The Gulf States

Welcome, oil-fuelled reader, as this week I regale you with tales of visiting the Gulf States.

Our first stop on this quick skirt around the region was Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi is the capital city of the biggest of the United Arab Emirates, formed just over 50 years ago after we British decided we were no longer interested enough in the region to look after their foreign and defence policies. In the run-up to our visit, a lot had been made of the fact that we're visiting this area in the holy month of Ramadan, and that we needed to respect customs like not eating or drinking in public, and dressing respectfully. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the first things I saw in Abu Dhabi was a coffee shop very obviously serving coffee, and someone very obviously consuming it in public. Hmm.

Abu Dhabi is mostly big and modern, but retains a bit of its traditional Arabian charm. Yes, there are big fancy shopping malls, there is a purpose-built motor racing circuit with a hotel built on top of it, there is Ferrari-world, there is an outpost of the Louvre, but every self-respecting city has something like this these days, doesn't it? Well, perhaps not, but anyway, the three most striking features of Abu Dhabi are the preponderance of tall buildings without much in the way of architectural distinction to make them memorable, the Corniche, a wide boulevard that runs the length of the city alongside the beach, and the Muslim call to prayer which still rings out loudly throughout the place.

From Abu Dhabi, we moved on to Dubai. Perhaps this is appropriate, as having seen both places you could say that Abu Dhabi is Dubai's rather tame warm-up act. 30 years ago, Dubai as we know it today simply wasn't there. Since then, massive investment has created from nothing a city which resembles a theme park for the super-rich. It has what was the world's biggest shopping mall, until they built another, bigger shopping mall in another part of Dubai. It has what is by some margin the world's tallest building, the amazing Burj Khalifa. It has a massive artificial island in the shape of a palm, the Palm Jumeira, which is home to 10000 appropriately-rich people as well as numerous resorts and malls. Its main road is a motorway which for the most part has 8 lanes running in each direction. It's like they've gone around the world looking at things and thinking, "Right, we'll have one of those, but ours is going to be double the size".

Compared to Abu Dhabi, Dubai is both much bigger, more spectacular, and more vulgar. It's much more aesthetically pleasing: Dubai's tall buildings almost all make some kind of architectural statement. I have to pause here and say something special about the Burj Khalifa. At 828 metres, it's not only the tallest building in the world, it's massively taller than anything else you've ever seen: it's double the height of the Empire State Building, NYC's World Trade Centre, or the Sears/Willis Tower in Chicago. And it's beautiful: it looks impossibly slender and silvery, and somehow manages as a result to be a point of navigational reference without dominating the skyline.

Dubai is sadly not pedestrian-friendly at all. In fact it's tremendously car-centric: stepping out of the inevitable mall or resort that you've just visited, you're going to find yourself staring at multiple lanes of tarmac in each direction. The city sprawls over a wide area, covering a strip near the sea: it's a 40 minute drive down that 8-lane highway from the Marina at one end of the City to the Burj Khalifa, with the historic part of old Dubai even beyond that. There's a metro system, but it doesn't really connect the useful areas together: the stop for the Burj Khalifa is about a 20 minute walk from the building's base.

Old Dubai lies beyond the current business district, on the banks of the Dubai Creek, which is actually just an inlet from the Gulf. There, you can still find the traditional dhows (small, wooden merchant ships) and rickety-looking water taxis, but even the Creek hasn't escaped Dubai's desire to build bigger and better: to increase the amount of waterside property, they channeled out the creek so it reached behind the business district and arched back to the Gulf, turning the central part of the city into an island. They don't mess about, here.

Dubai is an impressive achievement, but it lacks charm.

Our next stop was Salalah, the second city of Oman. We'd been given some fairly dire warnings about how difficult it was to get around in this place, which we heeded and as a result booked a bus tour. By now, we know what we're in for with those: just a quick look at some interesting sites.

The highlight was the archaeological site at Samharam. Overlooking the sea, this former castle and settlement is said to have been a place where the Queen of Sheba lived. What we can definitely say it is, is something resembling Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall: a relatively well-preserved set of walls and layout for a settlement. It's both an amazing site, with a lot to learn, and a beautiful setting, with rocky outcrops on one side, and rolling hills leading down to something which looks a bit like Lulworth Cove on the other. We could have spent all day here.

... but this was a bus tour, so instead it was half an hour before getting back on the bus and stopping next at a spring and a cave for 10 minutes. Apparently the spring feeds the palace of the Sultan of Oman's uncle. Then it was off to the souk.

The word "souk" conjures up a mental image of something like that scene from the "Life of Brian" for most westerners; rows of stalls dripping with exotic goods, with their hawkers either engaged in aggressive haggling or entreaties for you to try something. Practically speaking, maybe there are some souks left somewhere that are a bit like that, although I get the impression that the Arab people are too kind and too reserved to be all that aggressive. It appears that these days, souk is more likely to mean "parade of small shops, possibly all selling the same thing". So for instance, in Dubai, the gold souk is just a bunch of shops selling gold (I guess there is a book souk at the bottom end of Charing Cross Road, and a jewellery souk in Birmingham). Here in Salalah, the souk was a parade of a couple of dozen shops selling stuff. Like proper tourists, we bought some frankincense, the local speciality.

One notable thing about Oman is that most of the shops have an Arabic name, and a translation in English above the door. Those English translations are a very literal statement of what the shop does; I particularly liked the shop called "Services of photocopying and typing of documents", but I'm not sure it'll ever graduate into being a chain.

In contrast to the crazy cities of the Emirates, Salalah felt like a much more authentic Arabian experience. Yes, the oil wealth is evident in some infrastructure projects here (mostly the Sultan's palaces, but also schools and hospitals under construction), but the city has that look of white low-rise buildings with flat roofs, and dusty roads that you'd associate with this region (although I'll note that the roads were actually really good here; quite a lot better than California, although I know that's not saying much). It's charming and incredibly chilled out: we'd also been told there's very little crime here because punishments are so severe. Hmmm. It's chilled out enough that traffic stopping for camels wandering across the main road appears to be a fairly normal experience, and drivers patiently wait for the huge creatures to pass by.

Anyway, despite being here for a very short period, I'd recommend visiting Oman over Dubai or Abu Dhabi any day of the week. I wish we'd had a bit more time to soak up some of the history in Salalah, but now it's on to Jordan.