The Delights of Economic Tourism. Part 1.

We have been in Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka for three days now, and are moving on to Kandy tomorrow afternoon. So far, I must say, so very, very good. I’m not sure that Colombo itself has a great deal to recommend it. Indeed, we received a text message from a colleague who had arrived in the city a day ahead of us telling us it was, in her words ‘shite’. I don’t think I’d go that far. It feels like a third world city: very poor and clearly battered by 37 years of war. There is a huge army presence still, with every bridge, every building of note and most major junctions having heavily armed checkpoints – a minimum of six Kalashnikov-toting soldiers at each, and often a tripod mounted heavy machine gun or, in a few cases, a rocket launcher. It has a different feel from other cities with a heavy armed presence, Cairo for instance, in that the Sri Lankan soldiers don’t seem to view their guns as macho accoutrements, more uncomfortable but necessary tools. The armed soldiers are a lot more cheerful for a start – more than happy to wave and smile and call out greetings. This was a bit unnerving at first. But we got used to it.

Given that Colombo has little to recommend it, why then so far so very, very good? That is because of the hotel. I would go as far as to venture that Colombo would probably be worth giving a miss entirely were we not staying at the Galle Face Hotel. As it is, we will indubitably be back. The Galle Face Hotel is the oldest hotel in Asia. The oldest hotel, in fact, east of Suez. It was founded in 1864, 46 years before Singapore’s Raffles, 64 years before Hong Kong’s Peninsula and 23 years before Conrad Hilton was even born.

The Galle Face Hotel seen from it's swimming pool.

These days it is split into two sections – the Galle Face in the northern wing and the Regency (not sure why you would choose to call a Victorian Hotel the Regency, but there you go) in the southern wing. The Galle Face is the original part, slightly tired by all accounts, but charming. The Regency, where we are, has been renovated in line with what modern customers would expect from a hotel of this standing. The building is all one, though. And the building, along with the location, is what makes to hotel what it is. Our hotel bedroom looks out over the courtyard which faces straight out westwards across the Indian Ocean.

The view from our hotel window.

This evening, we took high tea on the verandah and watched the sun set behind the palm trees.

Rachel and I taking tea on the verandah. Note the colonial moustache.

The view from the verandah.

The verandah.

 On our first night we ate at the Sea Spray – the hotel’s fish restaurant, our table right beside the balustrade, three feet from the breaking waves. The hotel is impossibly, unutterably, astoundingly wonderful. I am currently reading a memoir by the journalist Paul Harris who stayed at the hotel for a year in the mid 90s. I am very jealous.

The rest of Colombo is…well to be honest, we have rarely left the hotel. We went up to the station to book our train to Kandy (£1.80 each for the best seats in the first class observation carriage – I’ll let you know what it’s like anon). We also made a sortie out towards the National Museum this morning, but Rachel came down with food poisoning (not the fish restaurant! We suspect the water) so we returned. I went out alone to the mother of all factory surplus shops, intending just to have a look round. I came back with 4 suits (Dunhill, Armani, Boss and Valentino) and 7 shirts (Paul Smith, Ermenegildo Zegna and others) which I assumed were knock offs. But, apparently, the shop is world famous and 99% of its stock is real factory surplus/seconds.

My new suits.

The one thing that has kept me constantly amused is the scam artists, of which there are many. Try to walk anywhere from the hotel and within twenty yards a local will fall into step and engage you in conversation which will eventually work round to his recommendations of where to go. Most often this can be deflected with a smile and a firm ‘no thanks’ but the persistent ones are often worth listening to for their invention. The heart of all the scams is that they will try and charge you to go to a special, one-day only elephant festival at a nearby temple. The thing is that there is an elephant there every day and it is free. One particularly persistent chap earned full marks for inventiveness with his replies:

Him: it is a special one day festival!

Me: I’ve been.

Him: No! This is a Hindu festival. The one you went to was a Buddhist festival.

Me: I’m short of time (I had reached the cash point that I was heading for, 100 yards from the hotel)

Him: Don’t go to that cash point. I will show you a better one.

Me: Better how?

Him: That one gives you Indian money. No good, you can’t spend it. I will show you a Sri Lankan cashpoint.

