Pigs do fly

There is only one place for a resident of Qatar to obtain intoxicating beverages to enjoy in the comfort and privacy of his own home. This is through the auspices of the Qatar Distribution Company, a kind of cross between an off-licence and a members-only club. It will come as no surprise at all to learn that, in accordance with the law of the land, Muslims are not allowed to be members.

Back in the olden days, Cable and Wireless somehow managed to obtain permission to import booze for sale to C&W employees. Other thirsty expatriates wondered why they weren’t allowed to avail themselves of this largesse and, to cut a long story short, the booze permit system was extended to all non-Muslim expatriates and administered by the British embassy. With an allocated weekday and a fixed maximum QAR500 allowance, going up to the C&W Syndicate once a month became something of an institution.

It has always been the case that the liquor permit system allows the bearer to acquire beverages up to a cost limit, and then to transport it directly to his residence for his sole consumption. Selling it, giving it away, or taking an Eski of refreshing hop-flavoured thirst-quencher to the beach are all strictly forbidden.

In due course, the Syndicate was taken over by the new Qatar Distribution Company, a branch of Doha Duty Free and therefore ultimately part of Qatar Airways. Allowances were doubled overnight, as were prices, so that the cost of alcoholic liquor aligned broadly with UK high street prices. The monthly allowance is now based on an individual’s salary.

Last week, the QDC quietly introduced an additional line of products that would not interest Muslims. Bacon and sausages. Proper ones, made of flat-nosed, curly-tailed haraminal. Apparently, plans are afoot to increase the range to hams and proper pork joints once the freezer space is available. And as a hog-gobbling infidel I say huzzah to this! Up until now, Qatar has been a pig-free zone, apart from the occasional pack of “Egyptian Veal” or “Turkey Burgers” flown in from Dubai or further afield. Now the bacon and sausages are flying in courtesy of Qatar Airways. I’m quite happy to purchase the products supplied by the State of Qatar, and then to take home and enjoy those same products.

Within a day of the news breaking, the Qatar Living website had multiple pages of forum comments, getting progressively more extreme. Such as:

“You shall not eat the flesh of swine.”

“But that only applies to Muslims, and my having a bacon butty doesn’t affect your beliefs.”

“But this is a Muslim country.”

“Then take it up with the Emir and his state airline.”

By the time I got to QDC this evening, the speciality sausages and all the bacon had vanished, and the freezers were resplendent with hundreds of identical packets of ordinary, bog-standard bangers. This is exactly as predicted by pretty much everyone. I like billy-basic bangers, so this isn’t actually a hardship, but a delight.

Being able to buy pork and booze in the UAE has not caused the complete collapse of civilization, as far as I know. It surely shouldn’t be any different in Qatar. I feel that the situation is a little like the idea of gay marriage. You may or may not approve, but if you don’t want one, don’t have one.

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Up diddly-up-up

I know that modern commercial aviation is a truly wonderful thing, and this post is rather unfairly written to highlight its recent shortfalls rather than its benefits. It's a bit of a cathartic rant. I basically agree with the sentiments of Ford Prefect, who “...always found the actual travelling-through-space part of space travel rather trying.”

Indeed. Air travel is similarly afflicted, being the several rather expensive hours of discomfort between where I am and where I wish to be. I lack the wherewithal to fly Business class, and I don't fly enough to earn sufficient air miles for upgrades.

I swore off Emirates, Dubai’s flagship airline, way back in 1997 after a disastrous Eid trip to the Maldives where the said airline contrived to bump me and two fellow passengers off our flights three times in 24 hours and then mislaid our luggage. How wonderful to arrive on a diving holiday with nothing but the clothes on our backs. My letter of complaint made shortly thereafter received a curt “it’s our airline and we’ll snub who we want to” response.

But for the most recent trip to the Philippines, Emirates represented the only realistic combination of schedule and price that would get both me and Beloved Wife from Doha and Dubai respectively to Manila and back again. Maybe Emirates had improved after 14 years.

