It must be rather nice to be rich. In fact, there aren’t too many things I can think of that are nicer than being enormously wealthy – except being enormously wealthy and the ruler of a nation. That way, you can look at a remote mountain, tell yourself ‘Hey, it might be nice to have a palace up there’, snap your fingers and actually have said palace built. I can picture Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the former ruler of Abu Dhabi and the principal founder of the UAE, doing exactly that as he, perhaps on a family picnic, happened to glance at the Jebel Hafeet mountain and be struck with just this idea. Mind you, if you try and research the origins of the palace, you’re likely to come up with very little; it’s one of those nudge-nudge wink-wink things – everyone knows about it, but it’s not on official record.
About an hour’s drive south-east from Dubai, the mountain (in West Asian terms – it’s a large hill by our standards) overlooks the city of Al Ain, and on it stands the palace that belongs to the ruling family. Whoever built the palace (and it’s quite certain that Sheikh Zayed oversaw its construction) knew how to make a statement, because after it was completed, it just sat there – yes, it’s apparently never been occupied. It must be nice to be rich, be the ruler of a nation, build a palace in the middle of nowhere on a whim and then say ‘Nah, I think I’d rather stay at home’ – now that’s real power and pelf.
After all this, it isn’t even the palace that catches the eye – it’s the road leading to it. The Jebel Hafeet road winds 4,000 feet from the foot of the mountain right up to a vast parking lot, covering 11.6 km along the way and throwing in 60 of the most glorious corners known to mankind, with a surface that’s almost race-track in smoothness. It is widely considered the finest driving road in the world, and the amazing thing is that it’s nothing more than the world’s most extravagant driveway – it was built so that the royal family could get to their palace (which they evidently never did). It’s since become something of a tourist attraction, and there’s even a 5-star hotel near the top now, but more importantly, it’s relatively free of traffic and there are no speed cameras on the road as yet. It would have been criminal to simply let all of this be and not do anything about it, so I did what any right-thinking person would have done, procured a Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet and decided to scare myself silly with it.
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