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When I was in Dubai I took four films worth of photographs. There are a few quite good ones, but one stands out in particular. It shows Mohammed, our driver for-a-day standing in front of his huge Nissan Patrol Four wheel-drive. He’s wearing traditional Arab dress and a dishdash which shows that he’s neither an Emirati or Saudi. The pattern or colour of the cloth used denotes where the wearer is from and therefore, to a degree, their social status, someone from Saudi Arabia would wear a white dishdashas. Behind the car is the red sand of the desert between Oman and Abu Dhabi, the capital Emirate of the U.A.E. The sand is red because of the Iron ore from the mountains, which can just be made out in the distance. Mohammed has a tiny new, red Nokia 8810 mobile phone in his left hand, with the ‘Hands-Free’ cord running up to his ear. This one photograph and also our meeting with Mohammed reveal a lot about Dubai in my opinion.

Three of us managed to get some cheap flights, and one of my friends, Chris, his parents live in Dubai so we were able to stay with them. Apparently, oil reserves will run out in Dubai within the decade. Because of this, they are pitching themselves at the executive, short-stay, tourist market. Now this definitely wasn’t us, but through a fair bit of luck we’d managed to organise a twelve-day holiday there. Paul, the other bloke that came with us, his father sometimes has to travel to Dubai on business, so he asked one of his regular clients if they could organise a couple of things for us to do while we were there. Paul spoke to his father’s client, Mohammed on the phone a couple of times to find out that he would send us his car and driver for a whole day. We didn’t know what Mohammed’s job was, but obviously it was exciting to be getting a car and driver, we’d be able to see some more of the U.A.E. beyond Dubai. It became obvious from Paul’s conversations with Mohammed that personal contacts are considered to be very important there, he’d never met us, but was going out of his way to ensure we enjoyed our visit. Even to the point of giving us a contact number for any time we might need it. We arranged to meet the car at Mirdif (Pronounced ‘mur-deef’ should you ever need to give directions to a Dubai taxi driver) Private School. It was necessary to meet the car here because of one of the first contradictions of Dubai. Despite hosting Marat Safin and Tiger Woods while we were there and the world’s richest horserace not long after, there are no addresses. Mail is delivered to P.O. boxes, normally businesses, and directions normally go something along the lines of: “Third street on the left after the huge mosque, next-door to the Greco-Roman style villa”. This is another feature of Dubai, because of its sprawl, those who can afford it, and also are nationals as they are the only people allowed to own property, can build their homes in whatever style they choose. So we waited outside the school for the “white Nissan” we’d been told to expect. As we waited, we joked that this could well be a 1987 Nissan Sunny, well, at least we hoped we were joking, as in reality we had no idea what to expect. Ten minutes after the time we’d arranged, we received an apologetic phone call to explain that the delay had been caused by traffic between Abu Dhabi, the capital, and Dubai. It was only ten o’clock but it was obvious that the driver must have left pretty early to complete the 1 ½ hour drive to come and pick us up. A couple of minutes later a huge seven-seater, gold-coloured Nissan Patrol 4Wheel Drive pulled up. One of the blacked-out windows lowered as we convinced ourselves that this couldn’t be for us. The clincher was to see an Arab in traditional dress behind the wheel, it definitely wasn’t for us now, as we’d been told and had seen for ourselves, the nationals didn’t work. However, after a brief and only slightly awkward exchange, it was established that we were Mr. Paul +2 and Mohammed + truck were indeed ours for the day.

We climbed into the car which had two seats up front, three in the middle then two in the back, the car was so new the seats in the back were still covered with plastic. We buzzed up the tinted windows and started to appreciate the air conditioning compared to the 30C outside, which, at the end of February feels fantastic, if somewhat of a shock to the system. I was sitting directly behind Mohammed and the first thing I noticed in the rear-view mirror was the colour of his eyes in the reflection. They were very bright blue, combined with the dark skin of his face the effect was very striking. We had the car at our disposal so we wanted to see the largest Emirate and capital of the U.A.E. , Abu Dhabi. We left Dubai on a brand-new four-lane highway which was as straight as a die. On the way out of the city we drove past the Burj-Al-Arab, the world’s first seven-star hotel, with rumours of up to twenty staff per guests. Lothar Matthaus, the former German football captain was staying there while we were in town to play in a testimonial football match. I thought back to the day before when we’d crossed the creek in Dubai, still very much a working waterway, with the migrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistani’s who along with Filipinos and Malaysians among others, make up 80% of the population of Dubai. We crossed on an Abra, a long, narrow, motorised boat, it cost less than 10 pence to cross. Squashed on there with about 25 people the sounds and smells couldn’t have been much more different from looking out of a climate controlled car through blacked out windows at a £2000 a night hotel.

As the journey went on and we spoke to Mohammed more and more, we found out that he worked for the Emerati military and had been living in the UAE since the middle of the eighties. I then saw that his dishdashas was different to the others we’d seen and realised that he was not a U.A.E. National, so we asked him where he was from. Almost immediately it seemed like the wrong thing to have done, he looked really sad, on the verge of tears even. He explained that he was from Afghanistan, about an hour away from Khabul, we didn’t want to press him on what seemed an obviously difficult subject, but once he started talking about it he wanted to carry on. Perhaps he didn’t get much opportunity to talk about it in his day-to-day work, which this quite obviously wasn’t. He told us that his family were still living in Afghanistan and how hard life there was now under the Taliban. He said how much he enjoyed living in the U.A.E., but more than anything he wanted to go to London or New York where he could eventually get a passport, impossible for non-nationals in the U.A.E., even for other Arabs. The thing he wanted above all was a passport, and somewhere he could bring his family, yet all I could think of was how he would be greeted as an asylum seeker in the UK. I wanted to tell him that the welcoming image he had of London was a false one, but you can’t easily tell someone that they’re wasting their hopes.

That day we visited the compact, high-rise, metropolis of Abu Dhabi; Al Ain a former oasis with a royal palace; and a camel market just over the border in Oman, in a small poor town called Baraimi which had dirt tracks rather than the tarmac roads we’d come to expect. It was as fantastic a day as it sounds, seeing as many new and foreign things in one day as in most of all the other holidays I’ve ever been on. But, looking back on all the photographs we took that day, the one that stands out is Mohammed, standing in front of his huge car, which is shining brightly in the sunlight, behind, red sands stretch out into the distance with not another man-made object in sight. And Mohammed in his traditional dress holding his brand new, tiny mobile phone, looking very much the oil-rich Arab, whilst inside thinking of London and passports for his family.