Credit where credit is due. Our bags were not mishandled and we got where we needed to be, eventually. All cabin crews were polite and accommodating where they could be. You can’t blame the airline for bawling brats.

But four flights, and not one of them took off less than 45 minutes later than advertised. After an hour queuing to check in, trying to get me and Beloved Wife into adjacent seats was “sorted” in Doha, but by the time we had rendezvoused in Dubai it had become “impossible” and the best the airline could manage was placing us on opposite sides of the cabin in nearby rows.

At least the entertainment system worked. Sleep was impossible in the packed cabin, as was movement.

I must agree with the SleepingInAirports.com website (for the more frugal traveller!): Manila's Ninoy Aquino Airport is a dreadful place to wait. Having negotiated check-in and immigration, the possibilities for entertainment are limited to a modest selection of duty-free shops and an even more modest choice in food and beverage outlets. We bought our instant noodles and then tried to find a quiet corner of floor where we could sit down and eat. The concept of a restaurant providing seating for patrons seems an alien one.

With over three hours to go before take-off, there were announcements that passengers for the Emirates flight to Dubai should make their way to the departure gate. It was very clear through the glass that there was a big empty space where our Boeing 777 should have been. It finally trundled into position about twenty minutes before the scheduled departure, at which point we were advised that departure would be delayed. Duh.

In other airports, there might be a business case to keep passengers on delayed flights in the terminal, where they’d buy food and drink, but not so in Manila. Perhaps the policy is to prevent the terminal from becoming totally clogged with people by removing travellers to the departure gate sheep-pen as early as possible and holding them there with nothing to do. And no, you can’t use the lavatory. Why not? Because we say so.

Many hours later, the Emirates flight touched down in Dubai but didn’t park at the Emirates terminal. Such is the case with Dubai, where the weary traveller arrives at his destination and then spends half an hour in ever-increasing circles, looking for a parking space. The airport bus trundled the length of the airport, depositing all passengers at Terminal 3 where Beloved Wife and I parted company. I underwent airport security yet again: the authorities clearly need to check that we transit passengers haven’t sneaked any contraband into our personal effects on the trip between aircraft and terminal. And then the 1km walk to Terminal 1 for the Emirates flight to Doha. Why not the Emirates terminal for an Emirates flight?

The lateness of the Manila to Dubai flight meant that my three hour stopover was now only two hours. I decided not to avail myself of the “SnoozeCube” at Dh65 per hour, but instead crashed out on the floor between one of the travelators and some airport seats for a fitful few minutes of kip. My carry-on wheeled suitcase does not make a particularly effective pillow.

And the Doha flight was delayed by half an hour, which actually turned into 45 minutes before the doors were finally closed and we were on our way.

I look forward with no little trepidation to my next long-haul trip. The idea of being able to cross a third of the planet or more by simply paying money and then showing up at an airport is a truly marvellous one. It seems such a pity that the actual experience always leaves me feeling as if I’ve gone several rounds against Manny Pacquiato.

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Her name is Rio, and she dances on the sand

Largely thanks to the efforts of Mohammed, the Daihatsu salesman over at Taleb Trading in Doha, I got my test drive. Adonis Car Rental must have been abundantly aware of what I intended to do with their black Terios, my having previously explained that I specifically wanted the 4WD version for a weekend. But they let me have one regardless.

The vehicle shuffling started on Thursday evening, as I parked the Jazz in a quiet corner near Terii-Я-Us and picked up the Daihatsu. I gassed it up and then filled it with diving kit in preparation for Friday’s boat dive.

Test 1 passed: a Terios easily swallows all my dive kit with room to spare. I wouldn’t want to carry five human adults and all their luggage, though. There are limits to friendliness!

On Saturday morning, I met Gadget Boy in his Nissan Patrol, with his snorkel, lift kit, big tyres, and – crucially – tow rope and air compressor, and we headed off south in search of a quiet area of desert where we could hoon in the dunes. After deflating our tyres, no-one was more surprised than I at quite how well the little Daihatsu tear-arsed over the sand, including successfully tackling some quite steep slopes without incident. Of course, the tiny engine had to be revved hard to extract all 103 ponies. This is to be expected if that’s all there are, and ten of them were pedalling the air conditioning.

