Al Khor

I was in my favourite part of Dubai yesterday and had my little pocket digital camera with me.



Coming in from New Dubai I find it easiest to park in Shindagah, where I can always find a space.

If I'm visiting Bur Dubai it's an easy stroll through interesting streets and if I'm going across to Deira I stroll through the textile souk and take the abra across the Creek, which is what I did yesterday.

There's been an upgrade of the abra fleet - now they have safety features for the twenty passengers...



Two lifebelts on each abra plus a sign about safety. I've never read the sign, I really must do that one day to see what they say.

The upgrade goes beyond safety though, or at least on the one I caught back to Bur Dubai - onboard cleaning solutions...



It was the middle of the day when I was on the Creek and half the fleet wasn't in action but those that were only took a couple of minutes to fill up with the full twenty passengers. We passed a few air-conditioned floating garden sheds, officially known as water buses, and each had only a handful of passengers.

RTA, there's a lesson to be learnt there.

I love the abras as they are. I know they're dirty, pollute with their diesel engines and all that but I'll miss it when they're converted to gas or solar, or whatever it was that was announced a while ago.

I love the dhows too. It's living history really, not very much about them has changed for a hundred years or more. They're built the same, from the same materials, they carry general cargo, much of it the same as they carried back in history, to the same destinations.

You'll see the cargo being carried on the backs of men as they struggle up wooden gangplanks too, as they would have done way back in time.

With the weather warming up - yesterday was 41C with humidity getting towards uncomfortable levels - quite a few of the dhows have canvas covers stretched over the cabin to give the crew some relief.

That's a bit modern though and it's good to see that others still use the traditional barasti palm fronds to give shade.



The dhow wharf, right in the heart of Deira, is always a reminder to me of how relatively crime-free Dubai is.

There are more than a few cities around the world where valuable items left lying around for days would soon disappear...