The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  Doug Cluer and I decided to be the first to set up camel safaris in the Gulf, as a private sideline to our work at the camel centre. This was no problem, as long as it didn’t get in the way of our work for the Crown Prince. It started off small. Our initial customers were the US and Australian military personnel who had gathered in Al Ain for the first Iraq war mission, in the early nineties. We took groups a little way out into the desert for day trips and pegged out tents in an idyllic little oasis, where palm trees grew out of sand dunes and water flowed, just like the postcards. It was far enough away from the highway to feel that you were in the middle of nowhere, a welcoming island in a sea of sand. You could almost hear the strains of Maria Muldaur’s ‘Midnight at the Oasis’. The military guys also started bringing down their mates who were in Dubai on R and R, and this plus general word of mouth meant we became a little bit successful.

  The camel safari business also spawned a very lucrative sideline. We started offering camel rides at the Fun City theme park in Al Ain, a magnet for expats and locals on the weekends. One of our innovations was to build a special ramp to walk up and take your position on top the camel, rather than going through the whole rigmarole of stopping the camel, have it sit down and get people to mount it on the ground. This worked like a charm because we could get the camels moving round and round in a super-efficient circle.

  One of our customers turned out to be a sheikh in his early forties, and this was the first time he had ever ridden a camel. I told him he was going to find this a bit ironic: not only was it his first time on a camel, the camel was actually Australian, as were the blokes giving the riding lesson! It was a coals-to-Newcastle moment that neatly captured how citified and westernised some younger generation Emiratis had become.

  The business was going gangbusters. At $1.50 a ride, it netted us a tidy few thousand dollars a week. But there was one snag: setting up a business in the UAE requires a local partner, so we still didn’t have an official licence to operate. We just did it.

  Technically, we were very open at this point to being prosecuted, thrown in gaol and/or deported. We desperately needed a local sponsor to be in business with us. An Emirati friend had the perfect solution: a man who was the former head of Interpol for the Middle East. As a senior security official in a country where security matters, our new connection, Juma, was supremely well connected. His dad had been born in an oasis near to Al Ain and was very close to the President of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, and Juma had plenty of hand-me-down stories of the days when the tribes of Abu Dhabi fought against the tribes of Dubai in the 1960s.

  Juma was tough as teak, a real camel man, and in his retirement he also dabbled in racing his own camels. He was keen to be involved as our business sponsor; this was good for us and good for him, too, because he instantly became the fifty-one per cent owner and therefore eligible for a large share of the profits.

  What could be better? We had one thriving business in a beautiful oasis close to the camel research centre, another business an hour or so away in Dubai turning a very handy profit, and we were in cahoots with one of the UAE’s most respected security chiefs.

  Both ventures went from strength to strength. We built the herd up to twenty-five camels. We designed a brilliant new saddle in a classic Arabesque style with lovely soft sheepskins to provide comfort for western bottoms. Then we added some luxury touches to the basic experience, introducing the overnight safari where tourists got to stay in a gorgeous black goats hair Bedouin tent. Riding their camels through the desert, tourists had the illusion of being in the middle of nowhere, though in fact they were only five kilometres from the main road. As we served them Arabic coffee after a dinner catered by the Hilton Hotel, we had a fund of tall tales to tell tourists camped out around the fire.

  Then we started getting very clever indeed, employing a couple of young British expats as managers and extending our camel ride business to other parts of the UAE, including the emirate of Sharjah. It was operating like a franchise. We had all the tour operators sewn up and if anyone wanted a camel ride, they had to come to us.

  And then it suddenly unravelled. Badly.

  Unbeknownst to us, our young British expat managers were double-dealing. They got in touch directly with Juma and convinced him that we were keeping the lion’s share of the money. Perhaps it was their attempt to curry favour with Juma and get hold of the business for themselves. Needless to say, Juma didn’t take well to the idea that we were ripping him off, even though it wasn’t true. Things got ugly and Juma locked us out of the business immediately. We found we were seriously out of favour with a man who could now do us real damage.

  There are many stories of expats coming unstuck in the UAE. Sometimes they hit the headlines, like the case of the Australian businessmen Marcus Lee and Matt Joyce, who were imprisoned for several years on accusations of fraud before being released. But for every one of those high-profile cases there are dozens of smaller cases you never hear about, where expats spend time in prison before being quietly released and deported after the diplomats get involved.

  All these cases have one thing in common: life in the UAE was a bunch of roses until suddenly it all disintegrated. It was a fine line—sometimes an invisible line—between having it all and then watching it all go down the drain.

  It was then that I did the stupidest thing of my time living in the UAE, a total rush of blood where I behaved as though I was in Australia and applied my own form of justice. It was almost a catastrophe.

  Having put a great deal of effort into building up the camel business, I thought, bugger it, these are our camels, our saddles and our business. So we got a mate who was a former SAS officer and hatched a plan to get it all back.

  The operation was planned meticulously. Doug and I, together with the old SAS man, would strike before dawn as everyone slept and make good our escape. So at five in the morning, commando-style, the three of us slipped silently into the camel camp, herded the camels together, scooped up our saddles and whatnot and made off with everything, lock, stock and barrel.

