DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 134

the popularity of the route, and the tourist business has enriched the region's economy
immeasurably.
To anyone who has made a pilgrimage, this makes sense. Whether walking alongside
the Hindu faithful on a crowded, song-filled holy day to the Ganges or with Buddhists cel-
ebrating the New Year walking to Angkor or in the quiet contemplation of my Christian
faith on a Good Friday walking the Stations of the Cross at St. Mark's Episcopal Church
in Washington, D.C., I know firsthand that the pilgrims themselves are best at creating the
spiritual landscape. The question is how much the tourism industry can intrude on their
journeys before the religious character is subsumed.
• • •
We left Dubai and drove down the E-11 Highway to Abu Dhabi. Clouds of brown dust
swirled across our windshield as heavy machinery clawed the parched earth on construc-
tion sites that had shut down following the 2008 recession. In those days foreigners were
going broke and fleeing the country en masse, leaving their cars in the parking lots at the
Dubai Airport. There were predictions of the death of Dubai. Now, the boom is back, at
least on the surface, and construction cranes dominate the bleached-out sky.
As the traffic thinned, we noticed oddly painted old school buses filled with men
dressed in identical dungarees. From a distance it looked like a prison bus in the United
States. The windows were dirty, but from what we could see of the faces of the men, they
appeared to be from South Asia. Finally it dawned on us that these were the foreign work-
ers that built all those luxury hotels in Dubai. They were the men we saw from a distance,
gaunt figures, some with scarves wrapped around their heads against the heat, climbing
scaffolds and filling construction sites.
All those hotels in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, whether American chains that cost $500 a
night or deluxe hotels that cost $5,000 a night, were built by men like these. And they were
paid only $175 a month for their labor.
“The first-world wealth for citizens and professional expatriate workers is created
through third-world wages of Asian laborers,” wrote Syed Ali in his book Dubai: Gilded
Cage. He believes the poorly paid migrant labor has been as important to Dubai's eco-
nomic success as oil. Otherwise, the emirate could never have afforded its architectural
fantasies.
The buses head toward an area called, logically, Labor Camp. Here these foreign
workers are often housed in crowded, squalid buildings with often-fetid bathrooms and
scant running water for bathing, drinking and cleaning their clothes. They are bused
from the labor camp to construction sites and back again. That is their life. Camp—work
site—camp—work site. Construction goes around the clock with workers bused in shifts
back and forth, from morning to night to morning, working without any extra pay for over-