Muscat, Liwa and Ankh Morpork

No diving for me until December.

Following our Eid trip to the Daymaniyat Islands both Beloved Wife and I had to get our dive kit serviced. The dive centre very kindly washed our regulators after each day's diving, but allowed water to get into the innards of the first stages. Water pissed out of mine when I set it up for the next day's diving. As any diver will realise, that is a potential recipe for disaster. The water rots the innards and causes malfunctions and maybe interruptions to the supply of breathing gas. So upon our return, I dropped all the regulators off at Scuba Dubai. I also dropped off all our diving cylinders for cleaning and testing.

The lack of dive kit isn't going to present any immediate difficulties for weekend entertainment. Every weekend up to January I'm booked solid. So is Beloved Wife, who intends to visit gay Paree. She doesn't fancy a week of intravenous, total-immersion motorsport.

UAE Desert Challenge
I'm marshalling in this year's Challenge all next week. This year my job is to chauffeur some press photograpers. I'll have my camera kit with me; perhaps I'll get some decent shots.

The Challenge starts at DIMC in Dubai on Saturday 27th October with the Scrutineering. There's the Prologue from 4pm on Sunday on the desert round the back of the police training college in Umm Suquiem. The prologue is normally good for some car, bike, quad and truck action around a very tight course.

Monday 29th sees the ceremonial start from Abu Dhabi, and then everyone heads off to Liwa for the week. Finally, the rally finishes back at DIMC in the afternoon of Friday 2nd November in time for tea and medals.

Gulf News Fun Drive
I'm one of the marshals on this year's Fun Drive, which is going to be a two-day event in Liwa. Including all the tarmac sections, but excluding getting lost, the total drive from Dubai and back again is just shy of 1000km. ADNOC is apparently going to be providing a fuel bowser at the start and end of each day's off-road sections. Cash only. Any potential competi- sorry, participant with a thirsty engine and a tiny fuel tank (Jeep Wrangler, Toyota Fortuner and Cadillac Escalade owners please take note) might like to consider bringing a spare jerry can of go-juice.

The marshals have to drive the whole route at least twice prior to the event. Many do it a lot more times than that. This will take care of several weekends. The Fun Drive area is roughly where I went camping last February.

Guards! Guards!
The Dubai Drama Group's Christmas play is the stage adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel. I've landed a role, so evenings and weekends are taken up with rehearsing, I have to learn the words and, in the case of last Sunday, I had a plaster cast made of my face. No, I'm not playing Lord Havelock Vetinari.

Patrons of live theatre please put knots in your handkies for Friday 14th and Saturday 15th December. It's over at the Centrepoint Theatre, DuCTAC, on the roof of the Mall of the Emirates.

The curtain will fall as Guards! Guards! closes, and then Beloved Wife and I are off to the Maldives for our diving honeymoon. A week or so later, we're due back in Dubai to drop off our dive kit, pick up our winter woollies then it's off to Blighty for Christmas. We're having a shindig immediately after Christmas for those who didn't make it to our wedding in the USA in August. I'm thinking of inviting our luggage, and possibly Sir Richard Branson. Incidentally, I've now managed to get hold of someone at Virgin Atlantic in Dubai who appears to believe in the importance of customer satisfaction, so hopefully the Strange Case (boom boom) of the Missing Luggage will soon be satisfactorily resolved.

Edited on 5th November to add that Virgin Atlantic has decided that a couple of return tickets to London constitute adequate compensation. Now all Beloved Wife and I have to do is find time to make the trip!

It's a gas

Not satisfied with charging customers for using their credit cards, the Triple 'E' Triumvirate of Enoc, Eppco and Emarat have after less than one month now decided to abandon credit cards altogether. In this high-tech, 21st century, go-ahead, first-biggest-and-best society, we're all expected to produce crinkly cash.

This radical change of direction occurs just after the Three 'E's have printed thousands of 'we're gonna charge you 1.65%' sticky notices. Now they'll all have to come down and be replaced with 'ain't yer got cash?' posters. How organised! I've seen more organised Brownian motion...

