Total Darkness
12/5/2004 9:17AM (7:17PM Addis Ababa)
Between the last post and this one a great number of strange events conspired to keep me from writing anything at all. For instance the laptop was down for five or so days, due to some meddling at Addis Ababa customs. This of course puts me in a position because so much stuff has happened that I may not be able to do justice to it all. So bear with me...
The second to last night in the UAE was wonderful, partly because I saw my good friend and his son, but also because we visited one of the more beautiful spots in Al Ain. In Arabic, the name Al Ain means "the fount" or "the spring", and the city itself boasts a large number of natural hot springs, the most famous of which is Mabzara. Mabzara bursts out of the ground at the foot of Jabal Hafeet (Mt. Hafeet), the highest point in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. The mountain itself sits on the border between Abu Dhabi and the Sultanate of Oman, jagged and somewhat forbidding, adorned only by the green swath around the hot spring and a winding string of lights on the road to the summit of the mountain. The evening that we went happened to coincide with a national holiday, so the entire area was swamped with people, barbecuing on the vast lawns, walking around, and enjoying the sybaritic pleasures of dips in the spring. The spring itself comes out slightly up the slope of the hill and then flows down through stone-lined canals to various bath houses and shallow wading pools. At the spot where the water comes out it is almost boiling hot, and it continues to steam almost all the way down the half mile of the canals.
Unprepared for a dip in the life giving waters, we instead drove up the mountain. The road winds back and forth ion its way up the mountain, a brightly lit, perfectly smooth surface. At the top there is a broad plateau that is so high that the view is reminiscent of that from an aircraft at 30000 ft. The view also provides a rough measure of the relative prosperity of the UAE and Oman. While on the Emirates' side the landscape flashes and sparkles, with the city lights strewn across the plain, the Omani side is dark. Not just dark, it is completely dark, a complete and inky lack of any light that makes you feel like you are staring out over the edge of creation. This sensation is amplified by the cold wind whipping across the summit. All in all it made for a wondrous final night in the Gulf, and served to offset my crummy flight back to Ethiopia.
As I sat in my cramped middle seat, soaking in the stench of my seat mates, I thought fairly hard about my stay in the UAE. The place has changed a lot since I saw it last, as I mentioned in a previous post. Still, there are things that stick with me. Most importantly is the part that my family has had in making the UAE what it is. In the late 1970's my uncle, still a young architect, moved to the Emirates and took a job with the city government in Al Ain. Being very competent, and also one of the few qualified people in the area, he found himself getting more and more responsibility. My uncle soon found himself drawing up the city plans for Al Ain and then for the city of Abu Dhabi as well. Anyone driving through those two cities is driving on roads my uncle laid out on a piece of paper, in a desert that hadn't been developed yet.