[The Practical Nomad Newsletter] The Amazing Race 15, Episode 4

[Edward Hasbrouck]

Phnom Penh (Cambodia) - Dubai (United Arab Emirates)

This column with links:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001750.html

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This week's first clue directed the cast of "The Amazing Race 15" to fly 
to the "Arabian Gulf" to the site of the world's tallest building.

That should have been enough to send racers who'd been studying geographic 
trivia directly to the Burj Dubai (even if it's not quite complete and the 
world's tallest occupied building remains, for a few more months, the 
Taipei 101 office tower).

Many of the teams appeared never to have heard of the Gulf by any name. 
But the clue's phrasing got the racers off on a culturally wrong foot for 
where they were going: the body of water called the "Persian Gulf" in Iran 
is properly called the "Arabian Gulf" on its opposite shore in Dubai and 
the rest of Arabia. It's no longer "fighting words" to use the locally-
disapproved label, as it was during the "Gulf War" between Iran and Iraq 
in the 1980's, but it's always polite to use local geographical 
terminology unless you want to make a deliberate political statement to 
the contrary.

On the other hand, sending them to the construction site of a grandiose 
but unfinished modern megalithic monument may have been the perfect 
metaphor for Dubai, where the world's largest speculative building boom -- 
featuring structures like the golf course where the grass grows on top of 
sand, and the indoor ski slope in the desert that the racers later visited 
-- has been followed by the world's greatest current real estate and 
credit bust -- yes, far exceeding that in the USA, with average real 
estate values in Dubai only half what they were before the crash.

The Emir of Dubai has reportedly managed to refinance tens of billions of 
dollars of his own debts (with the help of a grudging multi-billion dollar 
bail-out by the Emir of Abu Dhabi by way of the central bank of the United 
Arab Emirates), and the flagship Burj Dubai is being completed, topping 
out at roughly twice the height of the Sears Tower (now officially the 
"Willis Tower", although nobody calls it that), give or take a few hundred 
feet. But some of the other buildings originally planned as part of the 
Burj Dubai complex, as well what was to have been the world's second-
tallest building nearby, have been canceled, some even after ground had 
been broken. (For those keeping global score, what was to have been the 
tallest building in the USA, the 200-story Chicago Spire, has met a 
similar fate, at least for now, after more than a year of site preparation 
and foundation work.)

In the USA, the commercial real estate crisis has hit hotel owners 
especially hard, driving many hotels into bankruptcy with ripple effects 
that have brought bargains for travellers in every price range. I'm not 
sure how the real estate collapse has affected the previously dismal 
affordability of tourist accommodations in Dubai, though, because 
development had been so top-heavy in luxury and price as well as building 
height. If anyone has been there recently and can report on budget lodging 
prices and how they've changed in the last 2 years, please let me know or 
post a comment.

After a look at the view from an upper floor of the Burj Dubai, "The 
Amazing Race" headed for the desert and a four-wheel drive through the 
dunes. I know, all of Dubai is desert, but there's the city and the 
construction sites and the labor camps, and then there's the "empty" sand-
dune storybook Arabian desert.

The racers were lucky: They had professional drivers. Citizens of the Gulf 
states, where sand driving is one of relatively few readily available 
diversions, learn to make it look easy. But try it for the first time, and 
you'll quickly get bogged down. On a stopover in Qatar on my last trip 
around the world, I got to go along on a day trip to a desert beach with 
some inexperienced expats. Each of our vehicles got stuck, repeatedly, and 
we never figured out if we were trying to go too fast or too slowly in 
places where the sand was soft. We were very lucky that passing groups 
(all male, of course) of local citizens, often speaking little or no 
English, kept stopping to show off their superior skills and getting their 
spotless white "dish-dash" robes dirty digging us out.

Keri and Lance, who were eliminated, had trouble finding their way on the 
roads. I can relate. We spent several hours driving around Doha with a 
local resident failing to find the Eritrean Embassy, and got there the 
next day, after another hour of fruitless searching by taxi, only when we 
telephoned and the Embassy, with typical Eritrean generosity, sent a car 
and driver to pick us up from the street corner where we were walking 
around lost.

In Dubai as in Doha (a wannabe Dubai, sitting on natural gas beneath the 
sand instead of oil, but without any of Dubai's tourists), everything 
including the roads is either just built or still under construction. We 
had been in Doha two and a half years earlier, and it's still a small 
city, but almost nothing was recognizable. One construction site tends to 
look like another, and outside of town the desert sands and the empty 
roads are largely devoid of distinctive landmarks, at least if you aren't 
well versed in recognizing desert details.

Map makers can't keep up with the pace of change, and few people know 
their way around areas that aren't on their regular rounds. Citizens tend 
to stay aloof from the majority of "foreigners" who do all the work. (No 
citizenship = no rights, no matter how long you live in the country, not 
that even citizens have any real rights in countries where the monarchs' 
words are law.) Expats from different racial and national-origin castes -- 
Bangladeshi ditch-diggers and hod carriers, Philippine nannies, 
Palestinian bookkeepers, white-skinned white-collar engineers, and so 
forth -- live in separate compounds or camps, and mostly keep to their own 
enclosures when they aren't working. (Some Afrikaner South African 
residents we met called the system today in the Gulf states "apartheid", 
and said they thought it was worse than what they had seen in the "old 
days" in South Africa.)

I never saw a decent map of Doha. There was a rumor that Fedex had up-to-
date digital street maps, but kept them secret to preserve their 
competitive advantage.

A GPS might seem to provide a solution -- but only if combined with a 
decent map database. In and of itself, knowing your grid coordinates 
doesn't necessarily tell you which road to take, as we found out on our 
way from the beach back to Doha. It was getting dark, a sandstorm was 
further reducing visibility, and we found ourselves lost amid an elaborate 
but inscrutable (and, of course, completely empty of pedestrians) network 
of boulevards through some vast half-built development, like the 
monumental promenades of a half-buried ancient capital mostly obscured by 
clouds of blowing sand.

Not to worry: Our host had rented a Range Rover with a GPS navigation 
system, capable of making its way through anywhere and anything. Just set 
the destination, and follow the GPS directions home to our hotel: "Go 1 
kilometer. Make a U-turn. Go 1 kilometer. Make a U-turn. Go 1 kilometer. 
Make a U-turn...." Only by turning in a random "wrong" direction, and 
proceeding blindly by the compass for several kilometers until we happened 
onto a section of older roads that were properly mapped in the GPS back-
end system, were we able to get out of the endless loop and back on track.

The racers finished at a new shopping mall built to resemble the old 
"souks" (markets) that are rapidly being demolished to make room for more 
new 
construction. A fitting symbol of Dubai, where the race will resume next 
week.

Bon voyage!

Edward Hasbrouck


----------------
Edward Hasbrouck
<edward at hasbrouck.org>
<http://hasbrouck.org>
+1-415-824-0214

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