My bloodstained, dusty and shell-shocked introduction to the Emirates (definitely not for the squeamish)
I got to know Abu Dhabi first, and completely inadvertently, changing planes while being invalided out of Sub-Saharan Africa. Transferring to a London flight, I met the emirates with a Frankenstein arm held together by stitches, two pints of stiff dried blood staining my tight African jeans, and in a state of shock after running six inches of iron railing through my wrist the evening before.
As the plane touched down I was still reliving the fall, putting my hands out to save myself… that dreadful sucking sound as I pulled the metal spike out of my arm; the way that the flesh inside my arm was cold stark white and that long horrible pause until the deep round hole filled with a sudden rush of blood; afterwards, the endless dizzy trudge to find help, left hand holding right arm together and bright red blood welling between the fingers. At several points I had stopped and watched it for five or ten minutes, absorbed like a biologist with an ants nest, held capture by the strange scientific detachment of shock.
As we disembarked from aircraft in Abu Dhabi I was swaying with morphine and exhaustion. I gripped the staircase handrail with a blood-sticky left hand as we disembarked from the aircraft into a dark swirling sandstorm. The touch and the thought of cold metal made me feel sick and shocked all over again. I left a rust-coloured handprint to which the blowing sand adhered.
I know now that storms of that severity are rare verging on non-existent in the United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is the richest and most powerful. We had been lucky to land. The airport was closed minutes later - no flights could land or take off, with departure times falling back and falling back before the storm. Six hours went by, and then eight. Children cried and I had no money for a book. Instead, I looked out of the window and watched the darkness of the sand against the darkness of the fog.
As the storm settled in and delays transmuted into cancellations Emirates airline sent their passengers into hotels, then British Airways, and KLM and all the others. At last only the Gulf Air passengers were left, and the children cried harder and the parents grew more irate. Only four hours after everyone else, when the hostesses were developing the wary look of someone expecting violence and it was clear that the storm might not disperse for days, did the Gulf Air authorities relent and agree that we also would be given hotels for the night.
By the time they released us, the three star and the four star hotels were full, even some of the five stars. Families with children were sent to hotels first, and then the elderly. As the hotel rooms ran out the names that they called became more luxurious. I swallowed a cocktail of pink and grey painkillers and fell into a codeine-twitching doze against the cold tiled walls.
When they finally woke me, I one of the last to leave the airport, emergency visa stamped in passport and loaded into an anonymous white minivan. I knew nothing about the Gulf or the Emirates at all, and watched utterly confused as we drove past strange monumental statuary of pearls and coffee pots and clock towers, evenly spaced palm trees and the most immense mosque I have ever seen standing uncompleted against the red sky. After Nairobi and Dar-es-Saleem it seemed almost hostile in the space and the cleanness. I saw workers sweeping marble streets at 4am in a sandstorm, one of those moments where you can never be sure afterwards if it was seen or dreamed.
The last hotel in Abu Dhabi was one which is now famous the world over. Gold covered domes, a lobby the size of a football pitch. The sound of my footsteps against the marble floors echoed against marble walls and the impossible high ceiling. The lobby was so large that a tiny breeze whispered across it and I shivered with shock and tiredness and air-conditioning.
Five hours later I woke up against the freshest most crisp cotton sheets ever to be spoiled by the red dust of the Rift Valley. I had been woken by the gentle, almost silent entrance of a butler who claimed to be there to do nothing but look after me. He brought me fresh orange juice and dates, and quite unprompted, a doctor to check the stitches in my arm. After fighting and fighting to stay awake and watch the treatment and the needles and to keep away the nurses wanting to give me a blood transfusion in the little clinic in HIV ravaged Africa, I closed my eyes, and relaxed, almost enjoying the solicitous tugging as my stitches were checked and cleaned.
Champagne brunches are part of life in the Gulf. Immensely luxurious, they can easily cost a hundred dollars a head, with people being given as much food and alcohol as they absorb over the many courses and five or six hours until they move on to the bar.
These luxury-inured days, I take them in my stride and bitch about the quality of the wines, but then… I had seen nothing like it in my life. A student before going to Africa, I lived on marmite and cheap white bread before moving on to maize porridge and fly-blown meat shared by people who often fainted from hunger while we talked.
In the Rift Valley I had been living in an area which barely supported life in the most fertile seasons, and living there during the worst drought in memory.
In Abu Dhabi I saw room after room full of food and couldn’t believe that it might be real. Knowing the poverty next door, it should have seemed grotesque, but it was only wonderful. Six or seven linked rooms, suite after suite of food alone: roasted food, boiled food, baked food, carved watermelons, ice-statues, sushi tables, starter tables, tables of Arabic food, Italian food, French food, Salads, tables of crepes, of pasta, of freshly made stir fries and flash fried stakes each with dedicated attendants to help and slice and serve and encourage.
And last and best, facing the swimming pool where children jumped and ran in the fast-emerging sun, the room solely dedicated to desserts. Table after table of dark and creamy things, cakes and cherry topped patisserie, silver trays of sliced and translucent fruit, Arabic pastries brushed with gold leaf, melted chocolate swelling from an enormous fountain, serried ranks of bright and unidentifiable juices in crystal jars, and almost imaginably to a small girl out of Africa, elbow high jars of M&Ms and the brightly coloured boiled sweets of home.
A waitress pressed a glass of champagne into my hand and I flushed with shame and embarrassment. Ridiculous as it is, I was twenty-two and from a poor family. I had hardly even stayed in a hotel before, and nothing that cost more than ten dollars a night.
‘I’m not… I mean, I can’t a….’
‘For you Ma’am,’ she said, sweet-faced, ‘All this for you…’
And at that pain and painkiller hazed moment, I really did imagine that it had all been put there for me – that one of these sunglass wearing white-robed Sheikhs had taken pity on me, and told the hotel to lay everything in the world at my feet, or that my charitable work had come to the attention of some anonymous and benevolent millionaire.
The combined champagne and codeine haze lasted until we landed at Heathrow seven hours later, and for the long tired train journey north. I held my injured arm tight against my chest and watched the hills flitting by, spellbound by the clear pale light and contrasting it to the glare of the Rift Valley.
My mother, who had been waiting for days met me from the train station in our village and cried and cried. Seeing me for the first time in years, white-faced and translucent; blood-stained and swaying, with torn clothes, dilated pupils, stitches torn out carrying bags across London and blood dripping onto my battered trainers, all that she could think to say was…
‘I knew this would happen.’
But I was thinking ‘What was that place?’
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