Passport to the big house
There is a zero tolerance policy to drinking and driving in Abu Dhabi. Any alcohol reading whatsoever and it is straight to the big house. Directly, no excuses and no insurance, even if someone else hits you and it is entirely their fault. This explains why Graeme the Scot is nursing soda water while we enjoy pre-dinner, dinner and post-dinner drinks with Martin Moodie, who has flown in from the UK via Delhi, and one of his business associates, Dan Cappell. Martin is down here for the opening of a new terminal at Abu Dhabi International Airport, and Dan runs everything there that isn’t to do with aircraft. Such things as retail, property, rentals and parking, the latter now the biggest single money spinner for airports around the world. Graeme manages the poorer side of the airport, the bit that has to do with planes, landing charges, catering and, we suppose, filling them up with fuel.
Dan, an exceptionally generous and gregarious host, let slip that he shares, with Graeme and his wife, a five bedroom villa which has two spare bedrooms, a maid and a driver. We immediately threatened to move in, Jade included, which we think Dan quite fancied. Perhaps if only the parents didn’t come as part of the package.
The only question of the night was why it cost five times the taxi fare to get home at 2.00am as it did to get to the hotel six hours earlier. A question which would still be being hotly and loudly debated had the taxi driver not threatened to call the police.
The house champagne last night was Moet and, despite its fine quality, the hot next-morning sun was not conducive for the short trek to the Indian Embassy. Forms, photocopying, queues and confusion, but it is all done in a couple of hours, the embassy clerks very patient with our inability to intuitively know the rules and what needed to be done. We’ll just have to wait the three working days while they check our kiwi credentials, and then see if the visas and passports turn up.
Weekends in the Arabic countries are Friday and Saturday, and for us it back to Dubai for the weekend to see if we can hear the calls to prayer.

Will that be gold with your cappuccino, m’aam?
At first I imagined that the big grey helicopters hovering overhead in menacing circles were for us. Maybe hoping to catch us holding hands or even nude sunbathing but, no, the military airbase is not far from here. It is just part of the daily routine.
The guidebook tells us that Abu Dhabi is a lush, modern metropolis with tree lined streets, futuristic skyscrapers, huge shopping malls and international luxury hotels, developing at a breakneck speed to become a truly 21st century destination. In little over half a century, it has seen a dramatic transformation from a small Bedouin settlement to a thriving business and tourism centre of global stature.
Our end of town is more old Abu Dhabi than new, the local shops more Arabic than international, that is, aside from the nearby Pepsi factory. The residents are mostly locals, apart from one young Chinese woman who seems to spend much of the day sauntering up and down the street fastened to a mobile phone.
Tuesday was spent starting our quest in earnest to absorb the sights, sounds and smells of Abu Dhabi, by bus and foot rather than Porsche. First stop the breakwater by the Marina which looks back over the skyline of the city and which houses a heritage village, the re-creation for tourists of the city’s Bedouin beginnings. Further along there is an enormous 100 metre high pole flying the UAE flag, the guidebook proclaiming that, until recently, it was the largest self-supporting flagpole in the world. Behind the breakwater, the Marina shopping mall, complete with viewing tower, Ikea and cinnamon bun shop.
Back towards the city is what at first glance looks like an extraordinarily lavish palace but which turns out to be only a palace of sorts, the Emirates Palace Hotel. Its website describes it as the iconic landmark of Abu Dhabi, costing a billion dollars, presumably U.S., and taking 20,000 workers three years to build. Time Out tells us that guests wanting that extra touch can have cappuccino with gold leaf sprinkled on the top instead of chocolate. Five kilograms of pure edible gold is used each year at this hotel, mainly for deserts.
Of course, in shorts and jandals we can’t even get beyond the sentry box so it is onwards, past the road to the ladies beach and down the “Cornishe”, the local waterfront promenade, and on to shops on the outskirts of the main shopping area. We ran out of time to see the souks and dhow yard, but that awaits us.
Wednesday is given to domestic chores. Washing to the laundry (about 20 dirham to wash and fold a small bag load) passport photos at a local store, then down to the Indian Embassy to arrange for visas. The Embassy was advertised to be open until 1.00pm, when we arrived at 12.15 it was closed. Not a good omen.
The find of the day was undoubtedly Sheikh Zayed’s Grand Mosque, the second largest mosque in the world behind Mecca. It is immense, its 22,000 square metres has the capacity to hold 30,000 people, and its exterior of pure white marble just glistens against the sun .Typically we find only after our visit that the mosque is open to non-Muslim visitors between 9.00 and 11.00 in the mornings. An excellent reason to return.

