Camel races at Sweihan

 The Sheikh's compound  - opened for the races. I think it was used for accommodation and there is an emergency mosque for prayers

 The racing machines arriving at the stadium with their minders

 The stadium from a distance

 A competitor on its way to the finish line

 The finish line, with the commentator and photo finish boys

 The ladies participating in the traditional dancing

 loose race camel... it lost its rider in the 1500m dash

 A group of Emirati girls hanging off the well in the traditional village

 one of the traditional bedu tents

Traditional houses made out of the traditional constuction materials - wood and vegetation, used as stalls in a market at the races

FW: There are three pairs of underpants . . .

Email from a friend's husband.  We all went through this process. He tells it best.....

Yesterday was a waiting day, which means that I am interacting with the bureaucracy, in some way. Yesterday was the biometric capture for my ID Card.

In a place without street addresses, it's not intuitive where Mussafah Service Point 1 is. I have a map which shows it as being in 12th Street, and their website shows it as being in 17th Street.

Between the two locations is a 3-4 km gap.

Ringing the enquiries number, I am told that it is next to the BMW showroom. The BMW showroom is not on 12th Street, nor is it on 17th Street.

Remembering that Ruth went to Mussafah to get her ID card done, I email her. She responds that she couldn't find the place at Mussafah, and went instead to some other Service Point, at the Exhibition Centre.

That Service Point is now closed. But Ruth is sympathetic (yeah right!)

So, with no wish to spend a day driving round Mussafah looking for Service Point 1, I decide to take a cab. I walk down to the nearby expat compound, Mangrove Village, and collar a cab there. In response to "Mussafah. ID Card. 2 o'clock.", the driver says OK, and off we go.

He drives with a great deal of character, tinged with malice, and we duly arrive at Service Point 1.

It is not in 12th Street, it is not in 17th Street,  and it is not next to the BMW showroom. As you might expect, it's in 15th Street, behind the Mercedes showroom.

As usual, there are a whole bunch of people milling about, and the choir of babel is in full swing. Every nationality you can think of, excluding perhaps Tongans and Easter Islanders. Or perhaps I'm just not looking hard enough.

But, oddly, there are a few distinct queues. Unused to such order, I stride purposefully to the door at the head of the queue, and shout "Two o'clock ! Queue ?" at the security guards. Whilst they're distracted by me, two guys slip into the building. One guard sighs resignedly, and goes inside to retrieve them.

The other points at one of the queues. I join it, establish that nobody near me speaks English, so pull out my copy of Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm" and start with the introduction.

My appointment is at 2, and at about ten past, the security guards come and check our mobile phones. You get txted an appointment time, and they're making sure that nobody's trying to sneak in early, or sneak in late, or both. I have printed the txt message. My guard is confused by this and waves me in.

Once inside, it's to the reception desk, where my appointment form is barcoded, stamped with "duplicate" and has "2:00" scribbled on it. Then time to follow everyone else upstairs, where we get a little ticket with a number on it. Mine is #235. The board shows that #555 is currently being processed. I sit down, show my ticket to the guy next to me, say "235. You ? ". He shows me a ticket that says #058, and explains that when they get to 600, it will click back to 0. So I'm on time, and about 270th in the queue.

There are 22 booths for biometric capture, and I time the nearest one. It takes about 5 minutes, so a quick calculation indicates that I should be out of here by 5 mins times 270 divided by 22.... um no, actually, because there are only 5 booths in use.

Hopefully, it's prayer time, and the biometric capture people will be coming back soon.

Nope, it's not prayer time, and the guy next to me explains he's been here about 4 hours. My brain does some sluggish, inaccurate mental arithmetic, and decides that I'll be outta here about 6:30.

Out comes my copy of Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm", and i continue - very slowly and deliberately - with the introduction.

This goes on for hours, but slow reading helps. Sort of a "chew each mouthful 32 times" sort of slow reading.

I fall in with a group of young Bangladeshi shop assistants, and we talk about work, where we come from, and, on hearing that I am from New Zealand, they guide me through the merits and deficiencies of every player who's been in the Black Caps for the past 5 years.

They all want to know about New Zealand, they all want to go and work there, but as they haven't a hope in hell of getting there other than tourists, I forbear, contenting myself with lurid descriptions of Wellington Southerlies, volcanoes, earthquakes and the other natural wonders which New Zealand has to offer.

After a while, conversation dries up, and we go our separate ways. I repeat the performance with a couple of Filipino drivers, comparing the merits of our various volcanoes. Mount Pinatubo wins.

More of the same follows, this time with two Sikhs.

I decide that my sluggish, inaccurate mental arithmetic is well within the margin of error, as I finish at 6:46.

And there are still about 70 pages of Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm" left unread.

three days in a row.... waaahoo!

 Yas Island, Sameh Teaching Elsa

 I counted 34 kites on the water at one stage

Camel judging criteria

Visit to Eid's farms, out in the desert somewhere (I was lost!) where I fell in love with camels

Yesterday afternoon, all of us Western Expats at SCAD, piled into cars and drove out into the desert in convoy to visit Eid's farms.  Eid is the boss's secretary, a total sweetie, and very proud of his farms.  He has a good reason to be.  One of his camels won the races last weekend, and he's been offered 300,000 Dhs for another of his camels - I wasn't sure if this was one of his breeding bulls or a mare? cow? what do you call female breeding stock?  

So I persuaded Nancy and Rob and Matthew to travel with me in my new Jeep because I wanted to test it out.  (I'm very pleased with it so far.  And I was delighted when Eid admired it, because that means it must be a cool car over here!)  And off we went into the desert.  Eid took his uncle and baby brother and a servant with him, to help with the BBQ and a couple of his friends, Jakob and another man, who's name I didn't catch, also joined us for dinner.