A recent letter in 7DAYS suggested that if the petrol companies want cash so much, we should shower them in small change rather than paper money.

An alternative to cash is prepaid cards. Naturally the petrol retailers love this. They get the money up front, and can collect the interest on it. By my rudimentary calclulation, if half a million punters each hold Dh100 on the card for a year, the petrol companies ought to collect the thick end of two million dirhams in interest alone. And there is the added advantage that a lost or destroyed card is to the customer's sole loss.

There is, however, a solution. Adnoc has never imposed the 1.65% surcharge, and after 20th October will continue to accept credit cards for fuel and other purchases. There is another advantage with Adnoc. The red-labelled 90 octane el cheapo petrol is only available at Adnoc. This is of academic interest to the Goatmobile, whose high-tech engine prefers the green-label 95 octane (or even blue 97 octane), but a Jeep Wrangler is quite happy with the red stuff.

Adnoc is alas 'not coming in Dubai'. I shall have to be organised and remember to gas up on my way home from work in Sharjah.

Little boxes, little boxes

Little boxes made for cricketers.
You stick one down your trousers
To protect you in the game.
There are pink ones and brown ones
And one made of aluminium,
But if you catch a googly
It will hurt you just the same.

Another type of box is the ubiquitous ISO container. Steel boxes, typically 40 feet or 20 feet long, designed to interlock like Lego and designed to fit on to trucks, freight rail wagons and on to ships and barges. The concept is brilliant. Rent or buy the volume and have it moved from here to there. Assuming that your box doesn't fall off the ship and spend its final hours being a hazard to navigation before descending into the abyss, all your worldly goods arrive unscathed at their destination.

I am not an expert on the minutiae of container handling. But something that I've noticed for a while has finally got me to the keyboard. It was brought to a head a couple of days ago when I spotted an interchange loop closed all day while a 40-foot container was being lifted out of the road by a large mobile crane and plonked back on to a flatbed truck. Evidently the truck had gone around the interchange at high speed (for a given value of high) and the container had slid or rolled off the back, landing with a clang on the road. I dread to think what happened to the contents. Hopefully not Ming vases, Queen Anne furniture or miscellaneous gentlemen who seem to have mislaid their passports.

Why did the box fall off? Look at the photo. At each of the eight corners is a hollow block which is designed to receive a locking device. I wonder if the container was actually locked on to the truck?




The twistlock typically takes the form of a rectangular lump of metal with a handle on the bottom and a pyramid on the top. The container is placed on the truck, and at each corner one of these devices is inserted up through the load bed into the container and given a quarter turn to lock it. Now the container can't possibly slide off, and can only roll by taking the entire vehicle with it.

And yet, in my unscientific and rather frightening survey last Friday, around 60% of the containers aboard trucks on the Emirates Road were unsecured. I don't know what the law says about it, but common sense suggests that a thirty-tonne brick (or 2.4 tonnes if it's empty) would do a lot of damage to the road if it were to fall off. It might hurt the truck driver if he stomped hard on his brakes and the container came hurtling through the back of the cab. Containers falling off trucks are not uncommon. Look for the huge gouges in the asphalt on interchange loops. Listen to the local radio for tales of traffic jam woe.

What really concerns me is the prospect of one of these containers unexpectedly sliding off and squashing a car. My car. With someone I know in it. There was a case reported a couple of years ago in Doha where a taxi and occupants were squashed flat by an errant container. The taxi was about 50cm thick, and that was only because the container hadn't managed to squash the engine block.

Surely there ought to be some laws, rules or Codes of Practice to prevent containers from being unsecured? And how about some enforcement? Preferably before someone else's household goods get rattled around like a couple of brickbats in a cement mixer.

Internal combustion

Customer service is alive and well.

But not in the Trading Enterprises Honda showroom on Airport Road a couple of Saturdays ago. Beloved Wife and her Goat dropped into the showroom to investigate the possible availability of an irresponsible little open-top car. We were politely greeted by a female assistant and we explained what we wanted to discuss.

Trading Enterprises: "Our SUV range, the MR-V, the..."

