Bustling, materialistic metropolis - DUBAI

We flew in over arid mountain ranges and sand… and more sand and then squared off settlements with a few flat-roofed dwellings. Then suddenly Dubai came into view with its high rise buildings and innumerable half-finished ones topped by cranes (25% of the world’s cranes are in Dubai!). There are road works everywhere too, so taxis seem to backtrack and go around in circles to get you anywhere. There is a ‘waterway’, the Creek (which is being extended all the time), running through the city and the gardens are spectacular (plenty of desalinated water – it tastes good too!) It is a very clean city with very little crime. It feels very first world.
Our friends have a lovely villa – fully air-conditioned, year round -but temperatures are very pleasant in the few 'winter' months. The garden is small, but there’s room to sit outside and many bulbuls, sparrows and parakeets crowd the feeders they have out there. Their roof has a spectacular view of the silver and blue skyscrapers. Some of their friends live happily in high-rise apartment buildings.
As there are mosques all around, one hears the calls to prayer, loud and clear, five times a day – but it’s short – some are more melodious than others! Sandy and I visited one of the biggest. Our guide was informative and the building itself is hugely impressive (literally and figuratively).
On Sunday I also went to St. Mary’s, Sandy’s Catholic church. It seemed pretty full to me, but she says it is much fuller on Fridays, as that is ‘Sunday’ in Dubai! It is also a beautiful and very well-maintained building. A visiting Indian preacher gave very good sermon – on Rockefeller becoming a Christian on his deathbed, at 50. He then went on to live another 48 fruitful years!
About 80-90% of Dubains are ex-pats; taxi drivers are mostly Indian or Pakistani (Sri Lankan too?), shop assistants, domestic helpers, waiters/waitresses, seem to be mostly Phillipinos and then there are a vast number of professional people from around the world working there. Nobody pays taxes! Sandy and Roger use taxis to get around, as their Zim drivers’ licences are not accepted. They would have to do 100 lessons at high expense to get legal ones. Most professional people have their own cars. The driving is quite hectic!
Shopping is a huge part of the Dubai experience – shops stay open till 10 pm (except during Ramadan). The Dubai Shopping Festival was on while I was there. The malls are imaginatively designed and vast. One can get exercise and window-shop at the same time and also find anything and everything you want (what a treat!). One can also go on bus tours, which include stop offs at souks (Arabian type markets, gold, textile), the museum (which is excellent) and a boat trip on the Creek (it used to be more of a little creek before it was dredged and widened a few years ago). Then you can do the desert experience; dune bashing in a 4X4, a camel ride, desert sunset, a meal and Arabian dance show in a tent, henna painting - we didn't do this, but perhaps a not so tourisy one would have been good e.g. without hair-raising ride and henna painting?! There are also beaches, but didn’t feel a need to go there (surprise, surprise!).
There are loads of fantastic restaurants in malls and also in magnificent themed hotels.


On the last day Sandy and I met up with another ex Mauritian friend at a Lebanese one with a view of the ski resort inside the MOE (Mall of Emirates)! We also saw a movie, The Kite Runner, in that centre.



I hope you feel as if you have been able to experience a little of Dubai with me!

SHOPPING ADVENTURES

Seychelle Rupee 1 = South African R1, about SR15 = 1 GBP, SR7.5 = $1

First, to market – take a clothes peg for the nose if you’re squeamish about fishy smells. Fish of all shapes and sizes are laid out on concrete slabs, and men are noisily selling them. If you’re buying, glistening eyes say ‘I’m fresh’, dry and sunken, ‘I’m not very’. Egrets strut confidently about in the blood and gore - they get fishy bits for free. Buy locally grown lettuces and bananas here, as you won’t find these in the supermarkets –this is income for people who grow these at home. There’s nothing for less than SR10 usually –‘yay’ days occasionally e.g. avocados for SR5s each. It’s a tourist attraction and one day Miss Intercontinental contestants, complete with sashes, added a touch of glamour, skirting around the veggie bits in their stilettos and mini-skirts.

