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All that glitters may not be gold
Like souvenir magnets to a fridge, we cannot resist being drawn to the excesses of Dubai. There is a powerlessness that compels us to see and marvel at its glitter, the very things we should be repelled by. The biggest, the best, the most lavish, and the simply grotesque, they are here and we flock to them willingly, perhaps a voyeuristic look at a monument to capitalism.
The Jumeirah Palm, the first of the three palm-shaped constructions jutting from the Dubai coastline into the Arabian Gulf is now open, and at its end the Atlantis Hotel. Inside the luxury 1500 room hotel (including underwater suites with floor to window windows offering a spectacular view into the Ambassador Lagoon with its “cornucopia” of exotic marine life) , a mall, Plato’s Way and the Avenues, houses exclusive shops, at its centre a huge indoor aquarium boasting more than two hundred a fifty varieties of fish, including sharks and stingrays. Within its 150 acre setting, Aquaventure, where you can be taken by “ziggaraut” through shark-infested waters or, for more a sedate experience and $NZ400, touch, hug or apparently even hold hands with one of the hotel’s thirty Solomon Island dolphins. For $NZ200 you can simply look at them.
There are others. The Dubai Mall, the world’s largest shopping mall ( 440,000 square feet in area with 1200 shops spread over three floors) alongside the yet-to-be-completed Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest tower, boasts a similar aquarium with stingray feeding shows twice a day. The Burj itself is due to be ready for occupancy in September this year. The Marina, with up to 200 multi-storied luxury apartment buildings, skyscrapers and hotels surrounds the world’s largest man-made marina and, of course, it houses aquatic real-estate to match
But all is not as it at first seems. The Guardian reports that half of the UAE’s construction projects, totaling $NZ 1,117 billion, have either been put on hold or cancelled, leaving a “trail of half built towers on the outskirts of the city stretching into the desert”. The hop-on-hop-off bus tour no longer features commentary on The World, another man-made construction in the Gulf, where each country is an island accessible only by boat or helicopter, and where Rod Stewart reportedly paid 20 million pounds for England alone. This is an indication of the extent to which the recession, or Carrot Crunch as Ali Moodie has dubbed it, has hit. The Jebel Ali Palm has been constructed but building not started. It is doubtful that the Diera Palm will proceed and The Waterfront, a single development billing itself as being bigger then Manhattan and twice the size of Hong Kong, and adding 400kilometers of new coastline, must surely be destined to be put on hold.
To illustrate the sort of dead money involved, one of Jade’s friends worked for three years at development company which has just laid off 500 staff; all of this without a single project actually being started.
A silver lining is that infrastructure will, at last, have time to catch up. A monorail running alongside Sheikh Zayed Road towards Abu Dhabi will be completed this year and make access to the ribbon-like growth of the city more accessible. The bus system, the main means of transport for migrant workers, has been expanded and modernized, and routes now boast air-conditioned bus shelters, complete with water dispensers. So nice, they’d be vandalized within moments in New Zealand.