The lobby

I was in Jeddah recently, and enjoyed a repeat stay at the Red Sea Palace Hotel.

Built in 1959, and last renovated almost thirty years ago, this was for ages the only luxury hotel in the city (perhaps the whole country? The Khozama in Riyadh didn’t appear until 1978). No longer five stars – and of course overtaken by more luxurious properties – it’s still an atmospheric and upmarket place to stay, with an enticingly home-grown air of old-fashioned glamour. Nobody would call it pretty, and the little lagoon it overlooks is flat and a bit stagnant, but therein lies the charm. Unstudied, you could call it.

I chatted to some of the staff. The night manager told me he virtually grew up in the hotel: he remembers playing in the lobby as a boy, while his dad was working on reception.

It also knocks Jeddah’s phalanx of super-luxe hotels into a cocked hat for its location, plumb on the edge of the old quarter, perhaps ten minutes’ walk from one of the biggest and most absorbing souks in Arabia.

But while I was there I learnt the end was nigh. The Red Sea Palace was about to be taken over by IHG to become a Holiday Inn (even though HI already have a property nearby). The staff were unsure what the future held.

If IHG have got any sense, they’ll keep the corporate branding to a minimum, give the rooms a bit of a spruce (rewiring might be good) but otherwise leave well alone. People who simply want a faceless business hotel have plenty of choice in Jeddah. Charm, old-fashioned service and a sense of history are in desperately short supply. But, as you can imagine, no one’s holding their breath. So much for heritage.

Jeddah, though, still grabs you. Taxi drivers in other cities put their feet up on a break; here, they put their feet up while working.

And then there’s the spiritual element: there aren’t many cities in the world where buying a temporary SIM card amounts to an act of worship.

Jeddah is also home to the legendary fried chicken restaurant chain Al-Baik, with a gut-busting 31 outlets across the city. (By comparison, Birmingham – a similarly sized city –has a mere 24 KFCs.)

But you’re not in Kansas anymore. People want Al-Baik chicken. They really want it. This (below) is what happens in the thirty seconds after opening time – and it’s not a one-off: I’ve seen the same thing myself. Short YouTube video:

Buying fried chicken as authentic cultural travel experience. It’s good, too – hot, crispy, tender – but most of the satisfaction comes down to fight or flight. You have to go into caveman-hunter mode, jostling in line amid the sweat and the grunts, waving your arms, pushing to the front, eyes on the prize, emerging triumphant with your paper bag, then skulking away to tear lumps of steaming meat off the bone with your teeth. Rooooargh.

I love my job.

Rosa damascena trigintipetala

If I was chuffed a fortnight ago to have my radio piece from Cairo aired on From Our Own Correspondent on BBC World Service, I’m even more chuffed today to have a follow-up piece aired so soon – and this time on the BBC’s domestic Radio 4 network as well.

For my schizophrenic tale from Saudi Arabia – half about the rose industry of Taif, half about a very unusual encounter – click here for audio (my bit begins at 0:18:15) and/or click here for the article transcript. The latter includes some very odd rewriting of pounds, pints, litres and dollars to suit the BBC’s internal guidelines on weights & measures: don’t blame me!

Incidentally, I changed key details in the airport meeting story to protect the (unknown) identity of the person involved. For the record, I did not meet him in an airport – not Taif airport and not any other airport – he did not say he was an accountant (he told me a different job title), he did not say he was from “a small town in the north” (he told me somewhere else) and he did not say he was returning home from a company meeting (he told me something else). Otherwise, in every respect the encounter was as I described it.

And I still don’t really know why he did what he did. The conversation was interesting but unremarkable until he showed me the crucifix. That was a pointlessly risky thing to do – unless he wanted to make a statement. Was that statement simply self-aggrandisement? I didn’t think so at the time. It rang true to me: in a few short minutes together he chose to reveal to me depths of emotional and personal complexity in his life that most people would never normally dream of sharing with strangers. Partly by telling, partly by implication, he exposed to me his relationships, his aspirations, his frustrations, his failures, his hopes – and his courage. For what? So that I should think worse of his country? So that I should think better of him? I don’t know.