Test 2 passed: a Terios is fully capable of getting to the Inland Sea and back, over the sand. Following tyre re-inflation, Gadget Boy went off and got on with his life, and I drove back to Doha at a respectable speed.

Test 3 passed: a Terios can sustain the speed limit with ease without excessive noise, despite being a thrashy little beast. And it’s comfortable enough, and has excellent lights, an adequate stereo, keyless entry, central locking, trip computer, full-size spare wheel, whistles, bells, yadda, yadda.

I put the Terios through a car wash to remove the worst of the, erm, evidence, and off-hired it. Then I off-hired the Honda Jazz. I figure that I can use just the bike until Eid, and following the holiday I’ll pick up my new Japanese miniature SUV. I’ll put occasional updates on the blog as to how Rio (and now I’ve got to call her ‘Rio’) performs long-term.

Incidentally, full marks to Axa insurance in Doha for checking with Axa in Sharjah and obtaining an instant five-year no-claims discount. I’ll be fully insured, including against off-road risks, and with agency repairs, GCC cover and a free rental car if Rio ever ends up in the body shop. And I still had change from a farthing.

Now, without a car pro tem, how am I going to get those aqualung cylinders back to the dive club…?

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Tried and not tested

The Goat is mobile in Doha either on his motorcycle or in the rented Honda Jazz. As the latter of these is a member of the Rice-Pudding-Skin Preservation Society, and both vehicles are equally useless off asphalt, the Goat has been on the lookout for a four-wheel-drive for desert driving and hauling diving and camping gear.

As has been previously lamented, the Goatmobile languishes unsold in Dubai. It can’t be exported to Qatar because it’s more than five years old, so a different vehicle will have to be procured. Naturally, all available used vehicles are some combination of thrashed to death, never seen an oil change, crash-damaged or over-priced; most are some combination, and one or two hit the jackpot.

So a safer option is to buy a new one. Most decent 4x4s are stupidly expensive, so the likes of the Nissan Patrol at QR210,000 or more must be rejected outright. Even such delights as Toyota’s FJ Cruiser or Prado are prohibitively expensive. One possibility, now that expatriates are allowed to own certain commercial vehicles, is a crew-cab pickup. The Chevy Silverado with a ten-inch lift and a five-litre V8 is simply too large, too expensive and anyway the Goat doesn’t live in West Virginia. The Nissan Navara that is on offer is extremely basic, and the local dealer can’t or won’t supply one with higher spec. The indestructible Hilux is probably too expensive, and for the next few months is Not Coming In Doha.

So the Goat has found himself looking at Daihatsu’s Terios. Basically a 1500cc 4x4 Yaris, the Tear-Arse seems to tick most of the boxes. But will it perform off road? Published reviews range from: “The only one of us never to get stuck on an overland trip from Namibia to Mozambique,” through, “Being so light, it simply skips over the sand while heavy 4x4s sink in,” to “It was unremittingly awful in every respect. Avoid.” Jeremy Clarkson seemed to like it in Top Gear’s “Let’s pretend it’s a fox” but that was on mud and wet grass rather than power-sapping sand dunes.

The Goat concluded that the solution would be to borrow or rent a Tear-Arse for a weekend (and take it for a comprehensive thrashing to the Inland Sea). Having failed to find a car rental company with one that was available, he asked the Daihatsu dealer to provide a solution that involved a borrowed or rented vehicle. There followed a complicated series of phone calls and car shuffling between the dealer, Adonis car rental, and a customer who had been talked into relinquishing her Terios for the weekend. The salesman put in an inordinate effort to get the Goat his test drive. Full marks for that.

And then disaster! It was the two-wheel-drive version. Back to square one.

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Water weekend

It was when writing up my dive log that I noticed I last dived the Daymaniyat Islands off Muscat four years previously to the day. Four years? I was astonished.

