Why so many fires?

Photo: Devadasan. Gulf News

I wonder why it is that we seem to have an inordinately high number of vehicle fires after crashes.

Monday's reports were of a speeding 4x4 on Dubai-Al Ain road smashing into a car parked on the hard shoulder. The driver of the 4x4 and the two people in the parked car were all incinerated.

There are similar crashes in other countries but it's a real rarity to read of the vehicles burning. Here the vehicles seem to burst into flames far too often. I'm sure that many more people would survive the crashes if the fire problem could be removed.

Something for the authorities to look into?

No kangaroos in the city...

Disappointing for many tourists who expect them, but in Australia we don't have kangaroos hopping down the streets of Sydney or Melbourne.

We do have a lot of other wildlife though as this story in today's Sydney Morning Herald shows:

A woman has been rushed to hospital after being bitten by a red-bellied black snake in her car in inner-city Sydney, NSW Ambulance says.

Ambulance officers were called to a home at Woodcourt St, Marrickville in Sydney's inner west at about 4.20pm today.

An ambulance spokesman said the 60-year-old woman was bitten by a snake that was in her car.

The woman is believed to have just returned from a trip to the Blue Mountains.

Paramedics treated the woman at the scene before taking her to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in a serious condition.

AAP

Marrickville is right in the inner city of Sydney. The red-bellied black snake is large, common and very poisonous. Fortunately an anti-venom is widely available.

Myths & Legends in RAK

Great stories come out of Ras Al Khaima on a regular basis, bringing some light relief to the rest of us.

The latest story reports that residents came rushing from different areas of the emirate to Al Muntasir Street, where panic was being caused by...a dragon!

A dragon. No wonder they were panicking.

Several police patrols arrived on the scene - well you'd need a lot of officers to deal with a dragon wouldn't you.

It was a lizard.

Known locally as dabb it's like an iguana or goanna. I remember seeing a lot of them around Dubai in the seventies and eighties.

What do they smoke up there in the northern emirate?



Gulf News have the story, even with a photograph of the dragon, here.

A day in Dubai...

On Sunday, after three weeks on holiday I said: Just got back to Dubai - it's nice to be back too.

Then today dawned.

Even before I'd had my coffee - not the way I want to start my days - the day jumped up and bit me.

The car was booked in for service so I drove from Media City to Galadari Mazda on Al Ittihad Road. The traffic was heavy but moving...until I hit the disaster the RTA has turned Al Ittihad Road into. Murphy's Law - Galadari Mazda is slap-bang in the middle of the disaster area.

I eventually got through it and then the usual nonsense - for a simple, mundane, ordinary service: the car will be ready tomorrow sir.

Tomorrow!! Forget it, it's today or nothing.

I've had many different cars serviced in different countries and never has it taken more than a few hours. Not even when extras need to be done, such as new brakes or other parts. But not Galadari Mazda.

Anyway, ranting is the way to get things done in Dubai, so I ranted and eventually 'later today' was agreed.

I eventually got my first coffee of the day at 11am.

Boy, it tasted good.

Afternoon and the taxi I'd booked turned up on time.

But.

Sheikh Zayed Road was jammed.

Emirates Road was jammed.

Al Khail Road was jammed.

The airport tunnel was jammed.

Al Ittihad Road was its usual gridlocked disaster.

Two hours later we were sitting in a jam close to Galadari Mazda so I payed the driver and abandoned the cab. Walking was quicker.

The car was ready, the computer was down so I wasted half an hour standing around the service centre reception.

The drive back was reasonable - again heavy traffic but moving.

And here I am, having done very little today, just logging on to try to catch up with my blogger friends, sort out the rest of the holiday photos, read the papers, and write to Mazda in Japan to ask them to get stuck into the non-service service department of their Dubai representative.

Life & death blogging

Spare a thought for our fellow bloggers in Burma, now on the run from the regime, sleeping in a different place every night because they dared to tell the world what was happening on the streets.

Like all totalitarian regimes, paranoia characterises the military dictatorship. Because they control every part of the process they can easily check what bloggers are saying, their names and addresses.

They didn't like what they saw, so they started to crack down by blocking individual blogs, then blocking all blogs, now they've simply shut off the internet.

Their record of human rights abuses doesn't bode well for the bloggers, which is why they've gone into hiding.