Then the hunt is on: SMB, Docklands, Supasave, Freshcut, Timoljees and finally little shops near home: For cheese (please oh please let me find cheese this week, any cheese – ah look there’s some, one large lonely wedge looking forlornly out through the glass of the empty cabinet, pleading ‘Please buy me’ - I don’t think so – at SR249 per kg); milk (forget about fresh, there isn’t any ever and I won’t complain if I can’t find my favourite, just as long as I can find some milk other than tins of sweetened condensed milk), but no, there’s none, not even powdered. I find something called Dairy Whitener at a little shop at the garage, but before I am forced to use this, Dudley phones and has found a shop with some boxes of long-life – quick, buy 6 boxes please; instant coffee, only one shop has a few bottles of one brand only – 200g for SR145. We’ll wait at that price; bacon – forget green or smoked, back or streaky, forget price even, if I can just find some bacon – oh lovely shop nearby, he has two packets of bacon cubes left - too bad they’re R99 per kg (do pigs know just how precious they have become?); razorblades, still none anywhere – it’s been months since I’ve seen these (perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places). Luckily we still have a few and my legs aren’t very hairy.

Last stop on the way home; Randolph’s fruit stall on Beau Vallon beach. It’s a delight; he always has bananas, paw-paws, mangos and coconuts and other times he has pineapples, grenadillas, avocados, as well as other unusual local fruits.

One can get locally grown fruit and vegetables at the market and supermarkets, but most have been imported; iceberg lettuce SR75, grapes SR120 per kg, over-waxed apples SR80 per kg.

Thoughts on days when there are happy surprises; ‘Shitake mushrooms – let’s give them a try as they are reasonably priced’; ‘yay, mince and chicken pieces today (too bad there’s no ham again)’; ‘Ah Dudley’s favourite Viennas – not in hotel quantities today, so let’s get some of those’; ‘rocket salad again at Timoljees – must be their ‘speciality’; “Yipee, it pays to empty the whole freezer and find the last vanilla icecream at the bottom – so grateful for our little shop.’

All we want is one simple ball of string to tie meat onto the rotisserie – easy to find, right? Nope, no-one sells anything other than the raffia/nylon type. Other things - to name but a few -that have run out at various times; bottled water (La Digue on a very hot day), coke, sprite, yoghurt (and one hardly ever sees plain), butter.

Be grateful - 8 years ago was far worse; the only cereal, Cornflakes, the only toothpaste, Colgate!
Desperate plight calls for desperate measures. One of the young pilot’s wives coming in was worried she wouldn’t find wine gums - her passion. So she wore a trench coat in which she had secreted 80 rolls. She drew attention, wearing a coat in this heat and was searched and made to disgorge all the sweets into the tray. She was mortified, but allowed to repack her coat with them. So now she happily sucks her soothing wine gums as she shops.

Wild and wonderful

The snorkeling was awful; poor visibility and we saw very few fish, apart from a couple of rays and one small shark. The fishing was disappointing. It rained a lot, torrential at times. We hardly saw any sun or blue sky. We did not get to see the full moon. But the wildlife, walking, meals and relaxing were fantastic!
Bird island is owned by an old Seychellois family. It is not a luxury resort. Their main focus is conservation. This is what makes it special. Many scientists come and go but Roby is the ‘hands-on’ man who patrols the 5 km perimeter 4 times a day, making his notes. He is passionate about what he does and gave us a wonderful talk on all the creatures that populate this small coral island.

There are giant tortoises, including Esmeralda, who is actually male, not female! He is reputed to be over 200 years old. Roby showed us how to ‘jack up’ a tortoise by scratching its back leg. They love it and stiffen their legs, lifting their shells high off the ground. (There's a video at the end of this blog!) Among other more common bird species, there are frigates, brown and lesser noddies, waders, plovers, long-tailed tropic birds, sooty and fairy terns -here's a picture of one of these with her chick. They're all ‘tame’.

Best of all, both green and hawksbill turtles lay their eggs at this time of the year. On rainy, windy Monday night, we came across a big green turtle (about 1 metre across) digging with her front flippers. We could see where she had come up the very steep sandbank. She must have been exhausted as instead of going further up the beach beyond the high water mark, she was busy digging just over the rim. We got there at about 9.15. She finished digging a big round hole with her front flippers, then dug a much smaller deeper hole with her back ones. We watched all this from behind her, lying on our tummies at the very edge of the hole. Only when she started to lay did we turn on a small torch - Roby had told us what would or wouldn’t disturb her. She was coy and had almost hidden the laying from view with her back flippers, but we could just see the ping-pong ball sized eggs plopping down. I counted 62. To cover the eggs, she flicked sand behind her with her front flippers and paddled a compact wall with her back ones, moving slowly forward as she did so. Although she didn’t grunt, it must have been a huge effort, as she rested between every scoop. We wondered if she might tumble down the steep bank and end up on her back, but she shimmied down on her shell with flippers out of the way as easy as you like and off she went into the sea.

