Around the world, Dubai, April 2007

The Arabian Interlude

My common travel route these days goes from Kampala via Dubai to Hamburg. Hence on the wings of Emirates Airlines I continue my travel around the world with the Entebbe – Dubai sector. Arriving at about midnight in Dubai after a 7 hours trip with brief stop over in Addis Abeba, the 30 minutes drive to the Oasis Beach Hotel in a seriously undercooled Volvo provides me with another update on the building and construction activity in Dubai.

It’s amazing what these people do here in terms of creating new suburbs with an endless number of high rises. The dimensions are almost unreal and defy normal perceptions of city development. It is hard to imagine how they are going to fill all those millions of square meter with people and where those people are actually coming from or where they live right now. The imagination runs wild and somehow before my inner eye I see a large sea of people somewhere gathering at the gates to Dubai waiting for the boomgates to be opened and flooding into the newly created reality.

At present, though, it means driving around ever changing temporary lane ways along construction sites and protective fences to get to the hotel.

Arriving there at about 1.30 am on the 12th of April it means getting into my room quickly and into bed for a well earned sleep until the early morning.

Given the amount of work waiting on my computer and the fact that I have some internet access in the business centre, I spend most of the day on my room. In the early evening I make my way to the beach side bar for a couple of glasses of wine and I am welcomed by the friendly bar staff who obviously recognise me due to my pipe bag.

A further night in the comfy bed is cut short by the need to get to the airport at 6.00 in the morning of the 13th April and the long wait for the departure to Hamburg. I have worked out – being the champion of scurrile statistics – that on this trip I am spending some 26 hours waiting at assorted airports around the world for my next flight to take off and some 70 hours flighttime. That means that 4 full days in a 34 day trip are spent on transport. Not to talk about the CO2 output which such activity produces. For the real greens I am a fat and flying environmental disaster.

Fat hin disastrous her, I get on my flight to Hamburg and – being the regular patron of Emirates that I have become in recent years - they offer me a spare seat in business class which is mightily appreciated. In the tranquillity of my personal capsule the 7 hours to Hamburg are used for reading and sleeping in relative comfort.