Grumpy Goat: "Er no thanks. we don't want an SUV. We're after an open-top car."

Trading Enterprises: "But the MR-V..."

Grumpy Goat: "What about the S2000?"

Trading Enterprises: (after going to find someone) "I'm not a salesperson. The S2000 is not available. We have no information. The 2008 model isn't due for at least three months. We don't know how much it'll cost. Bananas are marsupials. Cars run on gravy. Salmon live in trees and eat pencils."

Questions:-

Why is a non-salesperson working on the sales floor?

Why is there no information available?

Where are the sales staff?

I can answer the last point. They were all crowded in a big group in the middle of the showroom, watching their team getting defeated at cricket. And not doing any work: something that really impresses the customers.

Yet even this level of attentiveness shines out like a beacon of excellence compared with what happened 24 hours later. I spent half an hour in the Liberty Automobiles showroom in Sharjah failing to get any attention at all from the sales staff. So the Invisible Goat turned and left.

Customer service alive and well, I said? Yes, actually. The nice lady in Sharjah's Jeep showroom was polite and attentive, although was unable to offer a car that suited our requirements. And over at Festival City, Trading Enterprises' Volvo sales were nothing short of excellent.

A test-drive of a Volvo C70 put this car definitely on the shortlist. We were a little bit concerned about the performance. The test drive was in the turbocharged version which, as predicted, went like a scalded cat. Unfortunately the T5 was prohibitively expensive, so a week or so later we test drove a different Volvo; one with the normally-aspirated 2.4 litre engine. Although a lot less powerful, it was still reasonably brisk, and was of course quiet and comfortable.

I also courted the Peugeot dealer, and was reasonably interested in the 307cc. At about half the price of the Volvo C70 T5, it looked like a realistic alternative. The salesman was helpful and friendly, and arranged a test drive. What as disappointment! Beloved Wife and I both found the driver's seat excruciatingly uncomfortable. It's apparently designed solely to suit beanpole-thin Frenchmen. It was impossible to see any part of the car in front of the windscreen, which would make parking an interesting Braille exercise. And the engine was appallingly gutless. Acceleration was dismal, and this is as compared with the Goatmobile, not against the Volvo. Finally, Beloved Wife vetoed the idea. "I'd rather keep the Jeep."

By this time, we'd decided against anything with a fabric roof, so no Honda S2000, no BMW Z3 and no Audi TT. The Saab and anything with a three-pointed star were rejected on the grounds of cost. But the Volkswagen Eos looked promising, so we dropped in for a chat and a test drive. Once again, the sales staff were helpful and attentive, becoming more so on our second and third visits. "Hmmm, customers must be serious..."

Both the Goat and Beloved Wife enjoyed driving the Eos. Its 200BHP turbocharged two-litre engine, (faster than a speeding ticket...) provided the required level of irresponsibility, the car had loads of whistles and bells, and it was comfy and civilised. Except for the horn which, I discovered when getting cut up on the test drive, was raucously cacophonous. Brilliant!

Now all we have to do is sell the Wrangler.

The Volkswagen Eos FSi

That's sandy

Last weekend saw Middle East 4x4 Club's first formal meeting of the new season. The September Shakedown was a camp-out in the desert between Shwaib and Al Hayer. Although roasting hot, getting away from the coast meant a welcome escape from the evening humidity.

We all met at Nad Al Sheba and were split up into small groups of four or so vehicles and briefed on the location of the camp site. "Here are some GPS co-ordinates. See you there." At first I agreed to 'sweep'; that is to bring up the rear, collect any bumpers that might have fallen off and advise the leader to slow or stop if anyone got stuck or needed a second run at a tricky bit.

