Essex Girl's Wet Dream

Dubai. The Palm. The World. The Burj. Land of the 7 star hotel. Home of the world’s largest shopping mall and indoor ski slope. Mecca for Footballer’s Wives wannabes. Chav central. Not my kind of place at all. And yet after a month of Sudan, squalid, maddening, wonderful, impoverished, magical, confusing Sudan, I found myself quite looking forward to my brief stopover in the Emirates. Not least because they have ATMs and accept credit cards. Not least because I’d just lived in a park for two days, hadn’t eaten for three, and had walked five miles out of town to the airport. And not least because I knew I’d hate it. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it” goes the old saying; and since I really really wanted to knock it, I supposed I’d have to try it.

My reasons for disliking Dubai are more complex than they might appear at first. “You only want to go to places that no-one else goes to” chorus the cynics. “Dangerous places”. And I can see why they might think that. The only way most westerners would go to the Middle East is with a gun (malfunctioning if they’re British) in their hands and a conscription notice in their back pocket. Sudan is nothing more than genocide and famine in Darfur. Syria is the Axis of Evil. Why on earth would you go there? Plenty of backpackers go to South America on their gap years; very few venture to Colombia – “renowned for drug-fuelled violence” is the shrill cry from the travel mags. But it’s not my fault people believe what they’re told. I don’t go to these places because no-one else goes, it’s merely a side-effect. I like plenty of places on the beaten track: New York, Boston, Miami, Cape Town, Pamplona, Paris, Berlin. But I know I’m going to hate Dubai.

I hated Singapore you see. After three months of relative adventure in India, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam, I found the surgical precision, the sterilised cleanliness of Singapore stifling rather than satisfying. The only vaguely interesting parts of Singapore are airbrushed facsimiles of somewhere else more real, more exciting, more visceral: Chinatown, Little India, the Arab Quarter. I’d never been to Canary Wharf when I visited Singapore in 2000; only when I arrived at the soulless glass and aluminium outpost in Docklands did I realise the true horror of Singapore. It even has a little toy train to rival the DLR in silliness.

And of course Dubai is all these things, and more. But somehow it’s much worse. Because it’s the future. In a world of rampant commercialism where global corporations are the new imperial powers, Dubai is a shining beacon of what life will be like. Lonely Planet urges visitors to “glimpse the 22nd century in this chaotic, visionary city”. If that’s what 2200 is going to look like, we should all be thanking our lucky stars we won’t be around to see it. Still, in a world where there are over 160 Starbucks branches within 5 miles of Oxford Circus tube station, is it any surprise to see all the usual suspects hanging out on street corners in Dubai? GAP, Nandos, MacDonalds, Burger King, Nike, Apple; Dubai is like some grotesque brand jamboree. It’s just one big American shopping mall. But without any Americans of course.

To be fair, however, for all its rampant commercialisation, Dubai is a little more interesting than Singapore, and a lot more interesting than Canary Wharf, at least in a voyeuristic kind of way. In short, it’s one of the oddest places I’ve ever been. Given that Dubai is the best-known city (though not the capital, that’s Abu Dhabi) in the United Arab Emirates, one might well imagine it’d be more or less an Arab city, with a more or less Arab population. Guess again. While there are a few Arabs in Dubai, their gleaming white dishadashas and red and white checked keffiyehs seeming incongruously exotic as they queue for a half-caf, double-tall, non-fat, extra-hot chai latte to go, before driving off in a gleaming Porsche Cayenne, the vast majority of the population is no more Arab than you are. This I discovered when I hailed a taxi at the airport in neighbouring Sharjah, and found myself totally unable to understand the driver’s Arabic. Not even ‘hello’. When he excitedly turned up the radio to listen to updates from the India-Pakistan Test match as we sat in traffic, I suddenly realised. Like so many others here, he’s a “guest worker”.

Everyone in Dubai is a guest worker, or an expat. The natives are seldom seen, probably because they’re at home counting their petrodollars or working out how best OPEC can screw the rest of the world just that little bit more. For Dubai is the second-biggest oil producer in the UAE (again, the winner is Abu Dhabi) and the country as a whole allegedly has the third largest oil reserves in the world. Yet oil accounts for a staggeringly small 6% of Dubai’s GDP; by 2010 this will fall below 1% as the property and tourism boom continues apace. Countless eulogising articles in the Western financial press speak of the “Dubai economic miracle” and wonder aloud, “how do they do it?”