Needless to say, the money was fine. Another favourite is them telling you that you can’t go a certain way because of security checkpoints. All lies! The only one that worked was a Bajaj driver (three wheeled moped taxis, like TucTucs in Thailand) who told me I should visit a shop on the way to where I wanted to go. I asked him why and he told me that if I did the shop owner would give him a litre of petrol and he was very poor. More examples of honest Sri Lankan advertising:

In case you can't read the strap line, it says "because it is really good"

And some not so honest naming of a hotel:

I think that 'bus stop' might have been more succinct:

The thing that I suspect will most evoke our visit to Colombo will be the sound of crows. Previously their raucous cawing reminded me of the beginning of Worzel Gummidge, but it seems that the whole of the city of Colombo is given over to them. The hotel employs a man to stand on the terrace with a canvas strap to make cracking noises to scre them off. It is also the first time I have ever seen urban scarecrows:

The final footnote to all this is the cost. Rachel and I are very much economic tourists and the strength of the Western and Dubaian economy (don’t believe everything in the news!) means we can afford holidays like this, and feel OK about spreading some of our relative wealth around poorer countries. The hotel is £50 a night. The fish restaurant (one of the most expensive in the city) was £9 each. High tea on the verandah, £4. My designer suits cost £40 each and the shirts were £5 apiece.

Cheers!

Well that's half a term closer to retirement

We have just finished our longest half-term ever: nine weeks without a break. For those non-teachers reading this and sneering into your cornflakes, nine weeks without a break is about a decade in non-teacher years. We are off to Sri Lanka in a couple of days where we intend to spend a week doing nothing whatsoever.

Today we celebrated National Day at school. National Day itself is sometime next week, but this was the nearest schoolday to it, so there you go. National Day is the anniversary of the formation of the UAE (38 years ago, so the UAE would have been in the same year as me at school). National Day was celebrated by the kids and some of the staff (myself and Rachel excluded) wearing national dress and by there being a camel in the playground. Getting a bit blase about camels now. Seen one camel, seen 'em all.

Now it is Eid which means 10 days off school. It also means everything is shut from 10 o'clock this evening for 24 hours, so no celebrating the start of the holidays in the usual pub-bound manner; it will be a few quiet boozydrinks at home.

I must say that I am quite enjoying being in such a fiercely competitive country. The country itself, that is, not the people or the culture. The UAE is desperate to prove its world-class status so is going all out to get everything it can (Manchester City FC included - the recent friendly between the UAE National team and Man City was billed as 'Our Country v. Our City'). In the three months we have been here we have had an international golf tournament, a Grand Prix, the Fifa World Beach Soccer Cup and, starting next week, the Rugby Sevens. There is also the Fifa World Club Cup next month to which we will be going: four tickets for the final AND the 3rd/4th playoff came to 20 quid. We also had an international airshow last week.
I am often accused by the kids of spending ages staring out of the window. This is because the view from my classroom window is pretty good.

That's the Burj Dubai on the left there. Another instance of the UAE being competitive. It is the tallest building in the world. Usually, when a country decides to build the tallest building in the world, they settle for a small margin. Before the Burj, the tallest building in the world was Taipei 101 at 509m. Before that, it was the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur at 452m, a difference of 61m. Prior to that it was the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago at 442m - a difference of 10m. The Burj, when completed, will stand at 818m. That's 309m taller than the next tallest. To put that into perpective, if you took Tapei 101 and stacked Canary Wharf ontop of it, you'd still be 74m short. That's a pile of 17 London Buses. Incidentally, 'Burj' means tower in Arabic, so don't confuse the Burj Dubai with the Burj al Arab, which is the tallest purpose built hotel in the world (the sail shaped one that you always see in adverts for Dubai).

Anyway, last week I had a day when it was all the kids that were looking out of the window. I asked them to concentrate on their exciting and fun English lesson, but to little avail. The problem was, the classroom window also faces the airport which is about a mile away and the airshow was on. So this was what they could see out of the window:

OK, so that's not entirely true. That's a picture I took of the following day's paper:

But they were really as impressive as the first picture and my real picture didn't quite do them justice:

I know that's sideways on, but I can't work out how to rotate it. Anyway, that's the Patrouille de France Aerobatic Display Team, the French version of the Red Arrows, and they were very good. So the airshow was three days of watching them, and F-22 Raptors and Eurofighter Typhoons and Airbus A380s circling the school. I think I was more excited about it than the kids.