  We were heading more or less calmly across the dunes and into the sunrise, feeling pleased with ourselves. The whole operation had gone off like clockwork. Just then there was the sound of sirens wailing from the direction of the camp. We had been busted, or so we thought. Now we started bolting across the dunes in a flat panic. How was this possible? It had been planned with military precision. Later we discovered that the guy who delivered water to the camp had used the siren on his truck to wake up the residents.

  By now we had put a fair distance between us and the scene of the ‘crime’. We crossed over the freeway with our booty of camels and assorted paraphernalia and walked the whole lot back to another camel camp that we considered safe. Mission accomplished.

  I still shake my head when I think about it. We had stolen our camels off the former head of Interpol! Of course the problem was that, in our rush to get our business back, none of us had thought through the consequences. It wouldn’t be long before Juma would get word and the trail would lead to me. He was, after all, a trained investigator, and this had all the hallmarks of an inside job. In reality there was nowhere to hide. Having had the rush of blood, I now agonised about the fallout.

  I came to the conclusion that I had to roll the dice and go direct to our boss, Mr Zuhair. We met with the great negotiator that evening in the Hilton. I had a strong sense that if we were going to get out of this then we had to create an air of crisis. I gambled that if we had a chance to explain the case fully to Juma then we might be able to justify our actions. Maybe we could get away with it.

  We were deep into the secret business of Emirati politics—and we were the outsiders. It could have gone any direction. In a close-knit, tribal society like the UAE, personal connections can matter much more than the letter of the law. That certainly applies to those who were born and bred here, and whose fathers might know the president on first-name terms. But how would it play out for a foreigner, even one
who was employed by the Crown Prince?

  It was threatening to get hugely complicated for everybody. Trust had been breached. Individual judgements on us as foreigners would come into play. After all, we had been given the highest honour of all when we were taken to meet the Crown Prince in person. What sort of message did this send about the judgement of the gatekeepers like Mr Zuhair himself? Reputations were on the line.

  The following day we had a big sit-down in the Hilton boardroom. Juma was on one side of the table, us camel rustlers were on the other. Juma let it be known that he was furious and felt personally betrayed. For our side, we protested that we were innocent, victims of vindictive lies and that we, too, felt betrayed. Why wouldn’t Juma believe us? After an hour of heated argument, the situation calmed. There would be a price to pay: we agreed on a settlement deal where Juma would buy the business from us. As a quid pro quo the matter would go no further. Juma set the terms so he got a good deal. But on the flipside, it hadn’t gone to the authorities and all the pain that would have caused, including, very likely, being sent to prison. You could say it was a form of local justice.

  There was a partly satisfying footnote to the story. A month later we saw a newspaper report that the two young British expats who’d shafted us had been thrown into prison for attempting to abscond from their sponsor. Juma had done his own checks, worked out the truth and had them arrested. This was the final vindication we needed, because their actions had come very close to leading us into disaster. The sad side to the story was that one of the young Brits was the daughter of friends of ours.

  Juma was then able to use his influence to obtain a decree from the president to the effect that he was the only person permitted to run camel safaris in the emirate of Abu Dhabi.

  The whole episode demonstrated that having the right personal connections mattered. There are two systems of justice: the traditional, tribal way and the official way, through police and courts. With a personal relationship there was always a chance that people would step back and work out a way to fix things. That’s one of the things I love about this place: nothing’s black and white and there is more than one road to go down. There was always another way, always the possibility of a deal that might save face and reputations.

  Juma told us that what was done was done. ‘We Arabs forget everything after three sunsets,’ he said.

  In truth I think it took a lot longer than that. But without a deal I would have been finished there and then.

  Ten

  Million dollar baby

  I’ve been through thousands of camel births over the decades, but there’s none to match the arrival of Sumha’s Girl (or ‘Bint Sumha’ in Arabic). She was the first embryo transfer calf from the Crown Prince’s herd.

  Aylan Al Muheiri, who’d been with us on the trip out to Australia, called me early in the morning with the news that Sumha’s Girl had been born overnight, which is the typical birthing time for a camel. Aylan was overjoyed. ‘Namoos,’ he said, using the Arabic word for congratulations used especially for camel achievements. He wanted to see us out at the stables straightaway.

  We’d known the day was close. A day or so before, Sumha’s Girl’s mother had gone quiet and taken herself off into a corner. The Pakistani camel handlers had separated her from the rest of the herd and stayed with her around the clock. It was as though they were guarding Fort Knox, which in a way they were.

  Now it was official. I got hold of Heath and Doug and I drove up to the Hilton to collect Angus McKinnon to get a first glimpse of our lab baby. By the time we arrived the handlers had disinfected the umbilical cord, generally cleaned up and made sure Sumha’s Girl was feeding from her mother, which is a vital early sign that the baby is on track.