Ruling the road
What better place to learn to drive a Porsche than in Abu Dhabi. Unfamiliar city, unfamiliar car, unfamiliar roads, right hand drive, and few apparent road rules, but Marty did it and survived. That is, aside from almost getting lost on what really is a simple grid pattern of streets. Jade’s Porsche is beautiful not only to look at but also to drive and has sufficient power for both getting in and out of traffic trouble, so it is irresistable, even to us.
The main streets here are wide and expansive, generally four lanes in either direction and lined by palm trees. The urban speed limit is 80kph though, like the open road, the speed limit seems to be irrelevant. Speed is controlled on the side streets by humps every 50 metres or so, designed to rip the innards out of even the most sturdy 4 x 4 if negotiated in haste.
Irrelevant too are pedestrian lights. Yesterday, on our way to the bus stop we waited patiently and obediently observed the crossing rules. Then, as we started to cross with the green pedestrian light, one of those huge 4 wheel drive beasts that mothers in Christchurch insist on using to take their children to school took aim and, at about 100 kph, missed us by mere inches. For a moment Kaelene dreamed of blood money, but on reflection thought Marty’s death may have been inconvenient at this stage of the journey.
That probably sums up the driving; it seems the key is anticipation. For example, rather than using indicators to signal intended lane changes, drivers veer slightly, straighten and then lurch until they achieve the intended change, or something close to it. The other art is overtaking where, once completed, a driver will dart suddenly in front of the overtaken vehicle to secure a just-spotted parking place. Not usually a designated parking space, but an untaken corner out of the stream of traffic. On reflection, it is quite like home.
Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest of the emirates, just not as flashy as Dubai and many cars are as ordinary as ours, but there is a quite tasty array of Bentleys, Jaguars, Lexus, Aston Martins and Mercedes nevertheless. So many orders are there here for the new Ferrari that there is a four years waiting list.

A culture change
The call to prayer wafted through the open window of our number 42 bus as we headed to downtown Abu Dhabi, Kaelene in the priority seats for ladies at the front. The service is free, the old buses jam-packed with migrant workers, and the driver working the horn and accelerator simultaneously while at the same time gesticulating wildly in frustration at the traffic and taxis who occupy the bus stops. We are certainly here in Arabia.
It is a culture shift, particularly little intuitive things. No pointing and certainly no touching between a woman and man in public. Despite the fact that we should have grown out of these things anyway, holding hands is out of the question, we have different surnames, including in our passports, and no way of proving we are actually married. So caution is the order of the day. Shoulders are kept covered in public; there are women-only (ladies) beaches and alcohol is only available to westerners in tourist complexes.
Abu Dhabi is an island, accessed by bridge and the part of the city we are staying in very much suburban with Arabic shops and supermarkets nearby. And cats. Skinny, wild cats are everywhere, trawling through open skips left in each street for the collection of domestic rubbish.
So far we have explored only very tentatively, local shops and the ultra-modern Marina mall. The city is one of contrast, and we plan to start exploring more thoroughly today.
We note that another cold snap has hit the north, with snow causing havoc right across Europe. It will be good to wander the streets here without the layers of thermal clothes and the involuntary streaming of eyes and noses that comes from the extreme cold. We’ll sit in the sun nursing drinks made of pomegranate seeds or crushed mint and lemon.

