by Joe Bennett
The Nakheel Hotel is seedy. The lift hesitates and clanks. There’s a pervasive smell of something rotting. In the corridors I repeatedly meet people who seem alarmed to see me, as if they were engaged in something naughty. And my room resembles an under-stocked second-hand shop. Nothing remotely matches anything. The only decoration is a watercolour of an Italian railway station. The tiles on the bathroom floor have been selected for that pre-stained look, the sink has been emphatically post-stained, and the toilet cistern sits at an angle of twenty degrees to the horizontal. I cautiously try to twist it back to a conventional angle, but it is screwed firmly in place.
Most toilets in these parts come with a side-slung hose and nozzle. Initially I ignored these things in the properly suspicious Anglo-Saxon manner, but I have since experimented and, after a few early mishaps of aim and range into the details of which I shall not go, I’ve grown accustomed to and indeed fond of these devices. I find the sensation agreeable and the service exemplary. The Nakheel Hotel, however, has a bidet.
I have never used a bidet. I am unsure how to. I presume you sit on it with your back to the wall, but if so, the taps are awkwardly behind you. Out of curiosity I bend and turn on the tap and have to sway back to avoid the jet that leaps three feet into the air. Which is more than enough to confirm my instinctive distrust. Like most English travellers, I shall continue to reserve bidets for the emergency washing of underwear.
A late-afternoon wander through Ras al Khaimah confirms first impressions. It’s a bit of a mess, a half-built place. It has ample ambition but too little money.
The khor is effectively a lagoon, with the big new bridge spanning its neck and passing over fishing boats and sleek white sheikh-carrying pleasure cruisers. Just beyond the bridge stands the regulation fort, now restored and turned into the regulation museum. Not far beyond that a warren of shops and little houses, Indian run as always, but catering far more than in Dubai to an indigenous population. Emiratis are a lot more evident here, little gaggles of women in full veils and abayas being deferentially served in clothes shops, perfume shops and shops dedicated to ornaments of great ugliness.
Behind and between the shops run rutted lanes, unsealed and littered, some still impassable for all but 4WDs after the recent rains. I’m intrigued by a little concrete house with an open courtyard and a neatly tended garden of plastic flowers in pots, protected not by the standard concrete wall or metal grille, but by a low and dirty picket fence.
‘Christian Baptist Mission’ says a sign. ‘Pastor Benigno Navarro III, Missionary. Sending church, the Baptist Church of Bulacan, Philippines. The end of your search for a true church, and the beginning of yours for a true.’
I knock on the half open door. No answer. I stick my head round the door and call. No answer. My search for a true will have to wait a bit. I carry on through lanes and shops then emerge spectacularly into a scene that lifts the heart.
It’s the seafront. It’s not in a great state of repair. A low wall separates the crumbling pavement from the beach. On the beach fifty kids of all ages are playing football. Behind them, a glassy sea of mauve, like shimmering ink. And on the horizon a sinking sun, a vermilion glory, dropping through clouds. The undersides of the clouds pulse scarlet, orange and pink, like embers.
The kids play in virtual silhouette. The goalposts are pieces of driftwood, repeatedly shifted to lengthen the pitch as more boys hop over the wall to play. It becomes about forty a side. And I sit on the wall and delight in it. I’m not sure why it pleases me so to sit on this wall in a spectacular sunset as the players pound pointlessly up and down the beach like puppies. But it does.
Ras al Khaimah hopes to boom and I hope its hope is fulfilled. But no boom will make it as present-tense happy as kids on a beach playing football.
It was up this beach that seven thousand soldiers ran in 1820, most of them Omani but under the command of British officers. They fought hand to hand with the local Qawasim for several hours, and blood soaked into this sand. Above the fighters flew a rain of cannonballs from the Royal Navy ships anchored a little offshore, cannonballs that thudded into the sandy flanks of the fort, behind me, that is now a museum for tourists. They reduced it to rubble. The Qawasim lost the battle and control of the local trade routes.
The British task force sailed on down the coast, subdued the Qawasim bases in Umm al Qwain, Ajman and Sharjah, then reached Dubai and found the rival Bani Yas people friendly. They made a deal with them, the ramifications of which are still being felt.
