Taxi! Just queue here, please

Dubai has the world’s first seven star hotel. It is building the world’s biggest tower and work has started on the world’s most spectacular hotel and entertainment strip. It is building a new airport city, and has spectacularly lifted three palm-shaped islands out of the Arabian Gulf.

Everywhere you look in Dubai cranes are working feverishly around the clock to build the infrastructure to support massive growth of the tourism industry.

Pity, though, that there is a chronic traffic problem that will only get worse before the new bridges, roads, tunnels, roundabouts and Metro transit system are completed.

I have also experienced another Dubai “first” – the world’s longest taxi queue. It’s at the City Centre shopping centre and winds its way around corners for 100 metres or more. If you’re lucky it may only take an hour to shuffle to the head of the queue.

The mother of all queues had its interesting moments, though. There was the ashen-faced young boy being escorted to the back of the queue by a concerned father, but not quickly enough before the poor lad threw up at the 50-metre mark.

Then there was the middle-aged man pushing people out of the way as he barged towards the front of the queue. Someone heard him say that he was in danger of missing a flight.

He had made about 80 metres before he elbowed his way past a group of Russian tourists who protested so vigorously that the rest of the queue was expecting a new Gulf war to break out.

I followed a local Arab lady and her two teenage sons who used the queue for last minute shopping in the mall. Every retail outlet provided an opportunity to get out mum’s purse. For her it was a glass necklace and a gaudy handbag. For the boys it was hi-fi equipment.

Just how I ended up in the queue is an interesting tale in itself. It was meant to be a simple exercise – leaving the Arabian Travel Market to travel back to the Park Hyatt hotel, a wonderful oasis of calm amid the tumult of Dubai.

Inside the exhibition halls at ATM, the scale and quality of infrastructure being built in the region is breathtaking.

Outside the show, delegates were confronted with Dubai’s dire traffic problems. Some gave up on transport and walked back to their hotels in 39-degree heat.

I was squeezed with others into a shuttle bus to be dumped in a dusty, temporary car park where we were told taxis would be waiting. There were few taxis. Just a queue.

For a couple of dirhams we were advised to take a public bus to the City Centre shopping mall where taxis would be available. But no one warned us about the 100 metre-plus queue. Or the sick kid. Or the guy barging his way through the throng.

But, hey, I eventually got back to the Park Hyatt – even though the cab driver complained bitterly that he had waited in a long queue of taxis for a seven-dirham fare.

“Hey, mate,” I told him. “Just take me to the hotel. And please don’t talk about queues.”

by Ian Jarrett