentine never expected to be arrested when he returned to the UAE. There’s a follow-up article on November 22: “Man detained in Dubai just wants home for Christmas.” For the moment, the case remains unresolved.
Then there’s 18-year-old London negro Marcus Fakana, who was vacationing in Dubai with his parents when he met another Londoner (race unspecified), a 17-year-old girl, also there with her parents. They had a fling, which comes naturally at that age. She was close to her eighteenth birthday. Had she been 18, it would’ve been legal. Instead, he’s looking at twenty years in prison. Her mother started it all after returning to the U.K., going through her daughter’s phone, finding steamy text messages, then alerting the police in Dubai where the kid was still staying with his parents. Read the November 22 BBC article for yourself: “Briton, 18, faces Dubai jail for sex with girl, 17.” Again, I suspect the BBC is leaving out a key fact or two, but no one disputes that penetration was consensual. It certainly wasn’t rape. The authorities in this strange country released a statement: “Under UAE law, the girl is legally classified as a minor, and in accordance with procedures recognised internationally, her mother – being the legal guardian – filed the complaint.” I’m the last person to sympathize with a black man charged with a sex crime, but this does seem rather ridiculous. Young Marcus’s trial is set for December 9 , and I must say it’s not looking good for him.
You know something? It never ends. I just found another story on the ‘net without even looking for it, a July 17, 2023 Newsweek article, “Houston Woman Faces Jail for Screaming in Dubai.” It’s pretty funny. I can’t be writing a book here, so if you want to know the details you can easily find and read the story. Yet, after just reading some of the comments below it, and having a sense of fairness, I think you should know that the article triggered some pushback. The best comment is far too long for me to reproduce here, but here are two others in the same vein for you to consider, the first written somewhat ungrammatically: “From the USA, been living in Dubai for a decade. I have zero doubt that much of the real story is missing. Lots of respect shown here and it goes both ways. Great story for Fox News tho, given their accuracy on reporting, who can be surprised. Amazed you guys picked it up without verifying all the deets. Click bait?” To which someone else replied: “Exactly. As a British expat who is a resident of Dubai, we both know Dubai is nothing like how this article portrays. You see these types of people in Dubai all the time, entitled brats that keep pushing their luck and showing crass disregard for UAE laws and when things go wrong they (predictably) attempt to paint these countries in the worst light.”
I instinctively agree with these sentiments, even though I spent very little time in the country. All I can say is, I was always treated first class and had no problems at all. So, is there something we’re not being told about Craig and Marcus? Was old John duped by a typical media lie? Maybe so, but there’s still that niggling fear. Like I said, I have no intention of ever revisiting the Gulf region, and probably nowhere in the Middle East. The thing is, Dubai is the world’s busiest air hub, and many a bargain airfare to so many places involves passing through, if only for a brief layover, to catch a connecting flight. My traveling days are not over yet, and I always look for the cheapest air ticket. Should I ever pass through the UAE again, if only for an hour, and this piece has found its way into a government memory bank where it can raise a red flag, I want to go on record here and now that not one word that I’ve written about the UAE was meant to be critical, and that I would never dream of putting a single aspect of the UAE in anything but the most favorable light.
Wink wink.