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.