We got back to our bungalow at 1.20 am. We both feel over-awed by the experience. We marked the spot 12 m in from the nest as we felt sure with the whole nest would be washed by morning – and sadly it was. But she is oblivious of course.

On Wednesday morning, Dudley was tired and so I went for a walk on my own and came across a hawksbill turtle coming out of the sea to lay! She went right up into some bushes, resting a lot, bumbling into and clambering over driftwood, grunting a little as she went along – she didn’t seem to have the sense to go round the obstacles. Turtles are very short-sighted. They are smaller than the green turtles. She’d wedged herself in under some branches and I wondered whether she might get stuck there and whether Roby ever helps them in these situations. A Swiss couple that we’d met arrived and together we watched her digging her hole – interestingly only at the back. Her eggs came out more than one at a time – sometimes 5 at once! Roby arrived and he broke off some branches around her and said we could scoop some sand out from the back to get a better view. She was also less shy and had her flippers spread wide open, so I got some good photos and also a little movie! I felt sad that Dudley missed this. Roby wanted to measure and make his notes etc., so we left him and her to it. Hawksbills lay up to 230 eggs, the green turtle fewer.
This is a paille-en-queue (long-tailed tropic bird) chick.

Why clothes?

As I stood under the fan, trying to iron good creases down the legs of my dear husband’s work trousers I thought:

Why clothes in the Seychelles? It’s so hot all year round – why don’t we all just go naked? Who decided that trousers with creases in them were smarter anyhow? It must have been a man and he would soon have changed his mind if he’d had to iron them himself, in the Seychelles in summer. My husband hates his bright red work shirts too. (He said he stopped to offered a colleague a lift the other day, then realized it was a postbox.) They could all wear red ties with the company logo on it instead, knotted loosely round the neck so that no-one gets too hot under the collar.

It would be a shame not to have some colour around. So maybe the older Seychellois women should still wear their lovely outfits with hats that are so much a part of the character of this island.

Also, the men that wear the huge rastaferian green, red and yellow beanies over their magnificent dreadlocks would probably be reluctant to part with these. They are certainly eye-catching, but so are the dreadlocks when allowed to hang free. Perhaps the tourists would want to show off their newly purchased sarongs. These could be knotted around waists. Cloths that so many people carry around to mop their sweating brows could become a fashion statement. They could be produced in lovely colours and made big enough to cover up strategic spots if one was feeling a bit shy.

Think of the money we would save on clothes, soap powder, softener, electricity, not to mention the time spent doing, hanging and ironing our washing. The company’s Christmas party would have been a lot more fun if everyone had been naked - just prettied up a little with bits of tinsel or coloured baubles.

FEAST OR FAMINE?

Christmas is coming. Normally by now the Christmas cake would have been baked and wrapped in its foil (full of Christmas cheer -plenty of brandy). Tins of pineapple rings and boxes of cherries would be ready and waiting to decorate a gammon, which would be glazed and cooked on Christmas Eve. So far I haven’t found gammon (turkey and legs of lamb, yes, at a price), or pineapple rings, or fruit mix. A small bottle of brandy would have been plenty for the cake, but there are none of those and SR’s175 for a bottle is just too much. A friend kindly brought us some fruit mix and cherries from Dubai, so we will have our cake but will eat it without brandy. It would be fun to be browsing for gifts in beautifully decorated shops, with choices to boggle the mind. But this is the Seychelles. There are no shops like that here. We've been spoilt in the past, being able to buy pretty much anything we wanted. All the things we can’t find now are luxuries anyway though and way out of reach for the majority of Seychellois, not to mention millions of others living elsewhere.

We came across an amazing sight on a jetty last week; two crayfish or lobsters, both huge but the one particularly was enormous – the biggest any of us have ever seen.

