Cities In Dust

The beginning of a full report of my visit to Hong Kong this month. As originally planned, I was going to spend about two hours in Qatar at Doha airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Hong Kong. As it turned out, a thick fog meant that I missed the connection, and had to wait 20 hours for the next one. I ended up being given a visa for Qatar, presumably to stop me escaping and living out my days as some sort of fierce desert bandit, but I hadn't packed for that anyway.

Fortunately, the airline put me up at a hotel for the day. More specifically, the five star Mövenpick Towers & Suites. It is, needless to say, the nicest hotel I've ever been in, and I'm unlikely to ever be anywhere that nice again. I would quite happily have rented my room as an apartment. Everyone else there was wearing very nice suits, and I was wearing a ten year-old sweater and had holes in my shoes. I felt somewhat out of place and apologetic, and that was before the incident with the orange juice at breakfast.

The hotel room contained a thick visitors guide to the country. It gave me a brief list of behaviour to avoid which included:

1. Don't take photos of buildings.
2. Don't take photos of people.
3. Don't talk to any Arab women.

It was shaping up to be a fun visit. Getting to the souks would also involve changing money into Riyals and getting to the other side of town, and I didn't want to miss any messages from the airline. I did, however, venture out onto the Corniche. As you'll see from the photos, the murk was beginning to gather again, and I wondered if I might be there even longer.

I was already breaking rule 1, but no-one arrested me on charges of spying on Qatar's huge military secrets. It pretty quickly became apparent that the whole West Bay area consists of nothing except luxury hotels and business skyscrapers. Anyone staying there is going to be spending a lot of time in the hotel, unless they're going to the golf course. Ten years ago there must have been hardly anything to Doha at all, which makes you wonder where, precisely, all that oil money was going before it was stimulating hotel construction.

The Sheraton hotel, Doha: Someone's been watching "Blade Runner". Also, if you get a penthouse suite you're allowed to cut someone's heart out and kick their body down the outside of the building.*

Something else was also becoming clear: in Doha, everyone drives everywhere. The only other people I encountered walking around were imported labourers here to do all the skyscraper-building, and joggers. Walking was a sign of extreme poverty. I still felt more at home than I did in the hotel.

The furthest point I reached was the mascot for the 2006 Asian Games. "What's the single most terrifying thing we could do?" they asked themselves. "How about building a giant, torch-wielding Oryx, and then leaving it to decay by the seashore?"

One day it will surely rampage amongst the skyscrapers. Until then, it waits.

I walked back to the hotel as evening set in. At 11 O'Clock the hotel bus ran me and the other passengers out to the airport. Seven hours later I was in Hong Kong, a day late, but still in time for the stag night. That's for the next post.

*This is a lie.