And what prompted it? Was it the political upheavals elsewhere that were passing his country by? Was it something in our personal chemistry together that made him feel he wanted to confide in me? (I didn’t feel the same: I wouldn’t have dreamed of confiding such stuff in him…) Or was it just the anonymity, that he felt he could get something off his chest with impunity by speaking to a foreigner, someone who he may have figured was just passing through on business? Again, I don’t know.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime encounter. In 20-odd years travelling around the Middle East and the world I’ve never had anything remotely similar happen.

It makes me want to write a book.

The best-known is the Kingdom Tower, also known as the Potato Peeler – or the Vest – for, well, obvious visual reasons. It holds offices, malls, apartments, a hotel and a fancy restaurant at the top. People like to use it as a symbol of the glitziness and contemporary zip of Riyadh.

But Riyadh is not glitzy. It has precious little contemporary zip. In truth, the Kingdom Tower looks like a giant alien spaceship, plopped down in an ordinary city as if from some other planet.

The other skyscraper is the Faisaliah Centre, just down the street. It, too, holds offices, malls, apartments, a hotel and a fancy restaurant at the top, housed within a giant golden sphere which is ringed by a high-level viewing gallery.

For some visitors that’s pretty much all they see of Riyadh’s public spaces. Not their fault. I found this an incredibly difficult city to penetrate – blank, dour, unused to outsiders, reserved, wary. The street running alongside those skyscrapers is Olaya Street, famed as the ritziest address in Riyadh. I didn’t think it was ritzy at all. This is what it looks like – and that’s pretty much the extent of Riyadh’s public transport, too.

I took several walks through the poorer downtown commercial areas. These are short one-minute clips of what the streets looked and sounded like, shot on my phone.

This next video is the same sort of thing, starting from the Bab Al-Thumairi gateway, which used to look like this. The new arch across the street, where the video begins, caught my eye for its calligraphy – my pic below shows “There is no God but God” in Arabic.

Still life with office chair.

As across Saudi Arabia, everything stops at prayer time (roughly dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and dusk). During business hours, that means shops close for 15 or 20 minutes after each call to prayer: staff bring the shutters down. In the souk, shopkeepers simply hook a length of cloth around the front of their shop – see video below.

Then, after the sunset prayer, people – well, some people – head to the malls. This is a walk into the Faisaliah mall, within that big skyscraper I talked about at the top of this post.

Riyadh’s a hot, dry, bleak, desert city, right? Well, in parts. This girl was enjoying the greenery at one of the public parks in the south of Riyadh, alongside the Wadi Hanifa, one weekend afternoon.

Back to the world of tourism. Riyadh’s National Museum is outstanding, perhaps the finest museum in the entire Middle East. I spent hours there. This rather ghostly scene is the museum’s haj gallery, housing a model of Mecca, explanations about what the haj means and a history of the pilgrimage. I loved it.

I could wobble on about Riyadh’s history, about the politics of the place, the deprivation, the economic divisions, the beauty, the architecture, the velvety dry heat, the sustainable development, the unsustainable development… but I’m not going to. This is just a bit of travel blogging. Eye-candy.

Tell me what you think of it.

Cropped image © Tariq Dajani

This is a blog about travel, but every so often it’s nice to take five minutes out for a thing of beauty.

I came across the work of British-Jordanian-Palestinian photographer Tariq Dajani back in 2007, when he won First Prize in the International Color Awards for his images of Arabian horses. They blew me away. Have a look – there’s a slideshow of his images, on his own website, here.

His images of Arabian hunting falcons here are works of art. Extraordinary. They remind me of 18th-century British landscape painters – Gainsborough, or (appropriately for the horse theme) Stubbs: measured, insightful, emotional.

Take time on Dajani’s website. His images of Dubai are perhaps the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.

Dajani’s horses were repurposed for a 2011 calendar by Saudi Aramco World – a cultural magazine focused on the Arab and Islamic worlds, published by Aramco (the Saudi state-owned oil company) out of their offices in the US. The calendar is downloadable for free here.

Tomorrow I leave for Saudi Arabia, on assignment for Aramco World. I talked to Dajani a couple of weeks ago in Amman and I was thrilled to learn that he might be photographing one of the stories I will be researching there, in Riyadh. A real privilege, if it happens (I hope it does).

