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trade goods in the Persian Gulf, including car tyres, non-perishable goods and electrical supplies from the Far East. While Sadek and his colleagues move crate after crate onto land in the heat, an Arabian dhow captain watches and grumbles to himself. But the dock-workers are happy because the port is busy. Sometimes they have to sit for hours in the shade waiting for boats to come in.
    When Captain van der Valt first sailed a ship to Dubai in 1990, the eight-lane Sheikh Zayed road which runs parallel to the coast had just been built. Many foreigners mocked the so-called ‘Grand Boulevard of Dubai’, as the road ran through undeveloped wasteland. Now however, the highway is surrounded by high-rise offices, hotels and apartment complexes. Construction goes on uninterrupted day and night. Today in Dubai, over 200 skyscrapers have been built, surpassing the number in Hong Kong and New York City. Only the smaller high-rises are simple in design and construction. The large skyscrapers revel in how elaborate and complicated they are; the luxury Burj al-Arab Hotel for example, looks like an upturned ship, while the Jumeirah Beach Hotel looks like an enormous slide. These buildings, however, pale in comparison to the Burj Khalifa. It is currently the tallest structure in the world, measuring 829.84 metres high. The Burj Khalifa has 160 floors, with a hotel at the bottom, a viewing platform at the top, and offices and luxury apartments in the middle.
     
The ‘Miracle of the Persian Gulf’: Dubai
Dubai is one of seven small sheikhdoms in the middle of the Persian Gulf, which together make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE or Emirates, for short). The country is hailed as the ‘Miracle of the Persian Gulf’. While bloody conflicts raged on around it, Dubai became an oasis of peace and economic growth, where people from different races and religions could live side by side. Thanks to its rich oil supplies and shrewd economic policy, Dubai has become one of the ‘winners’ of globalisation. It is, per person, one of the richest countries in the world. In order to show the world just how rich the Emirates are, they have built the highest skyscrapers, the largest man-made islands, and are in the process of building the world’s largest theme park (Dubailand).
Despite its wealth however, three quarters of Dubai’s population are not actually made up of citizens of the United Arab Emirates, but poorly paid immigrants with temporary work permits.
What the Emirates lack, however, is a good supply of natural drinking water. In spite of this, they use more than a million cubic metres of water a day. Only the USA and Canada use more water per person per day. The UAE’s fresh water supply comes from desalination plants, which are powered by locally sourced natural gas and petroleum. The Arabians in the Gulf still have plenty of these fossil fuels available, but they will, eventually, run out. This is the reason why the government sees the country’s future in trade, finance, retail and tourism. Hotels and parks attract tourists, and man-made islands, luxury apartments and docks for private yachts attract wealthy immigrants. In addition to expanding the country’s aeroplane fleet, the government is also building two new airport terminals, one for passengers and one for cargo.
 
    14 August 2005
    By the evening, the Madras is only a third full. The filling process takes between 36 and 40 hours. A tanker like the Madras can hold around a million barrels of crude oil – that’s around 159 million litres. The loading and unloading of the six tanks inside the ship is coordinated by Portuguese first mate and boarding engineer, Raul. A warning system of sensors controlled by a high-tech computer program makes sure that the tanks are filled evenly. If one section becomes overloaded, the hull could buckle like an empty shoebox.
    During the filling process, the oil company is in frequent contact over the radio. They want to know exactly how