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The UAQ Super Yacht

June 6th, 2015 · No Comments · Abu Dhabi, The National, Travel, UAE

This is a very UAE story.

A 155-foot super yacht with 10 bedrooms and a cruising range of 4,200 miles — and a 90 million dirham (about $24.5 million) price tag.

(Its arrival, in The National, comes with the requisite slide show.)

Nice yacht … sold to a “superwealthy” Gulf resident, we are told.

So far, a very UAE story, indeed.

But it also is an unusual story for one very particular UAE reason.

It happened in Umm Al Quwain.

UAQ, as it is known in the UAE, is the least populous — less than 100,000 people — of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates.

It also seems to be the least newsworthy.

The National covers the whole of the UAE, but you can read the newspaper for a week and not see a story about UAQ.

Not much seems to go on there. Not even a spectacular fire or a child falling out of a high-rise, which is standard fare for nearby Sharjah.

If we compared UAQ to a U.S. state, North Dakota probably would be most apt. In terms of a place where not much happens, not many people live and the possibility of the wider world not hearing a thing about it for weeks on end.

(Also like North Dakota, in that you can live in the country of which North Dakota is part … and never actually go to it. Same with UAQ.)

UAQ also is the only one of the seven emirates without a soccer team. In a soccer-mad country, that is saying something. UAQ had a team, playing in the country’s lower level, but it never played in the top division and was abandoned a few years ago — which seems to sum up how overlook-able is UAQ. I guess if you want to see a live match, you drive south to Ajman or north to Ras Al Khaimah. Hmmm.

And now that I look at my UAE road map, I note that UAQ is the only emirate of the six on the west coast of the country that, as a city, does not straddle Sheikh Zayed Road — the main drag from the Saudi border through Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Sharjah and Ajman, and on into Ras Al Khaimah.

Which makes it even harder to see any of the “main” parts of the sad little emirate. You have to get off the main road and take a spur into town. Which you can never do even in years living here.

One curious thing about UAQ is that it has history, which Abu Dhabi (city of) hardly does. People have been living in and around UAQ for several millennia, while Abu Dhabi (population, 1 million) was an empty patch of scrub until about 50 years ago.

So, we now know they do at least one thing in UAQ, and that is build yachts. I now will attach that fact to the emirate, and try to remember, so the next time someone asks me about UAQ, I can cough up the “yacht” stat.

And apparently, it builds really big and nice yachts. Worth looking at on the slide show.

 

 

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