For many people there is little in common between the land of the United Arab Emirates and the corner of Arabia previously known as the Trucial Coast, Trucial Oman, Trucial States, etc.

There are many people, both nationals and foreigners, who have little knowledge of the former and none of the latter.

Today, this observation is particularly true for many of the local people who have only known fine air-conditioned houses, shopping malls, expensive cars, and lavish trips abroad.

Similarly many foreigners, having perhaps seen the name Abu Dhabi on the side of a London taxi, arrive at the modern airport: they are conveyed in comfort to a first class hotel, they go to offices to conduct business, and in due course leave again along the tree lined road to the airport. They could have been in any one of a dozen places in the world. Many of those foreigners who stay longer may see more of the land and perhaps the desert, and complain that it is difficult to get to know an Emirati national. When I first came here to this land, more than half a century ago, there was little awareness beyond its borders of Abu Dhabi's existence. Before the discovery of oil, the region occasionally hit the headlines of the press in London, and then after a brief moment of fame, slid back into near obscurity.

The towns of the Trucial Coast were known to occasional foreign visitors, but the interior was definitely an unknown ‘no go’ area for foreigners. It was not until 1948 that a European, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, managed to pass, on a camel, through the inaccessible heart of the land, the Liwa oases. It was to be another few years before Codrai and Chatton took the first vehicle over high dunes and through soft sand to make it to Arada in the west of those oases. That was in June 1953 and they were in a Land Rover.

Those were the days when most people living on the Trucial Coast were born in, brought up in, and still lived in huts constructed of palm fronds. Asphalted roads with lights, and telephones, electricity and sanitation in the houses were more than a decade away, and beyond most peoples’ experience and comprehension. On my first visit to the Northern Emirates in 1968 I saw children whose faces were crawling with flies, the children had long ago abandoned the unequal battle to keep the flies away.