I’ve had a lot of memorable and strange experiences while in other countries. The 3 days that I spent in Abu Dhabi offered some of the more memorable for various reasons including this one.

We were getting a Taxi from the Shangri-La Hotel in Abu Dhabi to the Emirates Palace hotel about 20 minutes down the road. For whatever reason I decided to pull out my camera which prompted the driver to go up a gear literally. While flying down the motor way, he suddenly stops on the side of the road in the middle of the desert and goes to his boot.

My colleagues and I look at each other thinking we’re about to get messed up having annoyed the taxi driver by pulling out a camera. He comes back into the car and hands us a box of goods, inside were some items of pottery that he made. He couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Arabic so it was a comedy moment trying to communicate with him, but we got by and had a good laugh.

We continue on our way and he grabs something out the glove box and throws it back to us. It’s a photo album of a whole collection of items similar to those he’d passed back to us earlier in the journey. I don’t think he was trying to sell us anything just was wanting us to look at the work that he did.

The photo shows only half the story though, the HD video is something else. I switched to video mode halfway through the journey and he decides to take my camera into the driver seat where he then proceeds to tear down the tarmac while filming both out the window and at himself with us in the back seat. The funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Anyway, this gentleman was much nicer compared to the driver we had earlier who claimed to be ex Taliban from Peshawar. He too was crazy.