Since then Ras al Khaimah has struggled. And it has been the maverick sheikhdom. In 1971 it refused to join the fledgling UAE. Its reason was partly a traditional distrust of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the Bani Yas emirates down the coast. It feared that with their wealth they would outmuscle Ras al Khaimah in the new federation. Ras al Khaimah also hoped to find oil of its own, and in its bid for independence it quietly hinted to the USA that it had a splendid port that the US Navy might find useful.
No oil was found and the States expressed no interest in an alliance. Within a year Ras al Khaimah had grudgingly joined the UAE. But it wasn’t at ease. At the height of the Cold War in the late Seventies it offered the use of its port once more, this time to the Soviet Union. The Russians declined, but Ras al Khaimah still didn’t give up. During the interminable Iran–Iraq war in the late Eighties, it sneakily offered the use of its airbases to Saddam Hussein. All it asked in exchange was recognition as an independent state. This offer horrified the other emirates. Iran is only a hop and a skip away across the Gulf. The UAE could become a war zone. The rapidly self-enriching sheikhs of the UAE had no desire to get involved. But to everyone’s relief, the plan came to nothing and Ras al Khaimah still writhes under the yoke of the UAE.
Its current rulers are doing all they can to make the place prosperous along the lines established by Dubai. But there is discontent, apparently, among its local population, especially the members of a tribe known as the Shihuh. No one knows quite where the Shihuh derive from. Some contend that they were the original inhabitants of this region, predating the colonization by Arabs; others that they are descendants of a lost biblical tribe. All that is known for sure is that the Shihuh are largely excluded from power because of their traditional disloyalty to the Qawasim. And they aren’t happy. It was a Shihuh man, Marwan al-Shehhi, who piloted the second plane to hit the World Trade Center, on September 11th, 2001.
I amble gently back to the Nakheel in a merry mood, past chess players outside the Nice Palace Restaurant and past two Indian hairdressers three doors apart, one called Good Evening Saloon and the other Good Morning Saloon. The muezzins wail.
15
To the Tip of the Tent
The shower in the Nakheel Hotel is predictably dysfunctional. Standing naked in the off-white bathtub, that wasn’t off-white when manufactured, I finally work out how to get warm water but the showerhead sways like a dancing cobra. I reach up to tame it, a foot loses its grip on the bath tub, I grab the shower head, feel it detach from its mooring, grab the shower curtain, feel that sheer away, twist to save myself, and both feet lose all traction.
I’m not sure whether I’ve been knocked out. If I was, it was only for a second or two, but my vision is blurred. Tiny dots of light swim across my eyes like anti-aircraft fire. I have to make a conscious effort to remember where I am, to wit, lying on my back on a bathroom floor in a hotel in Ras al Khaimah, UAE, with my knees hooked over the rim of the bath. The shower curtain is partially wrapped around me like a plastic toga and the pole that supported it is on the far side of the room. Inside the bath I can hear the showerhead still squirting. And the plastic toilet seat is on the floor beside me, broken. My head must have hit it as I fell. I feel weak and cold and I don’t want to move.
If I’d left the toilet seat up, my skull would have smacked against the bowl. The thought brings an involuntary wave of nausea. It would have been like a falling apple hitting an anvil. Death by vitreous enamel. But it strikes me at the same
time that this would be a magnificently arbitrary way to die and place to do it in; a fittingly bathetic final chapter to a book with no plot. And despite my condition I half chuckle.
I haul myself up and discover a throbbing ache in my neck and left shoulder. I am fragile, mortal, shaken up. I have to lean on things as I make my way to the bed, staggering like a just-born wildebeest on the savannah, unsure of my limbs. I lie down, and feel like a curious spectator as the jigsaw of mental normality reassembles itself piece by piece.
‘I’ve had a little accident.’
The tubby Indian at reception eyes me through balloonish glasses, their left-hand hinge repaired with insulation tape.
‘In the bathroom,’ I say, smiling to trivialize the incident. ‘I fell over.’
He doesn’t smile. Nor does he provide the sympathy that I now realize I wouldn’t mind a bit of. Nor yet does he even seem surprised.
