D-Dive
Trip Start
May 01, 2008
1
9
48
Trip End
Ongoing
Loading Map
Map Options
Show trip route
Hide lines
Khorfakkan,
United Arab Emirates
Saturday, May 17, 2008
It has become fashionable in the UAE to have "heritage areas", where they excavate a few stones and rebuild ancient buildings "as they were". The problem with that, is that these new buildings are... new, and look new! You would even suspect that they used concrete...
I have heard that in Abu Dhabi at least, they restore old buildings trying to use the same materials as the originals.
So, ok, organizing archeological work and trying to show what the past was like goes in the right direction. They just have to try give it a bit more sense!
Beside the fort were some abandonned, destroyed houses, that are supposed to be part of something old and historically valuable as well. Well you can just drive by, or drive in if you fancy, with your big four wheel drive. That's conservation, isn't it?
I realized I was getting very late for my norning dive, which was another half hour drive up the coast, in KhorFakkhan. I got there in time, the dive center was part of a resort, and two boatful of divers were going out.
I got my gear and was teamed up with two French guys, of course one was a director and the other a lawyer. It seems I am the only French engineer in this country, everybody else is a director Finance guy. Manual work is left to the Indians and Filipinos. And French engineers...
The dive was not awesome, but I really enjoyed it! We went down on a wreck, the water was very murky and the visibility only 5 meters. At 20 meters deep without much light, there was not much life either. But enough to get lost in contemplation, and we even saw some big sea horses (hippocampes).
Back to the resort for lunch, as I said that weekend was terribly hot, and at noon it was impossible to leave your feet in the sand, even walking on it was dangerous. Walking on the ground, concrete or else, tat was not under a shade was an equally challenging matter of getting burnt to the third degree or only to the second.
I decided to skip the afternoon dive in order to go back to Sharjah. I had lost my company mobile phone, and I could not remember if I had forgotten it in my hotel room or if it might have dropped from the car door...
In the end I found the phone in my hotel room in Sharjah, but realized I had forgotten my camera battery and charger in the hotel room in Fujairah. Smart
On the way back I stopped in Masafi to buy a few more fruits. These road markets sell the fruit, vegetables, fish and meat, from the local agriculture you would think. Well maybe partly. But all these perfectly ripe fruits come actually from other countries, and even the dates were from Tunisia!
The peninsula is a maritime and air hub between the Middle-East, Asia, and Africa. That is actually, its history.
