Fjords popular in Musandam

Ten hours or more, there and back, on the road. But the trip to Musandam was worth it.

The journey is at best unspectacular, at worst a combination of dicing with death (Abu Dhabi to Dubai) and enduring the dullness of the coastal plains north of Dubai.

But this, or as best as I managed to capture it, is what awaits you on arrival in the mountainous chunk of Oman that is cut off by the UAE from the sultanate's main territory to the south.

As some of you will have seen from the photos already posted at Salut!, it is a remarkably beautiful corner of the Gulf.

We had only one night there, but this was followed by a magical day afloat as our crew navigated a slow course around the striking fjords.

It was a welcome relief from city life. Nothing happens in a hurry in Musandam.



And as a bonus, my Blackberry had no signal all day.

All photos are clickable for a better view....the hanging text will have to wait (in other words, I have no idea how to fix it).

One minor irritation. The dolphins are becoming blasé.

Cajoled by the spirited handclapping of our crew, they broke surface several times but then flatly refused to put on anything approaching a full show of tricks. Shame on them!

Nationalised Salut!

Someone posted a recent comment at Salut! saying that my musings on life in Abu Dhabi had been a factor in his decision not to apply for a job at The National, the newspaper launched in Abu Dhabi in April.

Well, I have certainly mentioned the dreadful problem of where to live, since only a fool or liar wold deny that excessive demand has combined with insufficient supply to produce outrageous rents for such homes that trickle on to the market.

Otherwise, I think I have been mostly positive and sometimes even warm about the place (and not just because it is very positive about itself, and also exceedingly warm).

The same applies to the weekly column - soon to be one of two weekly columns - that I write as part of my work.

You can find all of my contributions to the paper by searching for me by name at The National's website. There are also direct links from a list of columns that appears in the left column of Salut!

What is Salut! Salam?

Good question.

I am Colin Randall. I came to Abu Dhabi to help launch The National, a serious daily newspaper for the UAE and beyond.

My blog Salut! is reasonably well known. Its offshoots - Salut! Sunderland on the ups and downs of supporting Sunderland AFC, Salut! Live on folk and folk-rock music and Salut! North on North-eastern (England) nostalgia - have more specialised readerships.

What they share in common, beyond being mine, is that they are inaccessible to many, perhaps most, people in the country I have made my home, the United Arab Emirates.

I thought at first that I was being censored, either because I occasionally used pictures from Flickr (which has been banned, though it isn't just now) or because my host, Typepad, had somehow caused offence here. Typepad itself told me some of its sites were blocked.

But I am assured by the regulatory body that there is no such ban. Any formal ban, my highly place informant tells me, is demonstrated by the appearance of an on-screen messagee. Typepad blogs - or all those I have tried - just fail to open.

And that, I am told, means it is a technical issue, nothing to do with censorship. Boosters is the buzz word here.

So why am I able to get into my Salut! sites from work? This is where technological ignorance gets the better of me. My man at the regulatory body says it is all to do with the "boosters" a big media company is likely to use, and this is beyond my grasp.

But the upshot is that I have duplicated all items concerning the UAE and the Middle East and posted them here.

I just want people to see what I make of life in Abu Dhabi. Images, and the usual decoration you expect of a decent blog, will be added gradually, as time permits.

Blogging, which I began while working for The Daily Telegraph in Paris, has never threatened to make me rich. I enjoy doing it, but it is time consuming and costs money, not a lot but enough to notice.

The Google Ads and Amazon book and record shelves you'll find on my sites produce negligible amounts that do little to offset the effort and outlay.

Not without reluctance, I have installed a Donate button and if you like what you find at Salut! Salam, you may use it. Think of it as a variation of choosing whether to leave a tip at the restaurant - but rest assured that there'll be no scowl if you do not.

Making a point

Driving around Abu Dhabi, it is relatively unusual for the car driver to feel any great empathy with the people sitting behind tinted glass at the wheels of 4x4 monsters.

If I didn't like them as Kensington Tractors or 16th Arrondissement Juggernauts, I am not about to develop a grudging fondness for them here.

Maybe I am stuck with the view expressed in a piece some months ago, when I wrote that drivers were probably no worse in Abu Dhabi than in many other places I have been as resident or visitor.

