wwdouble you DUBAI.

It’s a phenomenon of the times. It’s extraordinary in the extremes of all that is good, and all that is bad.

It’s Dubai, or more accurately, it’s the UAE.  40C to 50C of camel depressing desert, which back in the ‘60s, hosted a few Arabs in boats, when up from the depths came a bubbling crude. Oil that is. Dubai gold. Or Abu Dhabi gold, at least. Dubai, Abu Dhabi’s  cousin state, seemed to borrow most of its neighbour’s oil doe. And when the Saudi’s had to be called in for a loan here and there, the Saudi’s added a few Sharia law conditions to the loan. UAE had two advantages, it was a British protectorate, not another state of the oil nazi US, and like Holland, Dubai, because of its (up a creek) trading location like the Dutch Rotterdam, became a trader not a warlord. Traders soon learn that multilingual, culturally tolerant behaviour is better business than sticking it to your neighbour ( or gassing them) like Sad and dead Hussein. Accordingly, in the UAE, there are about 120,000 expat poms, and just over 20,000 expat Aussies, and gratefully, fuc all Yanks.businessmen. Aussies are the preferred nationality to manage the construction industry, with Poms being the wanking bankers ( with many a deal secured and now torched outta London). It’s kinda fun that it’s us Aussies who are the main managing ‘doers’ of Dubai, as it is the world’s best construction and development training ground. As it is hard to get a regular mortgage in the UAE as a foreigner, much property is secured overseas, meaning much of the pain of the speculative bubble burst, bleeds the already anal haemorrhaging, and financially gluttonous England.

But don’t live with ya girlfriend, or you’ll get deported, to the airport (or the jail). Don’t get pregnant if you get raped, as you go to jail for adultery along with the baby. Don’t bounce a cheque, or, like in middle age Europe,  you go to debtor’s prison. When the boom collapsed, it seems the best option for many broke expats was to simply dump the new BMW, and head for the airport, as a first preference over bouncing cheque. In the streets below where I stayed, the dust encrusted evidence was everywhere, one guy didn’t even close the rag top to his  new BMW sports car, leaving now dust covered groceries on the front seat before doing a runner. The UAE was a late starter in the GFC, but when it went, it went over like a barrel of money at Niagara. Don’t be caught, if ya gay, being the ‘givee’. The ‘givee’ goes to jail, the ‘giver’ walks. With condoms being the biggest selling item in the all male Pakistani workers camp, ya gotta wonder what goes on at night, nonetheless.

As a graduate of a faculty of architecture, with a builder’s twist, to me, Dubai is the most amazing professional gawk of a lifetime.

Where we may be used to seeing a paddock of demonstration, project homes, Dubai is similar, except the homes come in a range of  60 storey towers, city wide. If you are ever in the market for a 40 to 140 storey tower, come shop at Dubai. At 98OM high, like a fairy castle stalactite, the tallest thing on earth will be opened in a month or two in Dubai. Go stick it, KL. And it comes alongside the hotel with the mostest, and it’s lapped by the fountain with water jets that would give you an enema through your cranium, in Walt Disney performing bursts, to acres of orchestral music, with hundreds of these jet bursts, maybe 15 storeys high. Beat that. Oh…I forgot, it has the world’s biggest luxury goods Dubai Mall alongside it too. If you ever wondered how to define every luxury retailer on earth, read the Dubai Mall directory.

There’s a fish tank in the new Dubai Mall, with wall of glass maybe 12m high, (god knows how thick is the seem less glass), some 40m across. If they burst that one, there would be more than one type of shark species swimming around Armani.

You can learn to ski in Dubai. In between shopping. Ice skate a tad in another mall. Feed the sharks in another. Or the seals. Take ya pick. Go could get some groceries, have a scuba dive, a snow ski, an ice skate, and be back home by lunch. Why the hell not.

But during Ramadan, don’t eat or drink in public, or at home for that matter, between dusk and dawn. But at 45C, a glass of water is sometimes an issue.  So don’t get caught sipping a water bottle. Or it’s back to jail. Such things don’t really enhance tourism prospects for all the acres of new hotels. Restaurateurs don’t do so well in Ramadan September, and it’s just as well they eat a lot of dates in Dubai, as a pig-out on dusk, with nothing in-between, must create a nice log jam on the digestive highway. But Dubai has got the traffic log jam issue well in the solution gun sights, building roads with more lanes that the Santa Monica freeway, for cars that, well don’t exist, or are dumped in tower block car parks. We’re ‘on a road to nowhere” comes to mind, especially viewing the freeway bridges that just end, in mid air, everywhere.