On this recent trip, all the dive sites were different, so everything was new. To be fair, all the sites are broadly similar tropical wall dives with prolific hard and soft corals and uncountable reef fish. Others in the party from Doha were lucky enough to see, and in some cases photograph, rays and turtles; Muggins wasn’t that fortunate.

The weekend away was organised by one of the guys in Doha Sub-Aqua Club to provide a change from the dubious delights of the silt and jellyfish of Old Club Reef. We flew to Muscat on Thursday night, dived intensively on Friday and Saturday morning, and then chilled out at the Al Sawadi Beach Resort before taking the Fun Bus back to Seeb airport in Muscat at obscenely early hours of Sunday morning. Thus, a very early flight got me back in Doha and at my desk by around 6:30am instead of the customary 8am.

Beloved Wife simply drove over to Muscat from Dubai, picked me up from the airport on Thursday night, and we drove to the dive centre on Friday morning.

I finally escaped from the airport so late on Thursday that it was almost Friday. Over 90 minutes I stood in a queue to have my passport stamped. It was Visa On Arrival, and paying was the easy bit. Why is Muscat’s immigration so unbelievably slow? How long does it take to find an empty page in someone’s passport and hit it with a rubber stamp? I pity the poor hapless fools who had purchased their visas in advance. They had to stand in a different queue to get their visas before joining the back of the passport-stamping queue. Even having a visa in advance was no help. The queue for visa holders was even longer.

How is it that when one of those alumininium tubes with wings pulls up outside the terminal building - exactly as forecast in the flight schedules - and disgorges several hundred people, that the authorities seem completely unprepared for the sudden influx? Once again, it’s Karma Sutra Passport Control: Loads of positions, but most of them don’t work. Beloved Wife rang me to find out if she’d missed me at Meet and Greet. No, I was still queuing.

Having at last got my visa stamp (on yet another empty page), I spent the next half an hour looking for my luggage. All bags had been removed from the baggage carousels and piled in unwieldy heaps. Was there any clue as to which carousel the Doha flight had used? Is the Pope a Buddhist?

I was certainly a relief to get to our friend TGL’s flat and become horizontal for a few hours. Beloved Wife handed me a small pie at the airport to cheer me up. Good show!

Friday’s breakfast consisted of an Egg McMuffin in lieu of food, and we headed off in Beloved Wife’s car to the resort. I drove and BW fiddled with her new GPS.

The diving was, on the whole, excellent. There are some additional photos in this gallery.

Having washed the kit after finishing on Saturday, we killed time allowing it to dry, and awaiting 6pm and Happy Hour. It would not do to pack our dive kit wet; paying excess baggage for water is extremely undesirable.

A beery and sleepless evening followed, and at 2:30am we boarded the fun bus back to Muscat and the airport. Here, I discovered a colossal cock-up with my ticketing. For reasons unknown, I was booked to fly a week later, and the only way to get aboard today was to buy a new ticket. A single Muscat to Doha cost an appalling OMR150, or some $400. My original ticket had been obtained through Qatar Airways’ Frequent flyer Air Miles, and should be changeable for a $25 fee. But of course, nobody’s available at 3am, and I couldn’t wait until office hours owing to the need for me to present myself in my office. Oh, and the website to obtain a refund on the unused return ticket simply crashes, perhaps because it’s allergic to giving anything back. It's not a total loss, however. Qatar Airways have now cancelled my erroneous booking for 23rd October, and I can apparently pay $25 to reroute it Dubai to Doha any time before September next year.

Not true, I have learned (November 2011). It's $25 to change the date, plus $25 to change from MCT-DOH to DXB-DOH, plus the difference in airport taxes. In other words, "$25" is nearer $100.

It took a while, but I eventually found myself airside. I went looking for breakfast. The only place that was open and offering solid food was a Dairy Queen. I stood at the entrance and checked my Omani cash, the menu, and the employee poised expectantly at the counter. Decision made, I asked for that thing on the menu, only to be advised that Dairy Queen was closed until 6am. So why the bloody hell didn’t he say so while I was planning my breakfast? Why wasn’t he simply asleep in his bed? What is the point of creating an illusion of being open for business when the shop is in fact closed?