The government has a policy here of encouraging Emiratis to farm camels and livestock and offers cheap feed to help them out from a Government-owned feed company.  Obviously farming conditions are quite difficult, what with the land being pure sand, and the lack of water.  Eid grows a special pasture that can tolerate salt water to harvest as feed.  He has two farms. One for goats and poultry and one for his racing camels.  

At the camel farm, we visited the camels, and met his favourite girl.  They are all very friendly, perhaps reflecting Eid's personality!  Some camels spit and bite, but his all wandered over to check out Greg and Robyn's little girls and hung about for a pat.  We also met his best racing stud - a Sudanese x Emirati cross, who we were warned not to pat.  The males are sometimes dangerous apparently.

The most gorgeous of them all was the one-day-old baby, who was born on Thursday evening, after a long and difficult birth.  Eid said he was in a panic because there were no doctors available to help anywhere in the region.  He ended up delivering the baby himself, and she/he was looking very healthy and beautiful yesterday.  Her mother was not so friendly and gave me a nudge to tell me to back off from her precious calf!  

I have now fallen completely in love with camels and can totally understand why Emiratis see them as beautiful and have annual beauty contests for their stock.  I am thinking of starting an Australasian racing camel syndicate, and working on Matthew (who is a sucker for farm animals) to go into partnership with me to buy a camel and start breeding racers.  ooo what fun!

After  sunset, and tea and coffee and a (massive) snack in the tent, we all set about cooking dinner on the BBQ and gas burners.  His place is set up really well.  He has a big tent with majalis seating, and a water tank on wheels for washing, and a really flash toilet and shower block - far plusher than anything Kiwis would have at their bachs.  And of course a generator, so we could watch the football on the telly!  

We lit the fire and did some chopping.  Nancy and Miriam were in charge of making the kebabs, and I chopped capsicum for the stirfry, while Eid chopped chickens up for the traditional chicken and rice dish.  Then Eid showed us how to cook the traditional way on gas burners, while the kids ran around laughing and squealing and admiring some new born ducklings.  A few of us tried to diagnose the stars and the rest of us sat around drinking coffee and tea and chatting.  It was a delightful evening, and dinner was DELICIOUS!  

I learned from Jakob, Eid's friend, that divorce is increasing rapidly in the Emirates.  He himself had been divorced and remarried, and his fifth child was born three weeks ago.  He was also a farmer (as well as doing his day job in the city) but he only started farming a year ago.  Eid's father is a camel farmer and Eid started his first farm in the 1990s.  His father apparently keeps telling him to stop buying camels, but Eid is determined to increase his stock to 150 in a couple of years!  He loves his camels!

Here's some piccies....

Eid and a new-born calf.  She was born the previous night, and delivered by Eid, finally after a very long and difficult birth.  Eid tried to find a doctor to help, but none were available.

A Saudi ram.

Eid's pasture. He grows a particular variety of grass that can tolerate salt water because that's all that's available on the farm.

Emirati heritage chickens.  Note the short stumpy legs. 

Eid's favourite racing stud.  He's an Emirati-Sudanese cross.  The sudanese camels are very fast.

Dinner in the tent, majalis style

 Greg about to tuck into a traditional chicken and rice dish, that Eid cooked up earlier in the evening on a gas burner.

 Sunset at the farm

 A baby camel (calf?) that Eid is planning to give to his brother to train up for racing once he reaches 1 year old.

Eid's younger brother taking a photo of the calf

kitesurfing on Yas Island

We were on the northern coast of the eastern spit on Yas Island. My place is between the Abu Dhabi-Dubai highway and the sea, across the channel from the southern spit of Yas Island. 

I went for my first kitesurfing lesson today.  Well, not my first. I've had lots of lessons over the years, but never enough time x the right conditions to get good.  This time, I'm hoping it is going to be different.  Beautiful warm water, shallow, gentle wind - it never gets up to 30kts apparently, and flat water. Goodbye chilly gusty Wellington - hello gentle warm Abu Dhabi!  AND, there was hardly anyone there.  So no toddlers eating icecreams or grannies strolling on the beach to knock down with my out-of-control kite, or even 50 hot guys all looping centimetres away from me and threatening to get tangled in my lines, like there was at Hillhead, in the UK.  I've already agreed to fork out thousands of Dhs to buy a 13m kite!

I had a delightfully uneventful and pleasant lesson in the water with a couple of beautiful young French people.  BUT THEN, I tried to drive back to the highway, through a tortuous series of sand paths to the asphalt.  I was in my rental, a Mitsubishi Lancer.  And I got lost in the desert!  It looked easy but it wasn't.  I got stuck in some soft sand had had to start walking back to the kitesurfers and picnicking Arabian families.  The kitesurfing instructor Sameh was driving a 2 wheel drive too, so when I saw a massive big 4x4 heading towards me across the sand, I knew I was in luck.  An Arabian guy in traditional dress was driving. I flagged him down and asked him if he had a tow rope and explained my situation.  He said: No problem.  He said he was off to the cafe to smoke hubbly bubbly, but had time to help me out.  He drove all over the sand dunes to get to my car, which I thought was promising, since he obviously didn't need to stick to the hard stuff.  Then, when we got there, he told me to hop in and drive but 'not too much petrol'.  Then he drove up behind me and pushed!  It took quite a bit of pushing to get me through the soft stuff, and every time he made contact, I cringed at the thought of the back of my rental. But we finally got back to a hard surface.  And there's no actual dents, just the R missing off Lancer, and a few scratches on the bumper!

I obviously need a 4x4.   And desert driving lessons!  I've only had the car a month, and already I've been stuck in the sand.

Not much wind, but enough to fly a 13.5m kite. Warm water, friendly wind, and no waves. I am going to get to be a hot kiter here!

The beach.