Those horses. Wow.

Tunisia was amazing. Egypt is astounding. Bahrain boggles the imagination. Libya is off the scale. At the time of writing, none of those 4 revolutions is resolved. And there is also Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, even – staggeringly – Syria. Of a different character, but no less significant in their own way, are protests in Jordan and Oman, government handouts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and even baby-steps towards parliamentary elections in the UAE. Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Israel may be fairly said to have their own concerns right now. That only leaves Qatar. Nuff said.

Anyone who’s been following me on Twitter will know that I’ve been trying to keep on top of the changing situations across the region day by day, which is a full-time job in itself. But this is a tourism blog, not a news digest – and I’ve held off from blogging travel titbits, since just about the only noteworthy tourism issues arising so far from these multiple revolutions have focused on less-than-gripping tales of Western governments’ efforts to repatriate their stranded citizens.

But the role of tourism in all this has increasingly felt rather seedy to me. Throughout the Egyptian revolution, governments and the travel industry kept on maintaining that Sharm and the Red Sea resorts were completely safe and unaffected by the upheavals in Cairo and around the rest of the country. Two British travel writers – who I won’t name, for their sakes – were flown into Sharm during the protests to ‘experience’ a luxury hotel. They did a bit of desert touring, tweeted about how peaceful it all was, and took some vox pops (which, unsurprisingly, were all about wanting to encourage tourists back – and this was before Mubarak had resigned).

That shocked me. It highlighted just how detached Egyptian tourism had become from Egyptian life. While people from all sectors of society, in all parts of the country, were engaging in serious political action – perhaps for the first time in their lives – all some Westerners seemed to care about was their ‘right’ to relax on the beach. The industrialised mass tourism which Sharm (and other places) specialise in filters virtually no money back to the communities which host it: a huge proportion of the cash spent on a typical Sharm holiday remains either outside Egypt altogether, or in the hands of inbound tourism conglomerates controlled by the kind of tycoons Mubarak’s regime favoured. People don’t go to Sharm, or Taba, or Hurghada, or El Gouna, or Marsa Alam, or any of Egypt’s other chiefly purpose-built seaside resorts in order to engage with Egyptian culture, or to enjoy a characteristically Egyptian beachfront scene. Most of these places didn’t even exist before mass tourism anyway; there often *is* no local “scene” other than tourism. People go because it’s sunny, cheap and you can fly there directly.

Is that bad? Well, since you’re asking me, yes it is bad – but some people like that sort of disconnect. What got my goat was that such disconnects enable Mr & Mrs Westerner to lie on sunloungers being served cocktails by Mr Egyptian, even while Mr Egyptian’s country is in flames as society is being completely reshaped by events a few hours’ drive away – and that Mr & Mrs Westerner are able to feel good about it because they are ‘supporting’ a vital plank of Egypt’s economy by not cancelling their holiday. Airlines and holiday firms kept on flying tourists into Egypt throughout the revolution.

That’s wrong. That’s a moral problem. If your tourism doesn’t allow your hosts to retain their dignity, you need to change your tourism. Dignity comes through income, sure. But nobody – in the UK anyway – seemed to relate industry calls for continued tourism to noses in troughs. At no point did the UK government advise its citizens not to go on holiday to Egypt (if it had done, then the rules on insurance reimbursement would have changed, whereupon the travel industry could have pulled out without losing money). I might be naive, but that is a failing of British foreign policy. Equally, the travel industry’s current reliance on Foreign Office travel advice benefits insurers (and reinsurers), not the industry – and certainly not holidaymakers.

Looking ahead, Bahrain and Libya don’t have anything like the same level of tourism – but the last couple of days have seen violent protests in Oman, which has a flourishing and important tourism sector. If the violence there escalates, will we see the same thing – Westerners holed up in luxury hotels, pretending all is normal, while Omanis try to reshape their society around them? It’s hard to tell. One complicating factor is that, unlike in Egypt, in Oman tourism is concentrated in the capital.