On the whole, the diving and chilling part of the weekend was excellent, albeit unnecessarily expensive owing to the ticketing screw-up. Such a pity that I find myself exhausted and irritated by the trials of air travel, and immediately in need of a holiday to recover.

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TBTB

Oh noes! The Goat is suffering from Blogger's Block. Or, more accurately, currently lacks the time necessary to put in the effort to produce a post. So apologies to those readers who return and learn that the Goat is Too Busy To Blog.

The change in weather has allowed the Goat to commute by motorbike, at least a couple of days a week. His Kawasaki doesn't really enjoy heavy traffic, lane-splitting and getting caught at every red traffic light, and it expresses its displeasure through ghastly fuel consumption. However, being able to get across Doha during the rush hour in about 15 minutes rather than a more customary hour or more is certainly a benefit. And being able to find a parking space in the shade next to the office without being shooed away by Security, and not on the far side of a six-lane highway is another benefit.

It's amost as if someone throws a awitch on or about 15th October and the sticky, humid heat almost instantly disappears. That same person will throw the switch again on or about 15th April, or is it May?

Outside work, a subject definitely beyond the scope of this blog, weekends and evenings are also busy. Regular return trips to Dubai destroy any weekend social life in Doha. Beloved Wife clearly takes precedence. Unfortunately, potential purchasers of the Goatmobile (now reduced to Dh65,000, by the way), fail to turn up at the weekend as they promised, which is vexatious at best.

At least there's no immediate need to sell the Goatmobile, so silly offers in the style of "I'll do you a favour and take it off your hands for Dh30,000" can be and are spurned as one might spurn a rabid dog.

Beloved Wife and Goat have decided what to do for Eid al Adha, but where to go for Christmas and BW's Very Important Birthday in January remain undecided. Flights to America or Antipodea cost around the same - lots - unless somebody is silly pecunious enough to fly Cathay Pacific and pay double the lowest fare.

And that appears to be that. Normal service will be restored once the Goat has time and something to rant about.

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A goat track-riding

That's a typo, of course. It should be 'a go at', and anyway it's not going to happen immediately. If it happens at all, it's contingent on the Goat finding some proper motorcycle leathers to cover his rather unorthodox shape.

There's been something of a development in track days in recent years. Instead of risking life and limb among the rest of the traffic, the potholes, the manhole covers and pedestrians, drivers and riders can now turn up at a proper race circuit and ride or drive as fast as they can/like/dare in the company of other consenting adults, all of whom are doing the same thing in the same direction. Added to this are the wide run-off areas in case of an, erm, excursion, and marshals and medical facilities are on standby in case of a major incident.

Rules are basically simple. Proper gear, a decent machine and the willingness to stick to some simple regulations.

The Goat found out about where bikers meet in Doha on Friday mornings purely by accident on Thursday night. And then, having turned up for breakfast at Starbucks, he learned that there was a track day at Lusail International Circuit that very evening. Bikes from 6pm to 9pm, then cars from 9pm to midnight.

He arrived at Lusail by car just before sunset, and eventually got the details of when, how and how much.

One of the riders pointed out that QR400 (around £70) for three hours on an international-quality racetrack was astonishingly good value, compared with the UK where, apparently, £300 buys three 20-minute sessions. Daytime sessions don't require floodlights and are a mere QR200 for three hours.

Most of the bikes are, of course, race replicas, crotch-rockets, or whatever you call them, so if the Goat ever happens to venture on to the track aboard his sports-tourer he'll be horribly outclassed by everybody. Must remember to remove the hero blobs and panniers, and tape up the mirrors. "The first rule of Italian driving: What's-a behind is not important." 

In the absence of leathers and indeed a motorcycle, the Goat simply satisfied himself last evening with taking photographs under the floodlighting. Any reader who is interested may care to check out the album of 139 pictures of high-speed antics.

The Goat has, incidentally, migrated to Picasa. This is after learning that Flickr ceases to be free once more than 200 images have been uploaded.

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