Until the mid 1960's Abu Dhabi - labelled Home of the Gazelle by some Bedouin hunting party - was no more than a single mud fort and a cluster of palm thatch huts. Older residents who remembered quite vividly the days before petroleum.

The city bore the unmistakable stamp of one man: the late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founding president of the UAE whose austere, bearded visage gazed down at us in every foyer.

British explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote admiringly in his classic "Arabian Sands" of his first encounters with Zayed in the 1950s, although later he would express his bitter disappointment at the loss of the traditional desert ways.