But rather a lot of expats do bring the worst-case road practices of their own countries and apply them to the bigger vehicles they can afford to run with fuel so cheap and no income tax to pay.

Is it just me? Or are 4x4 drivers in the UAE really the ones least likely to signal, unless the wrong way or after completing the manoeuvre, most likely to cut across three lanes at the last second to turn left at traffic lights and racing certs to zig-zag with criminal recklessness on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway?

And yet, Salut! favours fair play, so let me declare myself 100 per cent on the side of the man or woman who reacted to someone nicking his/her parking space by plonking his/her lorry-shaped specimen so close behind that the offending saloon driver has no escape, only the need to make humiliating entreaties to the wounded colleague.

If you need to ask the price.......

I did need to ask. So naturally, I couldn't afford it.

You cannot live in the UAE and not at least consider a visit to the Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai's grandiose answer to the Eiffel Tower and all other man-made monsters of construction the world over.

They don't mess about with false modesty. A brochure readily available on request at reception is titled The World's Most Luxurious Hotel.

It stands 321 metres tall on the shores of Jumeirah beach and resembles both the sails of an Arabian dhow, as intended, and a whale that has decided to stand on it tail.

A night in the cheapest room costs 8,500 dirhams, that is well over £1,000 even before 20 per cent worth of taxes and service charges are added on. The top rate, for the Royal Suite sets you back Dh55,000 (more than £7,000 once you've added the extras). Breakfast, please note, is not included, though I suspect that with 780 square metres of space, you might be able to sublet to a few dozen others to offset the cost.





The Burj Al Arab is the only hotel I have ever visited that actually costs money to enter, since you have to book - even for pre-dinner drinks, or afternoon tea - and there is a minimum spend. No point in just turning up at the well-guarded gate and hoping to blag your way in, even if I am prepared to believe others have had more success than me at that.

Once inside, it is all surprisingly friendly and unsurprisingly slick.



The giant fish tank, ridiculously over-the-top glitter of the decor and lashings of wall-to-wall splendour make for an eye-opening visit. We asked if it was possible to take a peek at the hotel pool before we left, but were politely told: "Only if you are resident at the hotel. Sorry, but we must preserve our guests' privacy."

The waiter to whom the question had been posed helpfully suggested visiting the ground-floor Al Mahara restaurant, from which we could apparently get a glimpse. "Sorry sir," said the waiter there. "But guests are dining, We must protect their privacy."

In the 27th floor Skyview bar, from which we had spectacular views of Jumeirah until it suddenly became quite dark, we'd promised to spend Dh550 between us.




That was the easy part. In fact, we could have spent even more. The "world's most expensive cocktail", based on a 55-year-old Macallan single malt whisky, would have required a visit to a mortgage broker. It costs Dh27,321 - not far short of £4,000 - but you have to hurry; it comes in a limited edition of 10, and seven have already been sold.

The bonus is that you get to take the 18 carat gold glass home with you, and it comes in a leather case. You may reasonably conclude that I am not scratching my head where to put mine. I do not drink whisky.

Oman revisited: great country, shame about the turtles

As a defender with Sedar FC, a club playing 50km outside Muscat, Abdullah doubtless knew all about stonewalling.

He dusted down and reproduced his skills each time he was challenged him on the question of turtles.

Abdullah, it must be said, was greatly responsible for three-and-a-bit magical days in Oman. It may seem posh to hire not only a Land Cruiser (whisper it; I'm supposed to loathe 4x4s), but a driver, too. Yet it is beyond question that we saw a huge amount more than would have been likely without him.



On turtles, however, Abdullah is on the blasé side. When we joined a group waiting on the beach at Ras al Hadd in the hope of seeing them come ashore to lay eggs, he warned us to prepare for disappointment. As often as not, he said, people went away without having seen a thing.

He made us feel fortunate to have passed by a tank with a few newly hatched specimens.



And luckier still to have seen two green turtles swivelling in the large holes they'd dug in the sand. I say green with the confidence of someone who has read that this is the colour of the turtles that frequent these parts of the Omani coast. To the naked eye, the ones we saw might have been no more than piles of wobbly sand.