Power is a bit of a problem, but 25c/litre diesel aint, so half the new buildings just generate their own. Shit trucks line up for miles, well full of it, waiting to do a dump at the shit dump yard. Pipes are a bit behind schedule. Just as well for the dates again.

De main man is Mo, Sheik Mohamed, His Royal Highness, a guy who sure was in the right place at the right time, after his dad was just tooling around with camels and boats, till some bubbling black shit gurgled up a few years ago. From camel pets, to the biggest horse stable gig on earth. Add the biggest white boat on earth. Sheik Mo is indeed well loved locally, and with free heath cover, no tax, and flash shit everywhere, he has got a good track record, on the subject of benevolent dictatorship. It’s only us expats who seem to have an issue with Sharia law, and hey, who’s to say pashing pommes fucking on the beach pissed, is pretty anyway.

Sheik Mo’s mota, his 140m white boat mota, looked a treat framed between a few of his towers, out Jim’s window.  The boat, according to our magazine shots, inside at least, is more colourful that a hippy holiday in India. He da man. He da Mo.

Da Main Man just opened up a new Metro when I arrived, and for Ramadan Eid-end, every man and his dog was riding it. Real men ride up front. There’s no driver anyway, so ya might as well join the hordes of Paki’s gawking down the tracks through the front window, as the new trains rip around Dubai sans driver like an airport shuffle on ‘roids.

And its three cheers and holy shit for me mates Gerard, Jono and soon Jim, who as COO’s or CEOs, or da big boss men, have projects on between them, that would rival all the big building projects in Aus, between just two of ‘em.

Their projects come in batches of 40’s, 60’s and 80 storeys….. that’s tower blocks…. lots of them, and flash ones bro.

We all go oou ah when Junipers tops of a big’n in the Gold coast, but in Dubai, Shaun’s tower would be lost in the crowd. Fuck me, the number and height of the towers is beyond comprehension. Some, a handful , are indeed architectural masterpieces, lost sadly in the overindulgence. Many are impractical, but spectacular sculptures, where it’s obvious that the architect who go the job, was the one who got the biggest ka-pow effect in the unveiling before de man. De Mo, oftentimes.

The law to support this madness was a bit lagging. For example, you could line up all night, to buy a home unit, and if you got to the head of the cue early, you could zip to the end of the cue, and on sell immediately, pocket 15%, and unlike Aus, you pocketed the cash earn before the building even began, with no tax payable. This mania became infectious, with the average unit trading hands 7 times, before it got built. When the music stopped, (as the Greenspan trap snapped close with bye-bye Lehmans) the guy left holding the title to the unit was well fucked, as prices halved, and halved again, leaving acres of newly opening buildings, with no one home. They say they need several million more inhabitants, simply to use up the commercial space under construction now. But unlike Aus 1990, the developers have got most of the doe, bar the last 25%, there is no 19%PA debt to banks, the oil is a happy $70 barrel, and pumping away in the squillions, so there may be a lot of empty buildings and burnt London property backed mortgages, but De Man, and his Sheiks ain’t too fazed. They just need to think about a 10 pound pom immigration gig. If the poms can cope with 45C.

Many thanks to the hospitality of Jim Spencer, on ya Jim. Ya view rocks. Boats R US. Nothing like waking up to a clearing in the dust, 25 stories up, looking across Dubai Marina, through the world’s fastest and biggest growth of reso’ towers in human history.

And also to Jon Lyle, another of the sheik’s men in Abu Dhabi, on ya Jono….and also Gerard Carrollll> holy shit, no one will ever be able to even compete with your resumes, after your gigs go pictorial. We all once worked together, and went to Uni closely, and we continue to drink together.Even somehow through Ramadan. But don’t tell anyone.  Besides, its water of course.  After dusk.  And not until dawn.

