Fujairah? What the heck? This is the first port I would not recommend. I wonder though who at Oceania negotiates the ports of call for each of the cruises that the company puts in their brochures? I want his job! Can you imagine jetting around the world and getting the silk glove treatment by government officials who want you to come to their country? Those sales pitches would be great but the deals themselves would be fun to negotiate too. I imagine the agreements would include things like which tour companies would be used, what restaurants and food services would be used, what goods would be supplied to the ship, what transportation companies would be contracted and what the docking fees and services would be provided. That job is right up my alley.
Perhaps that U.A.E. Agreement this year called for two stops and Fujairah had to be the second port. I don’t know, but this one was a bust. We were told there is nothing here and although that is not totally true, it is no Dubai. So you are probably curious to know what is around Fujairah, right?
Well, we were parked right across from the reason Fujairah made the world map. The mother of all refineries is here. F.R.C.L. or Fujairah Refinery Company Ltd. has a massive facility here and the tankers are lined up in the Gulf of Oman waiting to be either offloaded production from the offshore rigs or to fill up with refined hydrocarbon products. The city itself is like Edmonton. It was like we had already been to Calgary (Dubai) and the next stop was Edmonton!
Note: At this point I would like to apologize to my new friends Robert and Colleen Linttell who we met on the cruise. Although they are mostly from southern Alberta and now live in B.C., they spent many years in Edmonton.
Our other friends Roland and Brenda Anderson from the U.K. warned us about Fujairah and they were right so we organized our own tour this morning. We wandered into the city center in search of a cab and were happy to find a recent immigrant from Pakistan who told us with the help of a friend that he would drive us 100 kilometers back towards Dubai (let’s call it Red Deer), to find a nice Beach. On the way, his interpreter told us that we would pass the oldest mosque in this part of the world. We agreed on a price and he agreed that we would not have to pay until he dropped us at the ship after the trip, so we said let’s do it.
Our new friend Mohammed was really nice. He did take us to the Bidayi Mosque and past Fort Fujairah so we saw stuff that the other cruise passengers were paying tour guides to see. He also took us to a really great beach called Sandy Beach (I am not kidding). There are some nice hotels there and we had a great couple of hours surrounded by fun Russian tourists in 38 degree C heat. It was nice. It was nicer when we found Mohammad waiting for us where he said he would be a couple of hours later for the return trip to the ship. We tipped the gentlemen when he dropped us at the port.
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