Right, I've just had a phone call from the missus telling me she's ready to leave, so I'm off to start the holidays pretty sharpish.

Eid Mubarak everyone!

A Quick Trip to the Off Licence

This weekend was largely given over to a quick trip to the off licence. It takes about 3 hours, if the Great God of Traffic wills it so. Which means it has to be carefully planned to slot in between weekend hangovers. So it was Friday at about 1pm that we set out for Ras al Khaimah. The journey is fairly straightforward: you get onto the Emirates Road at the bottom of our road, then keep going straight until you get to the end, where you turn left. The last trip was made in the early evening after school with the entire process enlivened by the sight of some wild camels. I say wild, they aren’t really – they are owned by Bedouin tribesmen. But they are allowed to wander free rather than being kept on farms. Our trip on Friday was made during the day, so we first sighted camels about 10 miles out of Dubai, occasioning a volley of photographs from Rachel.

We next sighted some 12 minutes out of Dubai.

And then 14 minutes. And so on. We reached the off licence in a state of Camel fatigue.

Twelve hundred Dirhams (about 200 quid) later, we set off home with a boot full of booty.

The 7km between the off licence and the Emirates Road is made along Ras al Khaimah’s main road connecting its two largest towns. Once we had managed to negotiate a U-turn* traffic seemed unnaturally slow. The reason?

Camels in the road. We enjoyed that. The only regret was that they hadn't wandered onto the road a few hundred yards further along where there was a 'Humps Ahead' warnng sign. That would have made a pretty good photograph.

After the camels, the journey, again, was largely uneventful.

They don’t call it ‘the Empty Quarter’ for nothing. That is until we reached Sharjah. Sharjah is the Emirate right next to Dubai, just beyond the school we both teach in. Dubai has no money – its economy is propped up by oil money from Abu Dhabi. Sharjah has no money. Its economy is propped up by oil money from Saudi Arabia. Consequently, Sharjah is somewhat more conservative than Dubai. Not least in its tolerance to alcohol. A few years back, there was a well known and well loved Booze Souq in Sharjah. No more. Booze is now very, very illegal (except, for some reason, in the bar at Sharjah Wanderers Football Club). It is illegal to be in Sharjah with alcohol in your bloodstream. There is an off licence closer to us than the one we choose to use. Whereas our choice is mostly made on the basis of the greater range of booze stocked in Ras al Khaimah, there are stories of locals waiting outside the off licence in Ajman (right by the Sharjah border) then manufacturing accidents involving expats with a carload of illegal booze in Sharjah and blackmailing them so the police don’t get summoned. Apparently such instances are rare, but the shop in Ras al Khaimah has the added buffer of 20km extra before you reach the border with the dry Emirate. Nevertheless, I got to play Smokey and the Bandit with my bootfull of contraband for the last 15km of the journey home. Which was 14.5km further than it took Rachel to tire of me yelling ‘Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9, I’ve got the pedal to the metal and a Smokey Bear on my tail’ in a faux American accent.

Anyway, we got home without any interference from Jackie Gleason or any other type of law enforcement professional. And we filled our drinks cabinet.

Isn't that a beautiful sight?
And then we feasted.

On camel.
All in all, a good weekend. Cheers!



*For some reason, the road planners in the UAE are loath to let drivers turn across the flow of traffic. And nearly all roads are dual carriageways, at the very least. Consequently, journeys have to be carefully planned taking into account which direction each road feeds onto. For example, we live on the same side of the same road as our school, but our drive to school is nearly a kilometer further than our drive home as we have to travel away from school until the nearest U-turn place at our end, then past the school to the next set of traffic lights and back at the other end. If you miss your turning it can sometimes take hours and many, many kilometers to get back to where you wanted to be. This isn’t helped by the nationwide policy on road signage which is to remove every third sign for most of the journey, then all signs when you are less than half a kilometer from where you are supposed to be.