Dubai in summer makes our Kiwi winter welcome
Coming home via Dubai makes coming home good. Even with an acting prime minister. Dubai in summer’s impossible. For the two days I was there, the midday temperature nudged 40 degrees C. Next month it will nudge 50. Nothing grows unless forced to do so. Every municipal plant is given its own drip feed. Should it fail, the plant shrivels to a crisp.
No-one walks the midday streets. Every vehicle creates its own climate within the greater one. The only people out in the open are those obliged to do so by poverty.
My hotel room was on the 13th floor of 20, and the air was so conditioned that I changed shorts for trousers. When I briefly opened the triple-glazed window, the inrush of heat was an assault, a sauna with traffic fumes. My forehead prickled with instant sweat.
Through the haze of pollution, I could make out the ghostly phallus of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and the cluster of skyscrapers on Sheikh Zayed Road. The city is a built boast, a veneer of money over nothing much. Donald Trump would feel at home.
Across the road, two other multi-storey buildings were going up. Cranes lifted materials to the highest floors, where Indian labourers hauled them in.
But things have improved a little since I first came to Dubai. Twenty years ago, the construction workers had no protections of any sort. Hundreds a year would fall to their deaths, expire in the heat, be crushed by machinery. Their deaths were never investigated, barely even recorded.
Today’s labourers wear hard hats and hi-vis clothing. These don’t help with the heat, but they may with life expectancy.
And in the middle of the day, with the sun at its zenith, the men now get two hours off. They do not go home, because home is a barracks on the edge of the city to which they’ll be bussed at the end of the day. Instead, they go to a lower floor in the shell of a building, and though there are no walls or air conditioning, there is at least shade from the sun, and there they lie in rows like casualties of war, and sleep through the worst of the heat.
It is hard to imagine the life they lead. Yet they are in Dubai of their own free will. They are there, in short, because home is worse. To watch them at work is to recognise the blessing of a rich democracy and a temperate climate.
Dubai airport was Dubai in miniature: people from every country on earth milled in the cooled air, intent on their own purposes, eating, drinking, shopping. In the heat haze beyond the terminal walls lay hectares of shimmering concrete, as inhospitable as desert. When the mad young entrepreneurs build their colony on Mars, this is how it will be.
‘‘If you look to either side now,’’ said the pilot some 20 hours later. To either side stood the Southern Alps, impossibly pristine in the winter sun, the snow freshly ironed.
Fifteen minutes later we were touching down at Christchurch. The land beside the runway was thick with grass. It seemed a miracle.
The man next to me at the luggage carousel asked what I thought of our acting prime minister.
I said I didn’t know we had one. ‘‘Winston,’’ he said.
So he’s got the role that he always craved, the role that his vanity and paranoia, his miniTrumpishness, have hitherto and rightly debarred him from.
‘‘It’s only for six weeks,’’ said the man.
‘‘Then it’s good to be home,’’ I said.
The city is a built boast, a veneer of money over nothing much.