Geography Lesson

I've had a couple questions as to where exactly is the United Arab Emirates. So... here are a few maps. The first two are general maps. The third map is also a general map, but shows some additional detail for the next blog entry. Quick lesson on the UAE: The UAE is composed of 7 emirates; Abu Dhabi is by far the largest. Dubai, Sharjah, Fujairah, Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain make up the balance. We might think of an emirate as a state, within the country that is the UAE. They think of emirates as countries within a greater alliance that is the UAE.

Here's an overview of where the UAE is globally.

We zoom in a little bit this time to see where the UAE is located within the Middle East. Note Saudi Arabia to the West, Oman to the South, and Iran to the North.

This is a closer view of the UAE. I've highlighted Ajman, where my office and project are both located. There's a callout box on the right that says "UAE - Inside Oman - Inside UAE." The border between UAE and Oman is interesting, at the least. While Saudi Arabia borders the UAE to the south, Oman borders the UAE to the east. However Oman also borders the UAE to the north, though there is no connecting landmass between these two parts. To make the border more confusing, there is a small part of Oman located COMPLETELY inside the UAE. Continuing to complicate things, there is an even smaller part of the UAE within the small part of Oman, contained completely by the UAE. It is to this even smaller part of the UAE to which John and I decided we must travel as you can read about in the upcoming entry.

If you want any further information, I recomend Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_arab_emirates

Thanks to google maps for making it easy to use your maps.

Weekend of 9, January

Saturday is completely boring to write about. I slept in, organized music that I've been receiving from people (up to 40,000 songs, less than 5,000 of which I've listened to) and read like a fiend. The real day to talk about was Friday.

John and I had talked about going SCUBA diving at Dibba again, but I woke up with a sore back and decided donning all the heavy equipment probably wasn't in my best interest. Rather, we decided to take John's 4x4 Kia Sportage and go exploring.

Since everyone prefers the pictures anyway, I'll tell the rest of this story through the photos. Here we go:

On the way out, we found the Boy Scouts of the UAE Reservation.

The faithfull Kia enters the mountains.

Most of the trails were gravel roads through the valleys and wadis. A wadi is the path through the mountains that would encounter flash floods in the brief and rare rainstorms that assault the UAE. Because the land is so dry, and rain so rare, stormwater protection is rarely, if ever considered. When the rain does come, its effects can be devastating. We would soon discover, however, not all the trails were this easy to navigate.

There was a dam to protect the village situated on the other side of this Wadi. Notice the spillway and try to imagine this dam being overtopped. For reference, the concrete blocks at the base are about 6' cubed. It's not hard to imagine that a Wadi is NOT the place to be during storm.

This looked like a shot right out of the old 1990's "Cruisin' World" Video game so clearly I was obliged to take the shot. It's actually a random 25 house village in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea why they planted flowers and I can't figure out why someone stuck a village here. I think the main attraction was a police station.

This was as much as we could see of the houses in above-mentioned village. The arab culture here is very private. As such, most of their houses are closely guarded with full height walls around them. This was a particularly ornate gate, and thus, picture worthy. Its also worth noting that with the exception of one Jeep Wrangler, every single vehicle in the entire village of 25 homes was a toyota SUV or Lexus sedan.

After the village, we got back on the gravel path. You can't see it, but the GPS actually says "Continue to Road" It had no idea where we were.

Then we found this cool fort and decided to check it out. There was a guy with a guest book sitting out front, but I really don't think he worked here.

Here's the same fort from the courtyard. Interestingly, none of the rooms inside connected. You had to go outside to get from one to the other. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of a fort?

After the offroad driving, we found the east coast and the Indian Ocean. then these camels tried to cross the road in front of us.

SIDEBAR:
When in the UAE, if you hit/kill something you pay blood money for it, or go to jail until you have enough - mind you that you can't make any money in jail. Though I can't seem to find anyone who can tell me with assurance how much that is, I have gathered that different races cost different amounts; this occurs in 4 increments. If you happen to find yourself in the UAE about to be in a car crash and you have to hit something with your car, you should do it in this order (based on UAE fines only: this sidebar does not reflect the opinions of the author - the author strongly recommends against hitting anything with your car):
1)Indian/Chinese day laborer
2)White Westerner
3)Camel
4)Arab Local
SIDEBAR OVER

After the camels, we went to go see the local nature preserve. The above picture was taken from the center of the preserve.

