Read Online From Souk to Souk by Robin Ratchford - Free Book Online

particularly colourful contribution to my favourites with its depictions of exotic beasts such as oryxes and camels. The inexplicable spelling of the country’s name prompted me to demand an explanation from my parents. I do not recall any coming, but I remember I remained fascinated with the strange land whose postal authorities seemed to stand in defiance of everything teacher had told me. The sense of mystery was heightened by it being the only country in the whole wide world whose name began with the seventeenth letter of the alphabet, one so rarely used that, like Z, there was but a single tile in my favourite game, Scrabble, where managing to use it merited ten points. The seed of interest was sown. For a long time, I pronounced the state’s name with the emphasis on the second syllable, making it sound like an unpleasant flu symptom and only years later, when the diminutive but activist state began to make television news headlines, did I discover that political correctness and squeamishness seemed to have rebranded the country to sound inoffensively like someone employed to catch domestic felines.
    I first visited Qatar, on some counts the country with the highest per capita income in the world, many years later on the way to Yemen, a state languishing at the other end of the development scale. Even as I was busy building up my boyhood collection of worthless stamps, these two countries were already going along very different economic paths. In 1940, prospectors had struck oil in what was then the tiny British Protectorate of Qatar and black gold was rapidly transforming the former pearl fishing peninsula. The discovery of vast gas reserves three decades later provided another boost until, today, the barren sands of what passes there for countryside stand in abject contrast to the opulent glass and steel towers along the crescent-shaped waterfront of Doha, the Qatari capital. The flowing oil means the government has money to lavish on its quarter of a million citizens, providing them with free health care and education in a fiscal paradise devoid of income tax and VAT. But it also has endless cash reserves to pay for energy-intensive desalination plants that make seawater drinkable. In this arid emirate, water, perhaps the region’s most precious resource, is free for all.
    Yemen, meanwhile, is still the poor cousin for whom the outlook remains bleak: in the Land of the Queen of Sheba, the aquifers are sinking as quickly as water disappears into sand and there is no money to pay for hi-tech alternatives. And, while Qatar is busy using its wealth to punch above its weight on the world scene by doing everything from supporting Libyan rebels to hosting the Al Jazeerah TV network, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen’s slide into ever deeper poverty has been accompanied by the struggle to fend off Al Qaeda.
    As my plane prepared to land in Doha, the economic cleavage between the two countries was not, however, at the forefront of my mind. My attention was focused on the uninspiring view from the aircraft window: a flat sandy realm over which ran a vague network of roads and tracks, some little more than sketched outlines, work in progress like Qatar itself. Low buildings, many the colour of the ground as though camouflaged, dotted the bleak and barren landscape. As a child, I had never imagined I would one day set foot in this far-off country and now, despite the unappealing scene through the porthole, as the airplane’s shadow grew larger, I began to feel a warm glow of excitement at finally fulfilling a dream.
    The airport was being rebuilt at great expense and so, amidst a mixture of apologies for the current inconvenience and fanfares about the glory to come, the well-drilled crew dealt us coloured cards depending on whether we were in transit, merely using Qatar Airways’ home base as a hub, or actually intending to enter the country. The lucky few who had opted for the limousine