Porsche faces life
Jade has a brand new Porsche Cayman, not practical for two passengers and luggage, so it is swapped temporarily with her friend’s Mercedez Battletruck, something as square as and only marginally smaller than a Hummer. There’s no oil crisis in the Middle East, global warming a western conspiracy. “You can drive, I hate this thing,” Jade says as we prepare to leave Dubai for Abu Dhabi.
Sheik Zayed Road is six lanes wide each side and the driving on the right hand side of the road. The speed limit is 140kph, but only enforced at 160kph, so this is like a race track and our average 130 kph leaves us in the wake of an array of Lexus, BMWs and Mercedez, some of which must easily top 200 kph. There is no need to worry about speed camera fines if your veins pump oil.
We are mindful about blood money, the price to pay to the families of any Arab you may accidentally kill on the road. Avoid men in dish-dash and women in Arabic dress, and small children particularly, as blood money is around 200,000 dirham, more than $NZ100,000. The risk-factor is much higher here; Abu Dhabi is very much an Arabic city whereas only about 8 percent of the Dubai population is local.
Rule number one at roundabouts, Jade tells us, is that there are no rules. Just close your eyes, put your foot down and hope for the best. This useful advice comes just before a huge roundabout between her villa and the local supermarket where, it seems, half of the Dubai population has come to do the weekly shopping. We don’t know what the right hand rule is either, and parking and driving protocols are non-existent in the supermarket carpark. Only once does instinct draw me to drive in the left hand side of the road. The prospect of paying blood money a good reminder that when in the Middle East, drive as the locals do.

The skype is falling in
This is a commercial break. Or at least a break in the transmission of skype communication for those we have been calling this way. An error message, that Skype cannot connect, is a euphemism for it being blocked by the authorities in Abu Dhabi.
I checked the internet and found a site entitled Five simple steps to get Skype working again in the UAE, only to find a block on access with the message This site falls under the prohibited content categories of the UAE’s internet access management policy. Take a look.
We shall call again when normal transmission has resumed.

Change
They have given streets names instead of numbers since we were last in Dubai. Jade’s old place is no longer Villa 23 on street 20, off street 1 in Jumeirah 3,off Al Wasl Road. It now has an address, although I failed to note what it was and, we are told, taxi drivers ignore the new system anyway. But Dubai, has changed, and locals will tell you that if they have been away for a week they can notice the difference.
Dubai now seems less a city where the old Arabic world meets a modern western one, but more one where new meets even newer, and bolder means brasher. The Burj Dubai, the not yet completed one kilometer high tower, the tallest in the world, is already facing competition from a planned second new one, one mile high. The Mall of the Emirates, with its indoor ski slope, had been the second biggest shopping mall in the world, but has been surpassed by the recent opening of biggest shopping mall in the world. The Jumeirah Palm is now inhabited, at the outer end by the immense Hotel Atlantis complex which put on the world’s largest-ever fireworks display at its opening, has the underwater restaurant and is riddled with celebs.
We were holed up at the Metropolitan Hotel, off Sheik Zayed Road. You don’t have to leave the premises. It has its own movie complex, theme bars and restaurants (The Red Lion bar is an English pub, right down to artificially beer soaked carpets), a pool and spas, and then there is Rattlesnakes, a nightclub where young women are on hand to part men from large amounts of money in exchange for bodily pleasure.
The pool temperature was 29 degrees, the air temperature 23 in the middle of winter, and Kaelene was unwell having ice-on-the-lung, an illness resulting from the inhalation of cold European air. In these warmer climes we are expecting a quick recovery.
They say you can tell how hard the recession has hit Dubai by the level of traffic congestion. Apparently the current Auckland-style rush hour motorway congestion is mild by comparison to the pre-recession traffic. Ex-pats are leaving in droves as building projects stall, often leaving behind creditors and jail, the mandatory penalty for the non-payment of debt.
There is something alluring about the glamour and glitz here, the hustle and bustle, the opulence and the sheer audacity of the transformation of desert to luxury you would not think possible.
We have not yet heard the call to prayer which rings out over the city five times a day. Hedonism must make more noise.