At the edge of the preserve, we passed through a small fishing village. They still use these Toyota trucks. Most other cars here seem to die in about 3 years from the weather / sand/ heat / utter neglect from their owners. These trucks were still running strong. It seems like the only problem with a toyota truck is that you'll never be able to buy another one b/c your first will run forever.

Mangrove swamp in the nature preserve.

Fishing village on the way back out of the preserve. This is a very typical mooring arrangement seen all across the UAE.

More toyota trucks, hard at work in the next fishing village.

This fort once guarded the fishing village against Portuguese invaders, so says the sign just to stage left.

We decided we would try to navigate John's Sportage through the Wadis, those dry flash-flood stream beds, back to the west coast, rather than the paved road. We found this dam. For point of reference, that dam is higher than a 6 story building. Imagine that flash flood.

I don't know what this sign says, but it proves we were there. That's John next to me.

It seemed promising at first. Nice easy roads.

Then the going got tougher. The car couldn't conquer this rock, but I did!

After about the third time we turned around, we came through this village with trees growing out of the sidewall of the wadi.

More village.

Those light-colored diagonal lines are the "roads" over the peaks. Note how this particular one seems to just end with sharp rocks. This road was particularly impassable, but not too different than many of the roads we tried.

MANY of the roads were all dead ends. We never did figure out why they built these roads. We ended up trying about 15 distinct trails that headed north and west.

This was taken the same place as the last pic, just looking slightly more to the right (north).

It was here that realized the Kia just wasn't going to make it over the peaks and we turned around for good. It was a lot of fun, but we never did make it all the way through. Oh well, back the paved road for a two hour drive home.

Round 2, TRAVEL!

The Holidays were nice. I had a whirlwind trip home to Boston, via Jon Weston’s Christmas Party, Mr. Lucky’s Bar and the Long Island Ferry only to be back in time for Matt Hayes’ bachelor Party on the 27th back in Philadelphia.

So now it’s Tuesday after Christmas, back in the office and a call comes in, much in a similar way. It’s my engineering manager from my project in Ajman. The message: get on a plane; don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, just put the phone down and get on a plane ASAP. Well, Matt and Erin’s wedding is Saturday, January 3rd and I’m not about to miss it. A phone call to the travel agent later, I’ve got a ticket on Air France booked for Monday, January 5, a whole one week away to plan/pack and otherwise get ready

New Year’s was a relaxed evening at The One, The Only, The Brian, The Brady’s Mad Pimpin’ Bachelor Pad in Philadelphia. The Hayes’ wedding is a blast, despite the extraordinary lack of single girls. Oh well, borrowing someone’s girlfriend (or newly married wife) for a dance or two isn’t so bad. A good time is had by all.

3:00 PM on Monday, January 5, finds me en-route to the international gate at good old PHL. A long line and agents handing out cancelled flight notices is never a good thing. I wait in line about an hour to talk to a ticketing agent. Flights connecting through Paris are booked solid for the next 4 days, she says. Great! No problem because I’m trying to get to Dubai. How about connecting through any other city, US, European or otherwise. I think this is being flexible. My previous flight, Atlanta to Dubai direct on Delta is booked 4 days out. There is a flight from JFK at 11PM – issue: they can’t get me to JFK. It would be up to me to rent a car, drive said car, return said car and take the shuttle to the airport 3 hours ahead of time to check in for the international flight. Unlikely. (The train doesn’t get me in on time at all.) There’s a flight out of DC at 10:00 tomorrow night, the only catch is that to get to DC I have to take a flight that leaves in 50 minutes. Okay, good enough. The ticketing agent makes the changes, gives me a handwritten paper ticket and tells me to run. Thankfully, my brother had the day off, so he came up and picked me up at Reagan National. I had a good, relaxing day of hanging out with Tom and family until the whole clan dropped me off at Dulles the next evening. After being the lucky recipient of the SSSS (special security screening selected) and given the chance repack the entirety of my fully loaded carry on and computer bag under TSA scrutiny, I made it to the gate in enough time for my last American meal at California Tortilla.

I got on the plane and promptly passed out. At some point, I woke up in Iraqi airspace and started to read a sailing book borrowed to me fourth-hand from the most recent ex-commodore of the sailing team. (Thanks Danielle, even though you don’t know it.) Three Days, 4 Airports, 2 flights, 8 security screenings, Emirati Passport control and a 45 minute luggage delay later, I met my driver outside the Dubai Airport. I’m ba-aaaack!

(Sorry Folks, no pictures worth looking at here)