‘Yes,’ he says flatly.
‘I’m afraid the shower curtain needs fixing and, um, and the shower too, I’m afraid. And the toilet.’
‘Room number?’ he says.
I can’t remember. I have to fish the key out of my pocket.
‘OK,’ he says, and I walk out into the morning. After the gloom of the lobby the light spears my eyes. I take refuge in a restaurant next door and drink three thick coffees. I’m surprised by the degree to which my fall has shaken me. I feel the need to go somewhere quiet and remote for a few hours, somewhere I can sit and let my jangled mind recover its customary equilibrium. I go to find my car.
As I drive north, without destination, my mind rehearses my bathroom tumble. And I begin to turn it into a story in my head, to mythologize it. I name it ‘The Fall’. Like the Fall of Troy, or of the Arabian Empire, or of Man. The battle to be upright, to stand, to see over the swaying stems of grasses, to glimpse the horizon, is a battle that must be lost in the end. With the predator leaping on its neck the wildebeest strains every muscle to remain on its feet. Because to fall is to die.
Falls kill the elderly. Their brittle bones snap and that’s that. To hospital they go, where they are laid out on beds like corpses. Like the thousands of corpses in the stark dry valleys around here, the corpses whose tombs the archaeologists fuss over with trowel and brush. All of them, every one, over the long dispassionate years, eventually and inevitably fell. As will the archaeologists, every one.
Engaged in such cheerful meditations I see signs warning me of the approach of Oman, and I turn right up a valley. Beside the surprisingly well-made road the mountains gradually steepen, jagged, devoid of vegetation, inimical. The valley’s flanks are dotted with occasional hovels of piled stone, looking too low-roofed to stand upright in. Most are now derelict but a few have washing hanging from a line and are surrounded by tiny terraced fields, cut into the hillsides, where crops are growing. They must be irrigated by some sort of channelling. And there are pens of camels or goats, held in by walls of dried and woven palm fronds. Here’s an infinitely tough subsistence life in a place as harsh as they come. In summer this place must hold heat like an oven.
Another mile or two further up, a dumper truck is adding a few more tons of sand to a football pitch of sand. The pitch is surrounded by piled rocks to stop the sand melting away. Half a dozen kids stand watching. A little further and the valley splits, and here at the junction is the village the kids must have come from: a cluster of square white dwellings, some dirty 4WDs, a dusty little grocery shop. I stop the car and get out. The air is warm, still and silent. The place feels eerie. I had expected to find nothing like this in the UAE.
Three boys emerge from an alley and stop some yards away to stare with big dark eyes. They wear brown robes, like sacking nighties. And they say nothing. There are satellite dishes on many of the houses but the sight of a white man in the flesh must be a rarity here. Two of the kids disappear. The youngest, a kid of perhaps ten with close-cropped hair, follows me up through the village. He hangs a few paces behind me, saying nothing. I see no adults, no movement, only occasional birds, and little brown goats down alleys.
The village ends. The road becomes a gravel track. I walk on. I like the silence. The boy walks on. Either side of us rise sheer walls of grey brown rock, their strata tipped this way and that by forces beyond imagination. If, as I presume, this is a wadi, its depth bespeaks hundreds of thousands of years of serious water flooding off the mountains and raging down the path of least resistance. And yet the place now is as dry as thirst.
The occasional wiry shrub has been fashioned into a toadstool by the browsing goats. They prop their front hooves against the stem and nibble at any foliage they can reach. Even up here the silent local flies abound, finding momentary perches on face and arms. The boy comes alongside, looks up at me with wide-eyed seriousness, and doesn’t speak. We walk on.
I worry that he might be missed, that the other kids might tell his mother, that she might emerge to see her son heading into the mountains with a stranger. But I want to keep going and if he wants to come he can come. Then he reaches up and takes my hand. I feel a learned western discomfort. Almost all societies I’ve seen are more at ease with tactile contact than I am. I don’t know why. I stop. He looks up. I smile down at him and sit on a rock. He lets go of my hand and sits at my feet.