What can we do? Just about nothing effective. For what it's worth we can pester our governments to take stronger action against the regime, but the world has been aware of their excesses for decades and has simply looked the other way.

It's very depressing.

The story is in The Times and you can read it in full here.

Boring holiday photos.

I threatened to post some of our hundreds of holiday photos when I'd sorted them out. Well, I've got some of the work done, so I'm going to carry out my threat and post them.

We flew with KLM to London via Amsterdam. Amsterdam photos to come later, it's the UK ones I've sorted through first.

Heathrow? You can confidently believe what you read about it. Fortunately KLM uses Terminal 4, which is less of a problem to get to and from and is marginally less bad than the other three terminals. But it's still old, dirty, over-crowded, well past its use-by date.

The staff weren't too bad - I expected surly and rude from all the reports I'd read but they were just bored, obviously didn't like their jobs, couldn't be bothered.

There were no trolleys at the baggage collection area, not one. The reason? They were all, all, in the area beyond customs. No-one could be bothered to push them back where the passengers needed them.

Rubbish bins? None. They were removed to stop terrorists putting bombs in them. (Paris Gare du Nord station thought about it and replaced the bins with clear plastic bags. Heathrow can't be bothered to think about it).

Anyway, we got out without being hassled and into central London reasonably well - sensibly, we'd arranged transfers.

We stayed at the Ramada Hyde Park, a hotel that's been there for years under various names & management. It's reasonably priced, in reasonable condition and most importantly is in a good location. You can just stroll across the road into Hyde Park, down Kensington Church Street into High Street Kensington, the other way into Queensway, so there's plenty to see and hundreds of pubs, restaurants & cafes within easy walking distance.

Wherever we are I like to just wander around the streets and I tend to take photos of street scenes as much as anything. I won't bore you with many of them, just one or two.

Around the hotel there are the kind of London streets I've always loved. Terraces of beautiful old houses in classic design, a few trees, all class and style...



All over England the window boxes and hanging baskets are a blaze of colour in spring and summer and I've always been attracted by them. This pub is typical...



...but the Churchill Arms in Kensington Church Street, is exceptional!


On Sunday when there was far less traffic and pollution, far fewer people, we wandered around to have another look at Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the new statue of Nelson Mandella. It's a classic historic area of course and in spite of the ugly security barriers all over the place it still has a lot of charm and it oozes history.



Just across the road from the hotel is Kensington Palace, where Prince Charles and Diana lived and on the way back from strolling around the park we stopped to check out the gardens...




I also wanted to have a look at Windsor Castle, in spite of the crowds, to see how it was looking after the huge fire in 1992. Fifteen years! Where did the time go?!

They've done a fantastic job, especially in my favourite room St. George's Hall. No photos allowed inside I'm afraid. The cost to go in and look around the State Rooms is £14.20 by the way, which is just over Dh100.



It really is an impressive building, the largest inhabited castle in the world and it stands on a hill dominating the little village of Windsor.

And in Windsor, we're back to hanging baskets of flowers all over the place




So that's a little peep at some of the things we saw while we were in London.

Did I miss much?

Just got back to Dubai - it's nice to be back too.

Apart from the heat, humidity, the first half of Ramadan - did I miss anything important?

I'm trying to catch up, with sleep as much as the news. I've read enough so far to see our beloved RTA has said the first year of its three year plan to solve the traffic problems is to be ignored, the three years now starts from now. Apparently Dubai's growth caught them by surprise, they hadn't planned for it.

I did agree with one of their pronouncements though - the traffic police need to enforce the laws. Just about all of us seem to agree with that, judging by the letters in the papers and blog comments.

Talking of papers, congratulations to Gulf News on reaching the ripe old age of thirty today. I remember the very first edition, in fact I have a tattered yellowing copy of it somewhere. In those early days I really didn't think it was going to last, so well done to all concerned.

We had three weeks in UK/Europe, I have five-hundred photos to upload and sort out, millions of spam messages to get rid of - I've just spent an hour sorting through and deleting the spam comments on here and on Dubai Metblog. When I catch up with it all I'll probably post some of the better holiday photos and chat about the more interesting bits.

One thing I can confirm, that I've talked about before - western-European expats, and especially Brits, who complain about Dubai being expensive are living in lalaland. We spent a few days each in Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK and the cost of just about everything is terrifying. Only rents in Dubai are higher, everything else to do with daily living is way lower than western Europe. I'll give you examples when I sort my paperwork out...