Globally, tourism is dangerously close to getting too big for its boots. It seems to enjoy being last out – only halting altogether under extreme duress – and, above all, being first back in, even while the last stones are being placed on fresh graves. That’s topsy-turvy. When people are trying to grasp political power previously denied to them, holidays become unimportant. They should stop. We should stop them.

More significantly, the highly successful UAE-based low-cost carrier Air Arabia has announced that by the end of 2009 it will be launching a new airline, Air Arabia Egypt, to link several Egyptian airports with destinations in the Gulf, North Africa, Europe and the UK.

The Israel example shows the power of what the airline industry calls VFR – ‘visiting friends and relatives’. Despite the political problems, tourism to Israel has always remained buoyant, fed by special-interest religious tours in particular – but fuelled above all by VFR, especially from areas with a high Jewish population. In the UK that means, firstly, north London: even before easyJet’s launch, El Al is the only full-service national flag carrier able to maintain regular near-daily scheduled service out of Luton (and, previously, out of Stansted), in addition to its twice-daily Heathrow service. Another key VFR origin is Manchester, from where jet2 launched nonstop Tel Aviv flights in January 2009 – shortly afterwards announcing that it was doubling its peak service.

VFR out of the UK to most other Middle Eastern destinations isn’t as strong – there just aren’t that many expat Jordanians and Syrians in Britain. Air Arabia, though, has already proved that VFR works: in April 2009 it launched Air Arabia Maroc, a low-cost carrier which today links Casablanca with a clutch of francophone cities in western Europe (alongside London, Milan and elsewhere).

Its new venture, Air Arabia Egypt, on the other hand, is squarely targeting the leisure market, with multiple bases in Egypt serving different markets: Cairo and Alexandria will no doubt benefit from expanded links to Africa and the Gulf (where the large numbers of Egyptian expats brings VFR into play again), while Luxor, Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada will likely attract service chiefly from northern and western Europe. The three Air Arabias will also, no doubt, link up, making it possible to fly in a series of hops from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, low-cost all the way.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary

The new venture also kick-starts a fascinating contest. easyJet, a pioneer of low-cost travel in Europe, already serves Egyptian holiday airports such as Sharm and Hurghada from the UK. It will, it seems, soon have to compete with Air Arabia, a pioneer of low-cost travel in the Middle East. Two highly successful carriers from different parts of the globe are about to meet head-to-head. Be sure that Ryanair will be watching closely.

Beside all of this, the Gulf (although aided by market protection) is able to support six more low-cost carriers – Sama, Nas, Felix, Bahrain Air, FlyDubai and Jazeera. The last of these has announced that it is searching for a new regional hub. Will it be Beirut? Istanbul? Perhaps Athens?

As Middle East airlines start reaching out towards Europe, expect an ever-intensifying clash of low-cost cultures in the months ahead.

Since a lot of people are asking how to follow in Kate’s footsteps, here is some information to help travellers. I’m not connected with Kate or the BBC – just an enthusiastic travel journalist.

Dhofar, Oman

Oman

Kate started her journey in Dhofar, the southernmost region of Oman. Salalah, the Dhofari capital, is roughly 1000km south of Muscat. Several airlines fly there: from the UK, the easiest will be Oman Air from Heathrow via Muscat, or you could get a cheap flight to either Istanbul or Hurghada (Egypt) from where Jazeera Airways flies to Salalah via Kuwait. There’s a great museum of frankincense in Salalah (which also has a fantastic souk where you can buy your own), and you could follow cultural itineraries – designated World Heritage by UNESCO – to the frankincense groves in Wadi Dawkah near Salalah, as well as the ancient trading cities of Sumharam (aka Khor Rori) and Ubar. Read this superb article in Saudi Aramco World by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. The Oman tourist board is here.

Yemen

Yemen is not an easy country to visit as an independent Western traveller. Its politics are unstable, its infrastructure is very poor and safety is sometimes uncertain, especially when travelling outside the centre of the capital, Sanaa. Lots of tourists visit, travel and have a great time without any problems; others run into serious difficulties. Kate went to Shibam, in the hard-to-access Hadhramaut region of eastern Yemen, then detoured to Aden, once a British crown colony (where she was taken to see a statue of Queen Victoria), and on to Sanaa. Travelling overland from Oman is difficult: regulations surrounding the land crossing change frequently. The Yemen tourist board is here, and this is a good article from The Independent by travel journalist Ginny Hill.