The men who’d caught them said that they had got them at a depth of 20 metres. Is this allowed we wondered? They will probably have been sold to a hotel or restaurant and provided a feast for someone, but not the men who caught them.

Then at another little café on the beach, an array of huge, gorgeous shells were displayed on the railing. One never sees these sorts of shells washed up on the beach these days, so surely they must have been taken live from the sea, way out, where very few people venture. People must buy them (and it is tempting as they are so beautiful), as otherwise they wouldn’t keep producing more and more. Perhaps this is the only way some people can earn a few extra rupees, so that they too can give their families a little Christmas ‘feast’, something a little different from their normal diet.

So we're forgetting about the ham and fancy dinner with all the trimmings. But it won’t be famine for us. We will have our ‘feast’ at a local restaurant on Christmas Eve. It probably won’t be a traditional Christmas meal but the food there is very good. How lucky we are to be able to afford this. If the weather is nice, we will go snorkelling on Christmas Day and feast our eyes on fish and hopefully turtles too. This is where we often go snorkelling (and there’s my little dream house perched on the rocks….)

Stars and the Universe

There was a fascinating programme on TV a couple of nights ago about stars, the universe and all matter that we find in our world today; scientists speculations about what happened at the very beginning of time, how it all began and continued, to form the world as we know it today. They talked about the 'Big Bang', the huge explosion of the very small but hugely charged only bit of matter that existed (they think). Then from this, they deduced that various elements formed, probably through violent collisions of atoms, first hydrogen, then helium and finally, over a very long period of time, all other substances that make up our world today, including our physical bodies. Even a substance such as zinc is vital to our physical make-up. According to one scientist , our universe is still expanding and at an accelerating pace. The conclusion is that eventually everything will fly apart and be dispersed so widely that it will all go back to 'nothingness'!
There was a bit about the incredible Mr. Hubble and his telescope. What a brilliant mind, able to conceive and build such an amazing instrument. What a team that was then able to get it out into space and working, sending those awesome pictures back to earth. Not only are the images of exploding stars (and so much more) breathtakingly beautiful, they are captured events that happened so long ago, it is difficult for our brains to comprehend. It is a treat to go onto the Hubble site and look at the pictures it has taken and continues taking.

But God wasn't mentioned once.....frequent phrases cropped up which expressed uncertainty about their theories; 'we think that', 'we don't know, but', 'this is probably the result of' etc. It is inconceivable to me that people - and such clever people with magnificent minds (also made by God in my view; if you need convincing, read Dr. Paul Brand's books Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image) - can think and assume that it all 'just happened' without Divine Intervention. For me, Creation and the Universe and all it consists of, all of its beauty so evident to all, is summed up in the last line of the Lord's Prayer:
'For thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, forever and ever, Amen'

I had just written the above in my journal and was then doing my daily quiet time and reading. As if in affirmation of what I'd written, it said in my guide; 'Habakkuk affirms God as the God of the Universe, glorious and splendid.' So it seems that Habakkuk and I agree then!

FRUIT, STAR-FRUIT & STARS

We had been wondering if the plants growing in our lawn that looked like pineapples were in fact these, when suddenly we noticed that one had started to flower and grow its fruit. An exquisite star-burst flower/fruit of many colours, mauves, reds, pinks, blue-greens, has pushed up out of the leaves. A pineapple is growing really fast.

Also in our garden, we have a star-fruit tree. We have never seen one of these before and don't know if they grow anywhere other than in the Seychelles.The tree has dainty little clusters of pink flowers, but the fruits are the real eye-catchers. They are large and look like shiny yellow decorations hanging in the tree. The skins are very waxy, but you can eat the fruit skins and all. They taste and look rather like oranges inside, being similar in texture and having the same kind of pips. When you look at them end on, or sliced through horizontally, you can see where they get their name from.

Two paw-paw (or papaye) trees in the front of our house give us a more or less constant supply of fruit. The birds get plenty too. I always used to cut these lengthways, but recently cut one across its circumference and was intrigued to see how the central hollow where the pips are is star-shaped. It is an almost perfect 5 pointed star. The star-fruit is more like a Christmas star.

The real stars here are exceptionally brilliant, as there is no pollution.