No picture I took of the spectacle is worth publishing here. If that is a reflection of my equipment and/or photographic prowess, it is also indicative of how little we managed to see. And it is fair to say that Abdullah showed every sign of wanting to be away as quickly as possible.

Next morning, after others at our little hotel - or, rather, collection of huts with dhow-shaped reception and restaurant - boasted of all the turtles they had watched, Abdullah shrugged his shoulders. And when we said they'd also returned first thing to catch more activity, he simply questioned their powers of recollection. "In the morning, only picnicking," he said.




But that is the minor grumble out of the way. Turtles are clearly his blind spot.

Pretty much everything we did see was seen as a result of Abdullah's knowledge, driving skills and attention to detail.

I would have driven the 4x4 A to B, missing the wadis, sinkholes, off-the-beaten-track villages and mountain lanes that help to make Oman such an invigorating place to visit.



For sure, I wouldn't have indulged in 20 minutes of expert dune-bashing on the Wahiba Sands. Abdullah was particularly proud of being able to negotiate the steep descents using a manual gearbox.




If you would like to read a little more about my trip to Oman, I have written about it in my weekly column at The National. See this link. I may get round to posting a few more photos in one of the Salut! satellites.

Caught in a Blue Peter moment

This is one I made earlier. Pressure of work is inevitably creating gaps between postings but I thought it would be interesting to run this piece, written during our pre-launch trial runs but now past its shelf life for an Abu Dhabi audience. Are there cultural/pop culture events you left it late to see, or never got round to experiencing?......


There really was little excuse for taking so long to see The Mousetrap, and equally little reason to suppose that unpaid thespians in Abu Dhabi, performing at a social club built on land donated by the UAE's founding president, Sheikh Zayed, would end up filling my cultural gap.

It is hardly as if the long history of Agatha Christie’s whodunit, and the slightly shorter history of me, failed to offer an opportunity sooner.

First sprung on the public as a radio play, The Mousetrap made its debut on the London stage 55 years ago.

For 23 of those years, I lived in London and for a time nurtured a voracious appetite for all things Christie. I devoured her novels, studied the mysteries of her life and felt honoured to be sent as a young reporter to cover her memorial service in 1976.

And when I think of woeful shows I have paid good money to see, it is strange that I should never have got round to attending one of the 23,000 performances of that extraordinary run. But The Mousetrap remained, to me, a closed area. So now that I have rectified the omission, catching the Abu Dhabi Dramatic Society’s presentation of the play at the Club, I must surely be a satisfied man.

On the contrary. I feel only relief that the seat cost 50 dirhams (about £7), not extravagant West End prices.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the production. Alan Daft, the director, may have been a little, well, daft to suggest in his end-of-run speech that the cast reached standards indistinguishable from those of professionals. But it was a highy commendable effort all the same.

From the splendid set to impressive acting, this was a work of which the company, despite a vast range of experience (including, in the case of Graham Clews as Detective Sergeant Trotter, none at all), can be proud.
Just over 700 people attended the three performances, a hearty endorsement of the society’s reputation for excellence. The source of my disappointment, however, was beyond its power to remedy.

The Mousetrap is not, in truth, a particularly good play. Assuming that the cast stuck closely to the original script, it is a rare damp squib in the sparkling Christie archive. The plot is weak, a few characters are unbelievable and some of the twists and turns lack finesse.

Amid the mutual backslapping and banter of the closing night party, I learned one or two things. For instance, Agatha Christie would not have resented my unflattering verdict too strongly since she never placed the play among her finest work.

And if the Abu Dhabi society suddenly uprooted to Aberdovey or Derby, I discovered, it could not legally present The Mousetrap at all. As long as the play is running in London, copyright law prevents any impresario, rep company or amateur society putting it on elsewhere in Britain; indeed, there are even restrictions on it being published in book form in the UK.

This will doubtless encourage people to flock to St Martin’s Theatre, and the world’s longest running show, for years to come.

Each will want to know, and try to guess, Who Did It. I now know, of course.

But I feel dutybound to observe a noble Mousetrap tradition, also mentioned by Alan Daft to his Abu Dhabi audience.

My lips, accordingly, are sealed.