Having turned off Route 66, (not that one; the Al Ain Road) I was asked if I'd lead the convoy, which comprised the Goatmobile (a Prado), a Pajero, a Wrangler and a Land Rover Discovery. I apologised in advance that I was horribly out of practice because I'd not driven in the desert since the end of May, and would likely get stuck plenty of times. Actually, I only got stuck once. Having picked a line between a couple of small dunes that turned into a nasty powdery gully, I had to manoeuvre the Goatmobile in an awkward spot at a crazy angle. Not only was the gully at right angles to my route, it was right on the edge of an enormous slip face. Too slow and I'd get stuck in a bowl, whereas too fast would result in one of those groundskygroundskygroundsky moments. As it happened, I erred slightly on the side of caution, was not quite quick enough, and ended up perched on a tuft of camel grass on the edge of the bowl. Discovery and tow-ropes to the rescue. The desert bumpers paid off. With loads of ground clearance I didn't knock the corners or lose any hardware.

At least I had realised my original error as I'd driven in, so was able to radio the rest of the convoy not to follow me lemming-like into the same predicament. Everybody else stood on a nearby vantage point and took photos and the mick.

We had another minor stuck; the Pajero ended up bogged to its axles in talcum powder. We pushed it out. The car body was boiling hot. Memo to self: gardening gloves. A little later, I went over a sharp ridge and was surprised by a bush on the far side. I radioed to the convoy to follow me but slightly to my left, and the Pajero for some throttle-related reason came over the ridge airborne. There was a horrendous bang as the car landed on its nose, but by some miracle the damage was limited to a slightly bent bracket under the front bumper - something that we pulled straight in a few seconds. There is a minimum speed to get over dune crests successfully, but it's very close to the maximum speed.

Excitement over, we arrived at the campsite. Everyone had been asked to bring firewood, so I hauled a 1cwt log out of the back of the Goatmobile and added it to the store for the pyromaniacs' entertainment later on. After setting up camp, it was more or less sunset, so out came the Food and Bev and also the music system and a CD of Wrinklies' Wrock. Then the barbecue was lit and we all set about having a social evening. I chose not to pitch my tent. The weather was warm enough(!) and there was no wind nor chance of rain. I've not slept under the stars for years. I still regard the pneumatic mattress as an excellent investment, as is the 12V low-pressure inflator that fills or empties it in under two minutes.

Chatting about car mods, tyres and interesting stucks, I happened to notice an enormous cut in the sidewall of one of my front tyres. Air was staying in only by faith. For this reason I bailed out first thing on Saturday morning. I didn't wish to stress the tyre and risk a blow-out in an inconvenient spot, so made my way to the UAE/Oman border fence and thence to Shwaib for petrol and tyre inflation. ADNOC, incidentally, does not charge a 1.65% credit card surcharge.

It being Ramadan, of course Tyre Express was shut when I got back to Dubai, so I got myself a new set of Cooper Discoverers from Renaissance Tyres because the latter was open. If they last as long as the previous Yokohama Geolandars, 66000km and 900 days, I shall not be displeased. Especially because the Coopers were cheaper! I've previously had Discoverer H/T tyres on a Discovery to successful effect. I'd wanted some slightly more aggressive A/T or ATR but these are apparently not coming in Dubai. Leastways, not for 17-inch rims.

Disinclined to acquiesce to your request

Like anyone needs reminding, Wednesday is of course



Read about it here. There's more here and yet more here.

Wi'a wannion!

Parker, well done

I parked my car and walked away
In Sharjah, just like every day.
(Ain't it sad?)
And ever since September One
My only parking space has gone.
(That's too bad)
My car was on a sandy plot.
Two hundred chips is quite a lot.
Pay the Municipality!
It's inevitability...

Money, money, money!
They want money.
Think of it as tax.
Money, money, money!
It's not funny.
Milk us to the max!

Aha! What can anyone do?
They decide they want more money;
Never mind the facts.


We live here, and we find we are
Unable just to park the car.
(What a swiz!)
Perhaps we are required to deign
To park it in Umm Al Quwain?
(Take the pizz!)
Why do I make such a fuss?
Catch the (non-existent) bus!
Or maybe I could, if I like,
Just break the law and ride a bike.

Money, money, money!
Making money.
Greed's a Deadly Sin.
Landlord, just for fun he
Rents the dunny;
Packs a family in!

Aha! Only one thing to do.
Simply smile and pay the money.
There's no way to win.