Saudi Arabia

The difficulty with visiting Saudi Arabia is getting a visa to enter; once you’re in, travelling around is straightforward for men (women must be accompanied by a man, either a close relative or a licensed guide). Muslims qualify for pilgrimage visas. If you’re not Muslim, but you have business contacts inside Saudi, they could sponsor a visa for you. 3- or 5-day transit visas are sometimes issued, under certain conditions. Otherwise, tourist visas are restricted in number, difficult to get and very expensive.

Kingdom Centre, Riyadh

Two UK tour companies offer Saudi Arabia. The Traveller operates cultural tours which visit key destinations such as Riyadh (where Kate discussed capital punishment with a chief of the religious police), Jeddah (where Kate was moved to tears by the call to prayer) and Madain Saleh, an ancient Nabatean trading city in the northern deserts. Regaldive operates trips to the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea hosted by Eric Mason of DreamDiver.net: Eric led Kate on a wreck dive somewhere in the area around the Farasan (and has featured in travel articles such as this one by James Montague in The Observer). You could also talk directly to Sadd Al-Samallaghi Tours of Jeddah, one of Saudi’s leading ‘inbound’ tour operators: they handle regular tour groups from lots of European countries and were credited as ‘fixers’ for Kate Humble’s trip.

The Saudi capital Riyadh’s commercial area Olaya is dominated by two skyscrapers – the Faisaliah Centre and the Kingdom Centre (also known as the Potato Peeler, or the Vest – see pic – which was where Kate met Prince Alwaleed). Kate also met and flew with ex-fighter pilot Prince Sultan (who happens to be director of the Saudi tourism authority) and Prince Bandar bin Saud, head of the wildlife commission: she was flown in a light aircraft over the desert to the Uruq Bani Maarid nature reserve and on to the ancient frankincense trading centre of Al-Ukhdood near the modern Saudi city of Najran, site of a 6th-century massacre of Christians. She went to Jeddah, exploring the Old City, and the beautiful ancient city of Madain Saleh (built by the Nabateans, who also built Petra, nearby in Jordan) and dived in the Farasan Islands.

Click here and scroll down to post no.36 for a detailed account of how an ordinary traveller secured a transit visa to Saudi in 2006 and spent four days touring independently. Here is a travel article about visiting Saudi by Mark Stratton in CNN Traveller – and here is another, by Cath Urquhart in Wanderlust.

But the best way to get into the frankincense mood is to read Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans by historian Jane Taylor. I’m reliably informed Jane pops up in Episode Four, to guide Kate around Petra in Jordan (along with Marguerite van Geldermalsen, author of the highly recommended Married To A Bedouin). Jane’s book is full of stunning photos and intimate historical detail about the ancient frankincense trade. (Disclosure: Jane is a friend of mine, and has collaborated on my Rough Guide to Jordan.)

A mammoth undertaking

It’s a mammoth undertaking. Although the terrain – and the long distances – suit train travel perfectly, there are only a few scattered lines currently in operation.

Saudi Arabia runs a passenger service between Dammam and Riyadh. Syria has a good network, which links – through the tenuous connection of the Toros Express – to Turkey. Israel also has a decent system, but for political reasons it is completely isolated from its neighbours: trains once ran from Cairo all the way along the eastern Mediterranean coast to Beirut, but the lines were cut in 1948.

Flying the Arab Revolt flag

And the old Hejaz Railway, built by the Ottomans to take haj pilgrims from Damascus to Mecca, blown up by Faisal and Lawrence of Arabia during the ‘Arab Revolt’ – and which, in its latter years, hosted passengers trains between Damascus and Amman in Jordan – is also no more. Jordan resurrected it as a novelty this month, running ‘Ramadan Specials’ between Amman and the nearby city of Zarqa, but hardly anybody took notice. As this article pointed out, Jordan has no culture of rail.