The answer is surprisingly simple, as one perceptive (but not that perceptive) article suggests cryptically: “in a globalised knowledge economy it will be the ability to deliver the lowest costs of skilled labour that mark out the winners - and Dubai is already there.” Yes, low-cost labour is the key. Exceedingly low-cost labour. It’s a brilliantly simple, brilliantly original idea. Except of course it’s not that original at all. Slavery is as old as human history. The Pharaohs, the Romans, the Brits, the Americans, the Nazis. All the great empires have been based on slavery. And also the current government of Sudan. Ship “workers” from their homeland to where you need them, forbid them from leaving, and then force them to toil in appalling conditions for a hundred hours a week. And there are hundreds of thousands here, from south Asia, from the Philippines, and from east Africa. They have no rights, no unions, in many cases no passports (these are often confiscated by their employers on arrival), and are paid peanuts to live and work in dreadful conditions. But who cares? The hotels are great, property prices are booming, they have guaranteed Winter sun, and there’s a bloody great snow dome in one of the shopping malls. Chavtastic!

Which brings me onto the next issue. Tourists. Now generally, as you know, I dislike tourists. Loud, obnoxious, inappropriately-dressed, stupid. Yes, I dislike them mostly because they remind me so much of myself. Nothing ruins your ludicrous Lawrence of Arabia, man of the people, intrepid adventurer fantasy like tripping over a family of fatsos from Milton Keynes getting third degree sunburn as they walk topless (all of them) around the streets of Cairo or Istanbul. And I thought I’d seen some appalling tourists before. Then I went to Dubai. As Colonel Kurtz famously whispered, “the HORROR, the HORROR”. It’s a nightmarish vision of a dystopian future. It’s like waking up to Beethoven’s Fifth and suddenly realising you’re in A Clockwork Orange. It’s hideous. It’s as if Marx has been updated for the 21st (or 22nd) Century. The Chavist Manifesto. “Shirkers of the world: unite.” But it’s worse than that. Because they’re all here. From all over Britain. From all over the world.

And then there are the hookers. Because this is a Muslim country (believe me, I had to double-check that fact), alcohol is unavailable outside hotel bars. But since every other building in Dubai is a hotel, and every hotel has at least two bars, this isn’t exactly the Volsted Act. As I sat in my hotel bar, perusing the food menu, I didn’t pay too much attention to the scantily-clad girls gathered in a dark corner, until one of them made eyes at me as she walked past my table. She had that quintessentially Slavic look: ugly, thin (but thin in a manner that suggests an impoverished upbringing rather than a genetic predisposition or long hours in the gym), and appallingly dressed. Still I didn’t work out she was a pro. Until, that is, she left the bar and went upstairs with a portly middle aged Arab gentleman in a dishadasha. For the third time in an hour. It was like one of those Magic Eye posters in vogue in the 90s. After staring for so long at the wood, you suddenly realise you can see the trees. They were everywhere. I went to a couple of different hotels just to check. Same story. Russian whores. Everywhere. Singapore has the infamous "Four Floors of Whores", Dubai has every hotel in town. Of course with Russian prossies go Russian pimps. Heavy-set men with shaven heads, leather jackets, and menacing eyes that suggest a promising career in the FSB sadly curtailed by the inadvertent irradiation of a west London sushi restaurant or a massacre of Chechen dissidents, broadcast live on CNN. They’re terrifying. But like all good horror movies, you just can’t take your eyes off them. Of course when the alternative is endless Paris Hilton wannabes from Chelmsford, that's not entirely surprising I guess.

So I wouldn’t exactly recommend Dubai as a dedicated holiday destination. But as a stopover at least, it has its charms. Just not as a stopover on the way to the Maldives or Australia or anywhere nice. No, Dubai is best experienced as a stopover on the way home from the Third World. 72 hours since you last ate? A month since your last non-felafel-based meal? Nandos peri-peri chicken is perfect. Find your minimum standards for a place to sleep have slipped a bit: “there’s not too much goat shit there, and I haven’t seen any snakes around here”? A city with 5 star hotels for seventy quid a night is ideal. Yes, if you’ve just finished a season of aid work in Afghanistan, are on your way home from a trip to see the guerrillas (or gorillas) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or have recently been released after fourteen years chained to a radiator in a Beirut cellar by those nice chaps from Hizballah, by all means head to Dubai for some well deserved r&r. But otherwise don’t bother stopping. Of course none of this applies if you’re from Essex, view Hello magazine as anything other than emergency barbeque fuel, or want to fly thousands of miles to go snowboarding inside a shopping mall in the middle of the fucking desert. In which case you should by all means go to Dubai. And stay there.

Selling The Big Issue In Khartoum

When I was 17, I rather foolishly went to see the then recently re-released horror film The Exorcist at the cinema at midnight on Halloween. I was so terrified I had to stop the car on the way home and chain-smoke a couple of a friend's cigarrettes just to stop my hands from shaking. I slept with the lights on for about a week. Though I own the film on dvd and have watched it dozens of times, it still never fails to scare me senseless.

With this in mind then, imagine my horror when my Sudanese dive trip concluded with noxious green liquid began oozing from my aural cavity. This delightful discharge was accompanied by the kind of searing pain I'd only previously encountered in hospital beds shortly before some kindly nurse began dishing out the intravenous opiates. While I was almost certain I was not the victim of diabolic possession, I was undeniably in some considerable discomfort. Such discomfort, in fact, that I was forced to take my life in my hands and take drastic measures indeed. I went to the doctors in Sudan.