Back down the valley his village looks like what it is, a tiny human settlement in a hostile land. For thousands of years kids born in this valley would have died in this valley, but in the last fifty years all that has gone. The cause, I suppose, is the oil they found here and elsewhere to power the engines that have shrunk the world. Anyone can go anywhere and all the old notions of tribal home, of genius of place, of ancient bonds and traditions have dissolved or are about to. The story is not unique to this valley, this country.
This child, surely, will be lured by the bright lights of Ras al Khaimah twenty miles down the road, and then perhaps by the even brighter ones of Dubai. And from Dubai he can catch a plane to anywhere. The isolation of the ages is gone. There is no point in debating whether that is good or bad. It simply is. And it has happened so spectacularly fast. Thousands of years of accretions gone in half a century. This is an age without precedent. And in this tiny, once remote land the effects have been more sudden and startling than in most.
The boy is flicking stones at a rock. I do the same. He aims at a more distant rock. I follow suit. He looks up and laughs. Then a gulping clacking noise erupts below us, and out of the village there emerges a white 4WD, its engine knackered and hammering. It heads up the valley. The boy is watching it. It comes perhaps halfway up the track. I feel threatened, nervous, oddly guilty. I can see now that it’s an old-style Range Rover, two heads in the cab.
Then, to my relief, it veers off the road and goes joyriding through the valley. The driver flings his battered mechanical beast round boulders, throwing up dust and diesel smoke and noise that echoes between the valley walls and murders the peace. Young men, no doubt, with nothing to do. They careen in nowhere to no purpose for perhaps ten minutes, then return to the track and down through the village and beyond, and we watch them shrink down the road, the noise shrinking with them, until they round a distant corner and are gone. The silence floods back in.
‘Come on,’ I say to the boy, and we get up and head back down to the place where he lives and where I bet he will not remain. I’d love to know what happens to him, how his life pans out. His future seems to me uncharted, guideless, fraught with every possibility on earth, and every danger.
The village is as deserted as when we left. The boy stops and stands to watch as I get in the car.
‘Goodbye,’ I say, and start the engine, and he smiles and I turn the car round and head down the valley and he runs after me, waving, for a hundred metres till I accelerate away and out of his life. Just a brief and random convergence of two lives but I was touched by his trusting company. I also feel a hell of a lot better than I did a few hours ago. And seriously hungry.
In the al Saha restaura
nt, in an apparently nameless settlement just short of the Omani border, proprietor, cook and clientele alike are transfixed by an ancient television mounted high on the wall. It’s showing a kung fu movie. Despite the subtitles the volume is on max. No one speaks, but the little restaurant reverberates with thwacks and grunts while a dozen Indian labourers lift rice and goat meat to their mouths with greasy fingers. When the film is interrupted by an ad for Colgate toothpaste, they look down at their plates.
Quite how the word corniche gained popularity here, I don’t know, but Ras al Khaimah’s got one too. It’s not the seafront where I watched the kids play football, but the road that runs beside the lagoon. And it aspires, of course, to tourist posh. It’s got a little theme park of sorts with a replica fort, walkways among irrigated banks of marigolds, water courses built of concrete but fashioned to look like rock, ornate lamp standards, a cafe, and a puzzling free-standing turret with windows of mirror glass. A notice trumpets that this is an example of ‘Innovation, Creativity, Tourism, Design, Art, developed by RAK Dream Tours’, and that it offers ‘a unique tourist experience and exciting amenities’.
‘God willing,’ says the sign, the place will open for business in October 2008. But October 2008 has been and gone and the place isn’t open yet. God was not willing.
It must be tough working for RAK Dream Tours. They’ve seen Dubai draw visitors by the million and gain an international reputation. Here in Ras they’ve got the same benign winter weather and similar sandy beaches and warm seas, but they’ve barely started on the myth-making process, the image creation, the branding.
I can’t see this corniche hauling the tourists north. However much RAK Dream Tours may puff it, it’s just a bland straight boulevard thick with traffic. Halfway along it, just when I’m thinking of hailing a taxi, I hear amplified chanting. Following my ears, I find a spanking new building. The neon signs that decorate it are all in Arabic, an unprecedented oddity. Even government departments here advertise themselves in both Arabic and English.