Tiger989

I've just fueled up a rental in Saudi for 18riyals, thats 17 dirhams, 3quids, barely 5 dollars. Its ****ing 44 hallalas which is 44 fils per liter, a friggin local drinking bottle of 1.5 liter in UAE is 1.25dirhams at carrefour.



I'm simply gob smacked.

Its a toyota camry if you are wondering and i filled it from an empty tank.

Norm_uk

Bottled water is almost always overpriced even though the majority of it comes from the municipal tap.

It's not really surprising fuel is cheaper since the place has one of the largest oil reserves in the world and the lowest rates of precipitation in the world...plus they have no direct tax on fuel.

N.

nottmbantam

Yeah, its one of the 'perks' of living in Saudi. To full up my Pajero , 80 litre fuel tank, is around 35 riyals. At todays exchange rate, its a little over 6quid.

Tiger989

One of the perks?

The only perk you mean.

Blue Cat

It costs me 85 dirhams to fill mine up here but I still aint complaining

still.unsure

hang on, what perplexes me about the price of petrol is think about how much energy and processing takes to produce one litre of petrol versus a litre of water...

the only thing i can think of that causes the increase in cost over the two is that each litre (or split of), comes individually wrapped when it comes to water...

Norm_uk

When you consider a large portion of potable water in the UAE comes from the sea it's not hard to see why it costs so much. It's a lot harder to get drinking water from sea water and the "water table" than it is to get oil and refine it into fuel (given all you basically do is heat it up).

I think tap water is cheaper here than petrol though - but hardly anyone drinks it because apparently water is cleaner when wrapped in plastics than when it comes from a pipe connected to a regulated municipal water plant.

N.

still.unsure

in the magic kingdom, i'm loathe to admit it but will only drink the bottled stuff. i put the tap water into a humidifier and it leaves a thick brown sludge (very oil like!) residue... not drinking that! (i'll stick to my toxic home brew, thanks!)

Blue Cat

bottled water only in this house too, but then I really don't like the idea of those plastic water bottles being stored in the sun, what to do. The glass bottled water from Scotland costs a fortune

seven seas

Well you can always use the biriani (that's the name of the brown 'sludge' as you call it) in your cooking.

It's not expensive when you get it from the shops but you can get it for free, so....

Now we use humidifiers but traditionally it came from the inside of tents.

shiva

I've seen the inside of my water tank and frankly I'll be sticking to bottled drinking water for now. didnt and wouldnt in the uk though.

TGFKASE

Why would you? My OH's folks stay up the Glens and there water comes straight off the peat bog...

Mmmm, yummy......

shiva

exactly, rather that than through a decrepit system installed for the lowest bid minus the profit gouge, installed and maintained by rice farmers (not their fault i hasten to add).

I saw the inside of my water tank after it started to leak amazingly well last year, roll on 6 months when they finally decided to fix it, i had a look inside, was like the black lagoon in there, ****ing disgusting. They fixed it by liberally covering the inside with fibre glass which meant we couldnt use any tap water for a couple of weeks as the water stank and contained huge bundles of glass fibre......lovely stuff to be doing your teeth with etc......

On principle I hate bottled water but only marginally less than i hate being poisoned