It could only be done with armies of Paki’s, Indians, the odd Chinese crew, some Afghani’s and infact anyone who wants to quadruple their homeland pay, work in 45C heat, for less than a $grand a month.  Philipinos are smarter, they do food and beverage indoors. The local Emirates sure need to be tolerant of immigrants, as they seem outnumbered 9 to one in most places. But in their dish dash, immaculate white sheets and headdress, with kids paternally on their arm, the local Emirate lads sure know how to style it. Their backyard BBQ’s fill their driveways with Bentleys and half million dollar Merc’s, and when ya mate upstages you with a deadly, 6 cubic litre, US pick up, the mate with the Mack truck-pic up, upstages them all. In the driveway. Time to kill another sheep or two. Pity about no beer but.

With the US pumping arms and cash into the Rothchild’s, pseudo Babylonian state of Israel (”Is’  in Israel for Isis, “Ra” for the sun god, and ‘El’ for god or Elohim), and in the process arming the  Zionist maniacs with nuclear weaponry, it seems beyond belief that the west would be so audacious and hypocritical as to want to obliterate Iran for a possible nuclear program of their own. Even after Iraq and smack war Afghanistan, 70% of recently polled Yanks, are cool to attack Iran. What the?   If Iran is attacked, Dubai, just across the bay, could be bomb dust in minutes. Russians would love it, as the subsequent middle east oil blockages would then make their oil trice as valuable, and the only stock available, and they would be off on their dash to control central Asian hydrocarbons. So Russia is busy arming Iran, as the US pays $1600PA to every man, woman and child in Israel (whilst denying their own community health care).

The US embargo on Iran sure looks like bullshit when you see the millions of tonnes of goods being shipped there in Dhows from the Dubai creek. There is no where on earth like the middle east when it comes to fucked up, deceptive foreign intervention. If the western populations all could see what was going on here, without the lies of the western media, it would be shocked. But hey, Israel can kill 100 Palestinians for every one Israeli killed just last Christmas, yet the West, via CNN, see Israel as victims. The new big game, is who, of Russia, China or the US, controls the last big oil deposits on earth, in Central Asia. The US aint in Afghanistan to chase Bin Laden, no more than it is in Colombia to chase FARC , that’s just a smoke screen for the mums and dads back home…. it’s the oil in Venezuela  and Central Asia they want.

I had a week in Dubai, after a few fab weeks demobilizing in Holland near De Hague, with many loving thanks to Anoesjka and her family, who lent me a homely home unit behind the dunes. Holland is my favourite European country, the Dutch are way cool. The bike is soon in a container to Sydney ex Rotterdam, for all of $700, scrubbed for a day, with wire tooth brushes inside and out, ready for Australian Quarantine. It rained the day after I demounted, after almost 4 months of beautiful warm sunny European memory behind me, so I curled up and enjoyed the TV with added delight, cancelling the day entirely. I was sad to leave Europe, as Europe treated me to rich experience after rich experience, in mile after mile of breathtaking bike touring. You just can’t replicate the richness of travel, when you go in a glass and steel box called a car. Bike touring is living it, fully engaged.

Before I left Europe, I rode the length and breadth of Germany and Holland, meeting with the brilliant engineers and manufacturers of fuel cells, hydrogen steam reformers, and electric marine propulsion systems, who hopefully one day will be part of the fabulous www.trybrid.org project, to be the first to circumnavigate the world in 80 barrels. The Germans and Dutch are to my mind the world’s best and most innovative engineers, and to be hosted on engineering tours, by the best and brightest of the new energy innovators, was a special treat, and a great education. I think now, the final scheme for TRYBRID is taking shape, and conceptually, there is nothing like it, on earth. Maybe, just maybe, with possible partners like the crew behind the Masdar super green city in Dubai, TRYBRID will one day dock in Thames, as the guys conceiving and now starting this Masdar city, have conceived a renewable, self contained, Forster planned masterpiece, the likes of which has no competitor in green credentials , on this planet. May they, and TRYBRID, succeed. May Dubai recover, and survive the US’s seemingly evil intentions for Iran, a few miles across the bay from Dubai. Many thanks to all my hosts and friends over the last month. You rock. Ramadan’s month long fast and contemplations ended with a big splash out party as I left Dubai for Hong Kong.

Thanks also to the gorgeous Georgeous Stevens, and her pals from Brighton, with who I spent a last weekend in Brighton, learning more about the cutting edge of raw foodie culture and farming, with spiritually alive and vibrant approach, with clarity that I have never before experienced. You guys are onto something very special in Brighton. Thankyou Georgeous for your hospitality.  May Moonbean your rabbit be over the moon.

What a memory it left me. Next Asia.

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