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Published: March 10th 2009
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Well this week was a real treat. It is Prophet Mohammed's Birthday so there was meant to be a public holiday on monday march 9th. Of course this being the UAE and all the government can't actually get its act together very quickly and announce what day the holiday is going to be on for the private sector (the public sector gets annouced very promptly). The company that we both work for doesn't do the sensible thing and say "right, since the UAE can't get its act together and tell us in advance when the public holidays are going to be so people can plan things like holidays we are going to tell you at the start of the year what days you can have off for these holidays". Instead they wait until the government officially annouces a holiday, which is sometimes late in the evening of the night before (depending on if the moon has been sighted or not!!). However the government finally managed to officially annouce that the holiday would be on the Monday.
So I decided that it would be a great opportunity to pop up and visit the Desert Islands in Abu Dhabi. So my master
traveller Dave flexed his gold card and secured us a night at the Anantara Resort on Sir Bani Yas island.
And then our stupid company sent around a note saying that the newspapers had been reporting that the government had changed its mind and that the private sector holiday would actually be on Saturday instead of Monday. However this was not an official annoucement (which is the only thing that our company will usually stand for). But this time our stupid company decided that the governement was too embarrased to rescind its first notice and wasn't actually going to annouce that the holiday was on the saturday instead of the monday, so they decided to use the newspapers as gospel and to rescind their official notice that Monday would be a day off, after half the company had booked long weekends away.
IDIOTS!!!!
So anyway, we were booked to go and visit the Desert Islands. Sir Bani Yas Island is 4 hours south of Dubai in the emirate of Abu Dhabi and is one of the largest natural islands that the UAE has. It is very close to the border of Saudi and is about 3 hours drive
from Dubai. You can't take your cars onto the island and instead have to park up and take a ferry across. The ferry ride is only about 15 mins.
The island was/is owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi and they have a huge palace on it. The hotel is at the other end of the island from the palace. Sheikh Zayed (the last ruler of Abu Dhabi) was a huge fan of wildlife and when he realised that the arabian flora and fauna was starting to become extinct he started planting trees on Sir Bani Yas island and populating it with native wildlife. The arabian oryx was actually believed to be extinct until it was found on the island and a breeding programme has been very successful and has bought the species back from extincting, so much so now that the island is overpopulated with them and they are exporting them to other areas in the Arabian peninsula.
We went on a game drive on Monday morning (which I thought was going to be pretty lame after Africa) but I have to say that it was everybit as good as Africa and we even saw a
cheetah (that we didn't get to see in africa. It was a truely lovely trip away from Dubai and I can totally recommend it to people.
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