'Life is good': How a British surgeon found a second home in Dubai's desert

Dubai: Mseihan’s patience is running thin.

The eight-year-old Arabian camel sits patiently as his owner, Dr Martin Moody, explains what makes camels so extraordinary.

From how their long lashes and furry ears help keep sand out, to their ability to change their body’s temperature by as much as eight degrees over the course of a day, the 59-year-old British doctor can talk about them for hours.

But as Mseihan stretches his neck and nudges the 59-year-old British doctor to hurry up with the impromptu anatomy lesson, Dr Moody explains: “His friends just left for a walk and he’s getting impatient.”

And that’s the insight that can only come from a man who’s spent countless hours trying to understand how camels behave.

Until four years ago, though, Dr Moody was riding horses along the vast green lands of Dartmoor, UK.

He grew up in a military family. His father served in the British Army, who met his wife, Dr Moody’s mother, when he was stationed in Germany.

“My father was in the army, so we moved around an awful lot. So, I'm used to living in different places,” he said.

After training as a doctor in London, Dr Moody moved to Devon in southwest England to specialise as a consultant urologist in the National Health System (NHS). He would spend the next 25 years living and working on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, where his love of horse riding only grew stronger.

It was also while riding horses that he met his wife 30 years ago.

“My wife's a vet, so we've got a horse, a pony, dogs, tortoises … she's also got some sheep at our home in Devon," he said.

After more than two decades in the NHS, though, including around 15 years leading his department, the pressures of the job had slowly taken their toll.

"There was this gradual sense of burnout," he said.

Growing up in the UK post the world wars and having friends whose parents had worked in the Gulf, the region was always somewhere in the back of his mind. But it was only a few years ago that Dr Moody began to actively look for a new place to work.

After the pandemic delayed his initial plans, he came across a job opening at the King’s College Hospital London in Dubai. He interviewed in June 2022 and by the end of October, he had made the move to the UAE.

“Because of the relationship the NHS has with King's College in London, and the similarity with the structures and governance, it was quite an easy transition to make on one level,” he said.

From the very beginning, though, he was immediately drawn to the desert.

"Even before I moved to Dubai, I remember looking at a map of the city and my eyes naturally went towards this area,” he said about the Al Lisayli desert.

“Even then, it looked attractive, but initially, because of work, I chose to stay closer to the city,” he added.

So, he chose to stay in Al Barsha for a year. But he quickly realised how much he prefers the quieter desert lifestyle, compared to city life.

“I gravitate to the desert and have been since I've been here. I spend time with the camels or even go out in the desert with my four-wheel drive. I sleep out in the desert quite a lot throughout the year, which is just great,” he said.

Today, he lives in Damac Hills 2, overlooking Al Qudra, which is “about as far away as you can get from the city”.

"You've got views over the desert and I can actually see this area," he says, pointing towards the Arabian Desert Camel Riding Centre in Al Lisaili, where he goes every morning to spend time with his camels.

He discovered the centre on some of his early trips as a new UAE resident, and the support he received from the team at the centre helped him learn how different camels can be from horses.

Initially, he rode the centre's camels, gradually earning enough trust to take them out into the desert on overnight camping trips.

About a year later, he bought two camels of his own — Mseihan, who is about nine years old and comes from the Oman desert, and Uli, who is a little over three years old.

His fascination with camels, though, has a lot more to do with just their interesting anatomy. It’s loyalty.

“One thing about camels is that you have to gain their trust. Without that, you can do a few things with them but eventually they’ll go ‘I’m not doing that’ and, ultimately, if a camel doesn’t want to do something, it won’t. It will sit down and there’s nothing you can do,” he said.

But once you put in the work, and gain their trust, Dr Moody says, you get back so much more from a camel than you ever would from other animals.

“I’ll confess, I had some problem with Mseihan initially. I was trying to get him to do things without getting the trust first. And it has taken me a year to 18 months to really get the bonding after spending time with him, walking with him, rather than riding him and there’s still a long way to go potentially. But the feedback I’ve gotten has been really, really rewarding. Yes, you can get a similar thing from a horse, but camels just show their affection more when you’ve got that connection,” he said.

But it’s not just the bond with his camels that has convinced Dr Moody that he made the right decision to move to Dubai. It was when he found himself in need of a strong healthcare system as a patient.

Despite spending years riding horses, running long distances and considering himself fit, Dr Moody says he had unknowingly been living with severe coronary artery disease.

"I'd probably been having chest pain for the best part of 10 or 15 years and just ignoring it. As surgeons, and probably as men, we tend to stick our heads in the sand,” he said.

A few months ago, though, as he was returning from riding his camels, he noticed an irregular heartbeat. While he would have normally brushed off that feeling in the UK, because getting an ECG would have been a task, he simply stopped at a nearby clinic on his way back from the centre.

"I just walked in and said, 'Look, I've got an irregular heartbeat. Can I have an ECG?'" And they just said, ‘yeah’,” he said.

Within days, he had seen a cardiologist at the hospital he works at and around six weeks later, he underwent open-heart surgery.

“I've known surgeons who've died from heart attacks. And if I were back in the UK, I would have probably not gotten it addressed at all. So, being here has probably enabled me to address a health issue a lot sooner than I would have. For that, I'm really grateful,” he said.

Nearly four years on, Dr Moody says Dubai has become far more than somewhere he came to work.

He is learning Arabic through a tutor as well as learning apps and continues to spend much of his free time exploring the desert with Mseihan and Uli.

He also feels that the city has offered him a quality of life he hadn't expected.

"You can have amazing food, incredible hospitality and world-class shopping. I’ve had some of the best desserts of my life here in Dubai,” he said.

But it’s the other quieter side of life that truly has Dr Moody’s heart.

"You can come out here into the desert, switch off and just enjoy being outdoors."

His wife still spends much of her time in the UK while helping their three children through university, but visits Dubai regularly.

As for Dr Moody, he has no plans to leave. Looking at the way the country has dealt with the recent regional tensions as well as global challenges like the pandemic or the economic downturn, Dr Moody says the country’s approach has always helped it emerge stronger.

"Things always seem to come back better than they were before," he said.

"You can see there's planning and forethought."

Four years after swapping the green moorlands of Dartmoor for the golden dunes of the UAE, Dr Moody says he has found a rhythm that works for him.

As for life in Dubai, he puts it simply: “Life is good.”