Big plans

Yet big plans are afoot. Jordan is planning a new national network, incorporating a commuter light-rail line between Amman and Zarqa along the route of the old Hejaz track. The intention is to link up with Syrian railways, and idealists envision that – once there is sufficient political will – Jordan might also link up with the Israeli network. Relaxing one day aboard the Galilee Flyer from Haifa to Irbid, or the Umayyad Express from Damascus to Jerusalem? We can only hope.

But the biggest plans are on the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia’s rail expansion includes a Landbridge project to extend the Dammam-Riyadh line as far as Jeddah, thus linking the Gulf with the Red Sea for the first time. The Haramain high-speed rail line from Jeddah to the Holy Cities of Medina and Mecca will be partly ready for next year’s haj, and a driverless monorail is planned within Mecca to ease the traffic problems caused by 3 million pilgrims a year. The intention is for the Saudi network – specifically a new north-south line running from Riyadh to Ha’il – to continue to the Jordanian border, forming a connection with Jordan’s domestic railways.

Then the six GCC countries are well advanced on plans for an international railway along the Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman, which would link to domestic rail networks planned throughout this region. The Friendship Causeway, a massive engineering project to build a road link across 40km of sea between Bahrain and Qatar – thus reducing the journey time between Doha and Manama from almost 5 hours to 30 minutes, when it opens in 2015 – was hastily redesigned at the last minute to include space for a rail line. Both countries are designing railways and urban metros within their own, small territories.

And the UAE is planning a national railway, linking Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah and crossing to the east coast to Fujairah. In addition, a triangle of high-speed lines will connect Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Al Ain. Lines will extend into Oman to the capital, Muscat.

Finally, the GCC line would join with the Saudi network, by then itself linked with Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Syria and Iraq are already connected. Trains could, in theory, run the whole distance from Istanbul to Muscat, across half a dozen countries or more, making the prospect of travelling by train from Europe to the Gulf a real possibility.

Social cohesion

The potential for change is very exciting. Railways – or, more specifically, opportunities to travel easily and cheaply – make healthy societies: they foster social cohesion. Railways are progress. British policymakers forgot this in the 1960s and 1970s, cut lines and denied the railways decent investment. This contributed to the isolating, individualistic, London-centric reshaping of society which continued through the 1980s and which we are still grappling with today.

Mecca monorail?

In the UAE, where 80% of the population are from elsewhere, Emiratis are very unlikely to use their new mass transit systems – at least for another generation, until the individualism (and subsidised petrol) which ties people to their cars is abandoned. Consequently, building railways seems to me to be a rare, tacit acknowledgement by the UAE governments of the contribution made by outsiders, in particular by South Asian expats. It is – momentously, for these fragmented societies – a step towards integration.

Rail buffs in the West may get misty-eyed about all this, dreaming of historic lines converted for a new age, trains as harbingers of peace, new networks in virgin territory – and, of course, the romance of all those ancient cities of Arabia linked by gleaming new high-speed expresses.

But for the people in the region, the plans for rail are far more meaningful than that. Never mind all those skyscrapers and multibillion-dollar megaprojects; railway construction represents the most tangible, realistic move towards nation-building yet seen in the region. For the first time, virtually unlimited public funds are being married with level-headed, long-term planning policies. Two generations on from the biggest lottery win in history – the discovery of oil – the Gulf countries are starting to find their feet again.

Railways really matter.

UPDATE 7/9/09: A specialist rail writer friend advises me that the Hejaz line was in fact built by the Germans, under Ottoman direction, and also points out that it might be misleading to compare Syria’s network with Israel’s; the latter is far more advanced. Also check out this great video (5mins), posted today, of a journey aboard one of the ‘Ramadan Special’ train services along the old Hejaz line in Jordan – atmospheric visuals, “slumdog” scenery, but no toilet paper! Commentary is in Arabic, but the footage and music speak for themselves.

A bit of background: oryx once roamed widely from Egypt to Syria to Oman. They were a prize target for hunters, who celebrated the chase in epic poems: oryx became symbols of grace and fortitude, mythologized like bulls in Spanish culture or stags in British culture. The arrival of 4WD vehicles and automatic weapons in the 1940s meant that hunters could finally outpace the oryx – and in twenty years, they massacred virtually the whole population. A few breeding pairs were saved and flown to Phoenix, Arizona, to form the nucleus of a ‘World Herd’, from which all surviving oryx are now descended.