Given the quality of food, hotels, roads (not to mention the prison cells) in Sudan, this was certainly not an adventure upon which I embarked lightly. Maybe it is evidence of how far the NHS has fallen on hard times, or perhaps my negative experiences of the British medical system are skewed because of my long residence in 3rd world east London, but I was pleasantly surprised by my exposure to Sudanese primary care. Admittedly my waiting time was reduced somewhat by my skin colour and nationality (a not uncommon example of the positive discrimination which is often experienced as a white man abroad), not to mention the fifty dollar bill in my hand, but the service was exceptional. The doctor spoke impeccable English, superior certainly to that of anyone in my own GP's surgery in Bow (not once did he say "innit"), his office was spotlessly clean, and the equipment included a striking array of shiny new plasma screen monitors on which I was able to view the live ultrasound of a young Beja tribeswoman taking place behind a curtain. (While the Qu'ran clearly forbids both craven images of living things and women from showing uncovered skin in public, I'm not at all sure of the ruling on random passers-by staring intently at digital images of a foetus swimming around the womb.)

I'm not sure either whether the doctor had seen Linda Blair's fluourescent green oozings in the scariest film of 1973, but his reaction upon peering into my ear was certainly similar to my response to The Exorcist. For a second I was tempted to grab the crucifix from his wall and do something unspeakable while exclaiming " fuck me Jesus!", just to see what'd he say, but the urge thankfully passed. According to the good doctor (as the sign above his desk proudly annoucned, the esteemed recipient of a "degree from the prestigious University of Khartoum") no less) I was not the victim of Satanic visitation after all, but in fact had an ear infection of some unusual severity, for which he prescribed a rockstar-esque cocktail of potions and pills.

And here's where the trouble started. Due to a US trade embargo dating from the Khartoum government's rather ill-advised decision to back Saddam Hussein in the Mother of All Battles in 1991, Sudan is not connected to the international banking system. There are no international ATMs or credit card machines in the country; even the Khartoum and Port Sudan Hiltons only accept payment in hard currency. Consequently visitors must carry all funds necessary for the duration of their visit in cash, and hope that they don't become an unfortunate exception to Sudan's generally negligible crime rate and scrupulously honest people. I myself spent the first two and a half weeks of my stay carrying the best part of two thousand dollars, in fifty dollar bills, in a money belt down my trousers. However, having spent most of that on my dive trip, I was left with a mere $150 for my last three days. After forking out $50 for a bus ticket back to Khartoum, $50 for a doctor's appointment and a $39 dollar charge for medicines was not exactly ideal.

And thus, with $11 to survive on for three days, I found myself sneaking into the Blue Nile Sailing Club in the dead of night, and unfurling my sleeping bag on the lawn. While camping is a generally-accepted holiday and leisure pastime, it usually involves one or both of a) a tent and b) a rural location. People who spend nights in sleeping bags in parks are usually described as "homeless" rather than "camping", though to my shame I must admit it's not the first time I've slept rough in an urban setting. (NB: getting shit-faced and trying to find a hotel room in Brighton at 4am on a Bank Holiday weekend is not a good idea. Nor is trying to sleep on a gravelly beach when the tide is coming in, nor indeed is attempting to find repose in a "secluded" corner of a 24 hour convenience store, using a family size packet of dried pasta as a pillow.) At least the Sudanese don't much care where you sleep - given the extraordinary heat, many of them pull their beds into the street anyway. Unfortunately the downside of the balmy tropical nights which make outdoor sleeping so pleasant in Sudan are the scorching daytime temperatures, which meant that all of my precious $11 (yes, I survived 72 hours on just over a fiver at the prevailing dollar-sterling exchange rate) was spent on liquid refreshment. Say what you want about the evils of global capitalism, but when the mercury is pushing 45 degree Centigrade, the ability to procure an ice-cold bottle of Pepsi in deepest darkest Africa should not be underestimated.

Accordingly, I spent my last evening in Sudan, literally penniless, enjoying a 5 mile stroll through the southeastern suburbs of the capital to Khartoum International Airport. I'm not sure I can pay more glowing a tribute to the hospitality, friendliness, and honesty of the good people of Africa's largest country than to say I was able to sleep in a park for two nights, leave all my possessions under a tree for two whole days, and then wander aimlessly through the outlying slums of the capital with no danger my health or wellbeing whatsoever. It might be a total shithole with minimal infrastructure and precious little of interest to actually see, but of the forty or so countries I have visited in all corners of the globe, Sudan must rank as the safest and friendliest, bar none. Which sort of begs the question of how and why they've spent almost the entire fifty years since independence committing bloody genocide against each other. But that's another story...