  She was a frail little thing and quite skinny, probably because, being an experimental baby, she was born later in the season than usual. In all other respects though she looked like a normal baby camel, with soft brown down and gangly legs, all unsteady as she took her first unfamiliar steps.

  Within a couple of hours Sumha’s Girl attempted her first frolic around the paddock, at first a short distance from her mother and then a little further away before returning to safety again. She kicked out her legs as a first, instinctive test of her ability to defend herself. She made bleating sounds, similar to a lamb, as she communicated for the first time with her mother. As a pack animal, camels are very social, so you will hear a lot of ‘chatter’ in a paddock of newborns. In the first weeks they are so curious and social that they will sidle up and nuzzle or nibble your ear.

  So Sumha’s Girl was doing what all baby camels do. The big difference, of course, was that Sumha’s Girl had the genes of a champion. Her genetic mother, Sumha, was amongst the fastest females in the UAE, and Sumha’s eggs had been fertilised by the Crown Prince’s best male, Mileh Khabeer.

  It gives some idea of the value of this breakthrough that, back then—more than twenty years ago—this baby super camel was worth one million dollars at birth. Today it would be multiples of that. No wonder the camel boys hadn’t taken their eyes off her for a minute.

  Actually, to me, every camel birth is something of a wonder. A baby camel is all neck and legs. As it emerges, it looks more like a spider; you wonder how it can get out. But camels are fantastic at giving birth. They have fewer birthing problems than any other species. Generally, you see the face and nose come out through the birth canal first, because of the long neck. Then you soon see the feet, and out it comes.

  For all that, though, you never know until it happens. On this occasion we had taken a lot of precautions. All the surrogate mothers were being kept in a remote patch of desert owned by the Crown Prince. This was a secret operation, so access was heavily restricted. Here they had an outdoor paddock to themselves. We’d built stables for each of the surrogates, so they could be kept inside and protected from the elements. In March it can be cold, especially at night, and you get a bit of rain and wind, which isn’t good for any animal about to give birth.

  In the days after Sumha’s Girl there were five more live calves from different surrogate mothers, all a result of the union of Sumha and Mileh Khabeer. This represented twelve years of Sumha’s breeding potential, produced in just one season. We had in fact produced twelve fertilised eggs from Sumha that we transferred to twelve surrogates. Out of those, six camels became pregnant.

  The birth of Sumha’s Girl was the culmination of more than eighteen months of dreams, plans and sheer hard work. Seeing her for the first time, I felt a combination of excitement and massive relief. It was absolutely fantastic. Heath Harris was beaming, as though he was the actual father, which in a way he was after making his wild promises to the royal family. His was in every sense a triumph of optimism over experience.

  For me it was a hugely emotional moment—the end of a long hard road from the time Heath stuck his neck out and said he would deliver on something that had never been done before. We had travelled to Western Australia. Patti and I had lost Natalia. And here we had achieved a world first. The amount of time and effort that had gone into this moment was astronomical. There were about thirty steps in getting to this point and there were so many places where it could have all gone wrong. But it hadn’t.

  There was much riding on the success of the first embryo transfer, from the very top of the UAE down. In fact, there was way more interest than even we had suspected at the time. We knew that the president had taken time out from a state visit to Japan to call about our progress, but we also later learned that the Crown Prince would occasionally be driven up to the camel camp and spend the early evening sitting in the sand with the first batch of embryo transfer camels, before quietly slipping away back to his palace.

  Once we’d started the embryo transfer with the Crown Prince’s camels, there was a huge amount of anticipation. From day one Mr Zuhair would constantly be dropping down to the lab to inquire if we had a pregnancy yet. It was fortunate that we were able to produce results quickly, though it can ne
ver be quickly enough when someone wants a result yesterday.

  Aylan Al Muheiri had been given direct responsibility for the reproductive project and was very hands-on. He too was always in the lab, asking questions about where we were up to. As he squinted down the microscope, it was very hard to convince him that that little ball he could see floating in fluid was really a baby camel seven days after conception that would one day be a calf.

  You could see how excited Aylan was as he ran around the paddock like a little kid in the first week with these babies. He knew they were special. And he too was relieved because he had good news to report up the line.

  The six live births had been hugely helpful for our relationship with the trainers and camel handlers. Just eighteen months before, the only treatments they had been using were those handed down unchanged over hundreds of years. Now suddenly they had to accept the idea that you could put together the eggs and the semen of two animals, extract the embryo and impregnate a third camel to carry the baby to birth.

  Then there was the added dimension that the surrogate mothers weren’t the slim, brown racing camels they knew. Halfway through the program, the Crown Prince had decided that the surrogates should be a different breed altogether. Sheikh Khalifa wanted to use huge black camels called Hazmis, which were typically used in Saudi Arabia as milk camels. He judged that they would be better recipients because they were bigger, had more room in the uterus and a better milk supply.

  It was virtually impossible to explain to the Bedouin how all this could work, even though there is no physiological difference between these two breeds when it comes to reproduction. They simply had to take it on trust that a fine brown racing camel baby would emerge from a hulking black milk camel, with some very fancy lab work in between. There was a lot on the line.