Dubai Bus Tour and Dhow Cruise
The third day involves something I can’t recall
having done in more than a decade – an arranged bus tour. We have steered clear
of that sort of thing through my formative years, shaping my own ideas of what
a trip should be. Oddly enough, when something is truly sparse, it becomes
somewhat novel again and there is a palpable sense of excitement. When we
leave, it dawns on me that we are already used to the convenience of being
picked up outside the apartment in roomy taxis. It is no different this time
with a minivan.
After being transferred to a bus, we learn that our tour
guide is a fella going by the functional, diminutive name of Ali. Are all tour
guides in this part of the world usually called Ali?! Granted that it lends
itself with immediacy to convenience but wouldn’t it be wonderful for a guide
to introduce himself with the full Islamic glory of a name such as Abu ʿAbdallah
Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallah Il-lawati ṭ-Ṭanǧi Ibn
Battuta (more on him later) and then perhaps add, it is my very good honour to meet you and you may call me Abu?!
In his twenties, Ali is stocky with wry eyes and a sardonic
smile that he uses to close out sentences. It is the kind which makes me feel that
the tourist cliché has been reinforced multiple times back and forth, almost as
if to suggest that he knows we know he knows that the bus tour is, all things
said, only routine. Even his weariness seems practised; he seems capable of
conveying its specific tonality on a different day to a different group. He
might be the very embodiment of the bored tourist guide, with no hint of a
flourish or a bravura touch to what is admittedly a difficult job to plough
through day in and day out. It is one made more difficult by us tourists. During
the tour, Ali keeps throwing questions offhand at us, albeit in a voice that
suggests clinical boredom. More often than not, he gets no response. It is
difficult to assign blame to a situation like this. Typically, an audience
responds to its performer and a cheery one should
get some response if not reciprocated cheeriness. It is also fair to say that even
the most cheerful guides must come to feel dismayed by continual lack of
reciprocation. Eventually, Ali, like all people who learn to perform such jobs with
dutiful detachment, has pared the work down to its bare essentials. For our
part, as tourists, we have rationed our gratitude to the minimal in that we
thank a professional, not a performer, someone reeling off factoids and not a
storyteller.
Given the introductory function of the tour, we are
given fairly strict time slices at most places. In this regard, Ali is good at
conveying a sense of discipline and urgency. The Dubai Museum, meriting a
couple of hours, is to be galloped through in 20 minutes and yet we aren’t left
feeling morose at such a rushed pace for this is meant to be a sampling
exercise. People respond, out of understanding or indifference I am unable to
say, but with a delay of only 10 minutes, we are off for a drive through
Jumeirah, an uptown district that is as elite as they come.
The bus is being driven andante in marked contrast to the Metro ride that zips past the
towers of the business district. Neatly spaced plots housing identical
residences line the sides of the arterial road. They bear the Islamic stamp of
being miniature fortresses; no prying glance penetrates the facade. A sheet of
haze that day clothes them in a layer of indistinctiveness, making one doubt
their mooring in reality, enhancing the air of exclusivity of the place. When
we halt briefly at Jumeirah Beach, the
haze becomes strong enough to render a close view of the Burj Al Arab (The Arab Tower) rather like a ghost ship. Built to
resemble the sail of a dhow, it appears as a giant white corsair from the
Golden Age of Piracy, captured in the moment of gingerly absconding from shore.
In sum, it is an arrangement that I think works well
for a bus tour – passing by to register impressions and never staying to cement
them.
This part of the tour culminates in a drive through
the Palm Jumeirah, the only completed Palm project out of three planned ones. Going
by Google Maps though, all three have a more completed look. That said, even
the Jumeirah project has parts that are work in progress, an idea that is the
city itself in a nutshell. Cams is quick to phrase it thus – “SM, how does it
feel to live in a city that is always under construction?” By under construction, she is referring to the notion of being a work in progress perpetually. While
this is true of any city in its growth phrase, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to name but
two, have captured the popular imagination in our time because they are current
examples of a search that has been on ever since people began living in mass
agglomerations – the search for the perfect metropolis.
Cities can be written about in the manner of a
photograph; a certain place at a certain moment in time. Paul Theroux channels a
related idea in The Great Railway Bazaar when
he says some places have a specific orientation with time. I should like to add
the qualifier that over specific time periods, they do. Wind Dubai’s clock
seven years back and the snapshot would have been unambiguously oriented
towards the future. Go back twenty years and it must have been the same. Since
2008 though, with the recession having taken its toll and the pace of progress
having slowed, the time-capture today must reveal a dimmer sense of entitlement
to the future. Evidence as to this can be seen in the Government’s response to
the 2013 resurgence when real estate prices began picking up again. Property
Transfer fees have been increased and regulatory tightening done to prevent a
speculation-driven bubble. From this cautionary tale emerges the sense of a
city as a living thing, suffering a setback, learning and recalibrating its
brand of ambition.
An enduring fascination with cities is to do with
the tussle between old and the new, the latter always winning by relentless
attrition over time. The specificity of the bout often decides the nature of
the arrangement between the two. In mainland Europe, having come so close to
losing it all, preservation takes priority. The newly arrived must always tiptoe
around the recognized elders. In populous South Asia, by and large the new
takes root with a matter-of-fact credo – a space in the city is my birth right
and I shall have it – driven by plain economic bullying. Rearrangement of
furniture is only post-facto.
In Dubai, I sense a more curious relationship. Here
the new is designed in ways that atleast perfunctorily evoke the old. The
Desert Safari is essentially the power of the motor vehicle coupled with the
idea that sand dunes are nature’s roller coasters. The design of the Burj
Khalifa and the Burj Al Arab reflect traditional Arab themes, the spiral
minaret and the sail of the dhow respectively. The Dhow cruise is one more
addition to this theme. It is essentially, as SM puts it, dinner aboard a
cruise. I imagine there are versions of the same thing which appeal to varying
tastes but the boats we find upon arrival at Dubai Creek are all made of wood
with the overall design of the famed sailing vessels that plied the Arabian
Sea. The whole affair seems decidedly less ostentatious, something that can
only be the product of a conscious decision in this city.
Aboard the vessel, we are on the upper deck that is laid
out like a dining area. Floating along in slow and stately fashion with the night
breeze caressing the face, we are soon trading the vanilla how-nice-this-is look
that families learn to give each other at the first opportunity. In a stolen moment,
Cams and I exchange a sneaky glance of our own, one that feigns cocky derision
at what a ‘family’ experience this is! The draft blowing across the creek has a
tinge of cold that gets progressively colder as the night wears on. We are left
to contemplate what might have been had we visited in December.
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