Since then various countries have brought in reintroduction programmes, but almost none meets international guidelines. Oman could not control poaching at its huge reserve on the Jiddat al-Harasis plain, reduced the boundaries and was struck off UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list. Dubai has a desert reserve, centred on the Al-Maha luxury hotel. Abu Dhabi has crammed hundreds of oryx (along with giraffe and heaven knows what else) onto the small Sir Bani Yas island and called it a wildlife park with – predictably – a luxury hotel. They’re repeating the theme at a desert reserve in the south, due to open later this year with another luxury hotel, Qasr al-Sarab. Jordan’s habitats have been destroyed by overgrazing of sheep and goats; its oryx have remained penned in a small reserve at Shaumari for the last 30 years.

Only in Saudi Arabia, where there is much less pressure for tourism development, has oryx reintroduction worked, at the immense Uruq Bani Maarid reserve in the Empty Quarter.

Now Abu Dhabi has struck a deal with Jordan to release oryx at Wadi Rum. Twenty animals were flown over earlier this year for acclimatization, and the enclosure gates were opened yesterday. Abu Dhabi newspaper The National sent a journalist – her report is here.

All looks great, eh? Nice, feel-good story.

Unfortunately, this is not good journalism. Jordan’s RSCN nature conservancy society has been conducting experiments in oryx release at Wadi Rum for the last 7 years – but Wadi Rum is not an oryx habitat. It’s too sandy and too mountainous: the oryx always roamed south and had to be brought back. Several died from broken legs sustained on the scree slopes. The RSCN eventually called a halt and pulled out. Then the semi-autonomous Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (a commercial body, not a conservation organization) stepped in to try and boost local income through increased tourism to the area. It is they, not the Jordanian government in Amman, who have struck the deal with Abu Dhabi: this oryx release is a laudable effort, but it has little or no scientific basis. It is economic. I have talked to several conservationists, including independent scientists with no axe to grind, who are well aware the release will fail.

The article is also littered with factual errors. Sheikh Zayed did make a contribution to saving the species from annihilation, but the real work had been done years before with the establishment of the World Herd. Oryx conservation projects are not ‘planned’ for Saudi Arabia, but have long been under way there.

And why did they send someone with poor Arabic? “Aion elmaha” – or, more properly, “ayoun al-maha” – does not mean ‘beautiful eyes’, but ‘the eyes of the oryx’.

As for a professional journalist recycling the sentimentality of the father standing with his hand on his son’s shoulder – well, there’s no accounting for taste.

A lazily written story, presented as if it’s the conclusion – save oryx, breed oryx, release oryx, job done.

In truth, this is just the start. What is now involved is a pouring of resources into making sure the oryx survive: manpower, cars, data collection, analysis, maintenance of GPS collars and monitoring equipment, perhaps intervention, enforcement of anti-poaching laws, environmental education for local people, development of tourism strategies… the list goes on! This is why poor countries like Jordan can’t afford to do it alone – and why a highly-placed source within the Jordanian conservation community told me that, given a choice, he’d prefer to drop the whole oryx programme and focus attention on something less expensive and more likely to succeed.

But the oryx has become a popular symbol of conservation (see logo), like the panda or the tiger – despite the fact that conservation science has moved on from spotlighting big mammals and is now devoted to broader, but less sexy, preservation of habitats (which ensures survival of hundreds of species together).

Once the oryx was allowed to be eliminated in the wild, reintroducing it means we have now become entangled in a never-ending story of management and control, pretty much in perpetuity – rather like with the bison in North America.

The Wadi Rum release is an interesting experiment, but it is not a “success story”. I’m disappointed in the usually excellent National, leaving its readers so ill-informed.

UPDATE (12 Sept 09): To their credit, The National sent the same reporter back to cover the story again a short time later – her second story, published 6th Sept, covers the issues much more clearly and accurately, I think. Thanks (and kudos) to her and the newspaper.

UPDATE 2 (also 12 Sept 09): My article on the conservation status of the Arabian oryx throughout the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula was published last week in Saudi Aramco World magazine – click here to read it. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below…