nothing but maniacs behind the wheel

in case those of you who are coming to visit in the near and/or distant futures decide to rent vehicles whilst you are here, these are my words of caution:

1.  assume that everyone is going to cut you off and/or narrowly avoid hitting you at high speeds, because most likely, they will.

2.  just because someone is going 160 km/hr in the left of 8 lanes, does not mean they won't cut across to exit at the last second. they will.

3.  the vast majority of people on the road are bad drivers. i've become one myself, because if you don't get super aggressive, you go nowhere.

4.  you need nerves of steel to enter and exit roundabouts, even the ones with traffic lights. in dubai especially, some of the roundabouts have 6 lanes. trucks can usually only ever ride in the right 2 lanes. some of them stay in the circle while you try and get out to exit, as they block your path, while and the other 3 lanes of traffic are all jockeying to cut off the trucks before you can. once, we had to take a small roundabout (luckily) around twice, as the dude in the right lane faked out and didn't exit (and we wanted to). today, on the way to dubai, at the emirates road roundabout here in RAK, there was an accident involving a huge truck and a small bus. something to do with one staying in and one trying to exit (the cutting off of the truck thing) caused the bus to flip over onto the road. we just missed it, as when we passed, the truck driver (and others) were getting out of their cars to try and get the driver and passengers out of the overturned bus. lovely.

5.  signage is pretty poor here. there are plenty of signs, but sometimes they come up at you very close to where you need to go (probably explains the crossing of 8 lanes of traffic, something i myself did 2 days ago). or you follow signs for one thing and then they suddenly stop. throw in the construction and it's easy to get lost. roads are always being closed, opened, shifted, etc. 

6.  the max speed limit is usually 120 km/hr. the cars here have a mechanism that causes the car to beep at you when you hit 120. ours happens to keep beeping, even if you stay over 120. helps to keep yourself in check for the radar (as there are no police pulling people over - all done with radar and cameras). 

7.  don't be surprised if people attempt to cross 16 lanes of traffic on foot, because they do. i'm just surprised some of these people live to tell the tale.

8.  this is the land of u-turns. they are everywhere. you just get screwed (like the one in front of our house) if there's no room to turn around, like midday when the trucks take up the entire right lane and you can't cut the wheel sharp enough to blow down the left lane before the oncoming traffic tries to get you.

nothing to be worried about, you just have to know what you're getting yourself into. quite an adventure, actually. moral of the story, it's a jungle out there. run over or be run over.