The Isle of the Dead

Heathrow. Six in the morning. I am freezing and hurry through check in to the warmth of the inner hearth known quaintly as the departure lounge.

What seems like aeons later, I sit in a metal tube facing a cotton clad seat for nearly seven hours, dozing, being jolted awake by violent winds, before returning to shallow sleep.

I awaken, and step from the tube onto the bright sands of the desert. The heat is welcomed. It rolls in waves beckoning me to lighten my English morning (mourning) clothes.

This is the Isle of the Dead, so named from Sumarian times as the place of burial for their nobility. 

Bahrain as its called nowadays is an intriguing little place joined at the navel with Saudi Arabia to the west by a road causeway.

It is touted as a swish financial hub and its reason de etre is as a safe money haven for the Saudi Elite.

Little could be further from the truth.

When it was the Isle of the Dead it was a tropical paradise. A jewel like island in an azure sea surrounded by brilliant reefs of coral. No longer.

With the oil riches of the Saudi's gaining ridiculous proportions throughout the last and this century, Bahrain has become more of a vassal state to its western neighbours unfulfilled appetites constrained at home by the feverish swirl of Islam.

What started as a handful of sleepy banks, and the odd tourist hotel catering to the sex trade mostly, has become a full blown testament to an excessive worship of consumerism.

It rivals the world in boutiques per square kilometre. Five star hotels abound and one can find drink and loose women without much search. All this interspersed with the occasional mosque.

So what do I hear you all say? So what indeed. But here is the problem.

Its a small island. The traffic crossing the border grows and grows. The greed of the people grows and grows to match the appetites from the consumptive set. The wannabe consumer kings and queens. The island grows and grows. The coral reefs shrink and shrink as land reclamation projects and more glass towers are deemed necessary. Who needs reefs when gold is king?

Well, as it happens, idyllic jewel like tropical garden islands do. As this is what gave the islands interior it source of fresh water in the form of a ground aquifer filtered by the reefs from the aforementioned azure sea.

I stand now in a flat and featureless desert. All I see is sand and Chanel Boutiques.

If I was one of the Sumarian dead who paid in advance for the heavenly resting place, I would be looking to get a refund.