Tamara Pitelen heads to a Dubai restaurant where the house speciality is camel with everything – and realises the ships of the desert are now served with chips.

“I’ll start with the camel soup please followed by the camel burger… that comes with fries, right?”

It’s not often you get to say a sentence like that. In fact, I can claim with conviction that those words in that order had never passed my lips until a few hours ago when I visited Local House Restaurant in Dubai’s historic Bastikiya area.

Photo Credit: Local House Restaurant, Dubai

A few hours ago I was a camel-eating virgin. That innocence is lost. I have since feasted upon the flesh of some hapless dromedary (a one humped camel to you) and as a result, the kangaroo steak sandwich I had in Australia a few years ago has been stripped of its prize for ‘oddest thing I’ve eaten’.

In the heart of old Dubai, not far from the misleadingly-named Dubai Creek (it’s a sizeable river) Local House is a beautiful space for casual dining and specializes in offering a traditional Emirati experience. Built in traditional Arabian-style and dating back to 1890, there’s no roof, making it outdoor dining indoors, ideal for temperatures in the desert.

However, the fabulous ambience and historic décor of Local House are not the extent of its marvels. Since January 2010, the management took the relatively unique position of offering an array of dishes featuring camel meat or milk so this is the place to get your camel soup or salad, camel burgers or biriyani. There’s also camel kebabs, camel steak and camel milkshakes. In other words, the ships of the desert now come with chips.

For the occasion of my deflowering and camel knowledge, Dubai put on one of the balmiest and best evenings that it can offer. Myself and my best friend Rach spent the warm night relaxing on the long cushioned bench seats staring up at the black, starry sky complete with a shining, full moon while taking our first tentative bites from the flesh of hump-backed beast.

And guess what? It was absolutely delicious. Kind of like beef but a bit sweeter.
I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so delicious, I thought the whole camel thing was a gimmick but no, desert dwellers have apparently been eating their water-carrying companions for centuries and, according to Ramesh, the manager of Local House restaurant, camel meat is far superior to lamb, beef or any of your other common or garden sources of meat. He says it has 10 times the protein of beef as well as less fat, fewer calories and less cholesterol. Plus it’s succulent and tasty – although there is a secret to ensuring this that he tells me he absolutely cannot reveal.

About 30 seconds later he reveals it. The secret is to take the meat is from the creature’s shoulder. That’s the best bit, akin to the sirloin from some poor cow. “Other parts of camel’s body can have tough meat,” he says.

The restaurant gets through about 40kg of camel meat a day and the most popular dish is camel soup for 18 dirham (thumbs up from me, it’s superbly flavoursome consomme, full of scallion). Next are the camel burgers for 35 dirham, about 100 are sold each day, as well as camel biriyani. Although for local Emiratis, a dish of camel harees is the favourite, a cracked wheat speciality from the UAE that’s normally made with lamb or beef and is most commonly eaten during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting.

The camels that end up in these mouth-watering dishes are bred at a farm in Al Ain, a town about 90 mins up the road from Dubai. But the milk that’s used to make the camel milkshakes and chocolate is from the camels owned by Ruler of Dubai His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Royal camel’s milk no less but it doesn’t come cheap. If you’re still hungry after your burger, you can take home a 700gm gold-foil wrapped solid chocolate camel for 195 dirham.
Not for me though, I finished off with a cup of coffee with cream and sugar. Just one lump.

Intrigued? Check out the website at www.localhousedubai.com or email info@localhousedubai.com. If you’re in town and want to call, the number is 971 (0)4 354 0705. The address is Local House Restaurant, Bastikiya, House 65, near Al Fahihid Roundabout.

If someone gave you a map of the world and asked you to stick a pin in Dibba, I wouldn’t really blame you if your expression took on that of a slapped trout.

Unless you’ve had a good nose around in every nook and cranny of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over on the Arabian Peninsula, just a bit to the left from Saudi Arabia, chances are you’ll have never heard of Dibba. You’ve probably heard of its flashy neighbour though, Dubai, a place that makes Las Vegas look subtle and constrained.

Just a couple of hours drive from Dubai, Dibba is one of the main towns in the emirate of Fujairah and, like Dubai, Fujairah is one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. That’s about all they have in common. If Dubai is Paris Hilton, Fujairah is the shy girl next door. But one thing that Dibba does better than Dubai is diving – in a nutshell there’s much more to see and the water’s clearer, which is why I was there recently.

Having recently received my PADI Open Water Diver certification, the oceans were a calling and when it comes to donning a scuba tank and getting below sea level,

Dibba is a crystal clear diver’s treasure chest of marine life. The waters are so warm you don’t need a wetsuit and swimming happily within them is everything from turtles to Moray eels, barracuda, trumpet fish, angel fish, crayfish, stingrays, puffer fish, clown fish (the Nemo ones), black tip reef sharks (harmless, apparently, but wouldn’t poke them with a stick or anything) as well as huge schools of small tropical fish.

Dubai used to have reasonable diving but the unabated construction frenzy that’s going on just off the coast has disrupted the marine environment and left the sea full of silt which means there’s not much left to see and what there is you can’t see for all the murk. The price you pay for having fancy palm and world-shaped developments.

So there I was, on my first certified dive. This means it was the first time that no instructor was hovered over my shoulder to make sure I’d assembled my equipment properly and turned my oxygen on before doing a back roll off the boat – crucial, if you’re planning to breathe underwater. But happily for the new and nervous diver, you don’t have to go very far or very deep in Dibba to access the best diving and snorkeling site in the UAE, namely, Dibba Rock.

Just a five minute boat ride from the beach, Dibba Rock is part of a marine reserve so fishing is prohibited, that’s what makes it so rich with marine life. On that first unsupervised dive I floated over huge beds of raspberry coloured coral as well as got in the face of countless marine creatures.

The highlights were the four black tip reef sharks that slowly circled the area, the huge clouds of thousands of multi-coloured tropical fish and the turtles. The diving fraternity has very firm rules about mingling with marine life, basically you can look but keep your hands to yourself. However, when you’re so close to a turtle that you just have to put your hand out to run a finger down its shell, it’s a woman of strong convictions who can resist. I’m not that girl. The turtle didn’t seem to mind though, I’m not even sure it noticed. I’ll never forget it.

The Facts

Fujairah extends 70km on the Gulf of Oman, its total area covers 1450sq km of mountains, hills, plains and desert. The population is about 100,000.

The climate in Fujairah is semi tropical meaning it’s hot most of the time and rain is rare.

Useful Websites

Fujairah Tourism Bureau

www.fujairah-tourism.ae/

Freestyle Divers

www.freestyledivers.com

Email: freestyle@eim.ae

Located in the grounds of the Royal Beach Hotel, Dibba, boats for divers and snorkellers leave for Dibba Rock three times a day, at 9.30am, 12.30pm and 3.30pm. Freestyle Divers also teach PADI courses. Other dive trips are also offered.

Pavilion Dive Centre

If you want to learn to dive in Dubai then visit Dibba, one option is the Pavilion Dive Centre located in the Jumeirah Beach Hotel.

www.jumeirahbeachhotel.com/dive_centre/dive_centre/