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Published: January 19th 2007
Our Just Deserts in Dubai
Wasting Time in the Morning 1/18/2007 - We woke up as usual yesterday but felt tired…very tired. I guess jet lag isn’t as easy to get over as it used to be!! Either way, we headed for some breakfast and then went to explore the hotel.
Since we were planning to take a tour out into the desert at 3:15ish, we had some time to kill around the hotel. There is a decently sized shopping area as part of our hotel complex. To get there you can walk across a bridge or take one of the canal boats. Kel had been dying to take a canal boat so this was an obvious choice.
The boat driver asked us if we wanted a tour of the whole hotel complex which we said, “sure,” to. There are 3.5 km of canals in the complex (about 2.1 miles) that circle our hotel and the surrounding villas and shopping area. The villas are 9 or 10 bedroom suites that are rented by big groups or families. Every three villas has its own pool which is small but probably nice when the normal
Desert Plant
A Baby and its Mompool is crowded during the summer.
The whole loop took us about 15 minutes and was really quite informative if not very interesting. The driver dropped us off at the shopping mall and we were off to explore. This mall is more geared to tourists than the mall of the emirates. It sells art, postcards, summer clothing/bathing suits, pashminas and other assorted goods that make good souvenirs. Kel and I browsed for an hour or two and then got some lunch at a Chinese restaurant that was pretty good (the hot and sour soup wasn’t as good as some).
By time we were done with lunch it was time to head back to our room to prep for the desert tour. We ran up stairs grabbed coats to fight off the night time chill and went to the lobby to wait for our pickup.
The Desert: a Driver’s Playground We were picked up in a GMC Yukon and headed off toward the desert. In our car we had two other guests - a mother and daughter from Istanbul - and our driver Adnan Khosravi who was originally from Iran but had been living in
Dubai for the last 21 years.
During the drive out to the desert preserve no one really talked much, I guess we were all a little shy since we didn’t really know what to expect. Kel had wanted to sit together so she and I grabbed the very back seat, with the Turks sitting in the middle seat and the driver, obviously, in the front. This arrangement didn’t lead to a lot of conversation due to the isolated nature of each party.
After a 30-40 minute drive we reached the desert reserve that we would be driving through. We all got out while the drivers let the air out of their tires to make the cars better to drive on the sand. Kel and I got a few pictures here and wasted the 10 minutes until we left.
When we got back in the cars, Adnan suggested we not sit in the back as it is behind the back wheels and thus could make you sick. I sat in the front and Kel sat behind me with the Turkish mother and daughter next to her. This is where things started to get fun.
The path into
Camels
A Baby and its Mom the desert isn’t a flat road, we actually were shooting up and down sand dunes and skidding around corners. Adnan had been driving in the desert since he had learned to drive so really knew what he was doing. He made it all look very easy, but I can tell you that its not. If you hit the gas to hard you plow into the dunes instead of over them or could get the tires stuck. Sliding sideways down a dune that is about a 30 degree angle could cause the car to flip if you aren’t careful.
The Turkish mother was scared out of her mind, Kel was yelling for more and I was calmly asking Adnan questions while he negotiated the desert as part of the caravan of 20 or so trucks heading to our first stop which was a camel farm.
At the camel farm, which is owned and run by Bedouins who are sponsored by the Emirate government in order to keep the old traditions alive, we stopped for some picture taking. All of this was very touristy but still fun…how else would we have gotten into the desert? I got some decent pics
of a baby camel with its mother.
15 minutes later we were back in the car for more hair raising dune spins to the place we would watch the sun go down. At this stop Kel and I had to walk a bit further away from everyone else to be able to get some pictures without some wild Englishman running around with a camera in them. We stopped on the other side of a dune from everyone else and sat and enjoyed the relative quiet while the sun went down. It is very obvious that it must be completely silent out there at night when others aren’t with you.
From there it was a quick jaunt on to the base camp they use for dinner. At the dinner base camp they were giving people camel rides. These rides, which are very similar to a pony ride for kids in the states, were just a short circle through the parking area. It was still pretty fun despite the kitchyness of it all. I will tell you that when the camel stands up and sits down that it would be completely possible to tip right off the end of the
camel. The camel stands its back legs up straight and then picks up its front which puts you at a very precarious angle. Kel and I managed not to fall off, but I bet people do it all the time.
Dinner and Great Conversations We had some of our best times at the base camp. While everyone else was off getting the free beer Kel and I sat and talked with a Pakistani gentleman who was serving Arabic coffee ( a mixture of coffee beans, rose water and cardamom which is very tasty). We talked about his past and his brother who works in the US in New York City, Queens to be precise. It was interesting to hear the pride in his voice when he told us that he had worked through his young adulthood to be able to send his younger brother through University. His father had died when he was a teenager leaving him to provide for his family. These are the stories you never hear on the news.
Once dinner was opened we went and got some food which was good solid middle eastern fair. After eating dinner the belly dancing
started. We weren’t really interested in belly dancing so we went over to the shisha pipes (hookahs) and tried out the apple flavored tobacco that they were giving everyone. The shisha pipes make the tobacco very smooth due to the water filtration at the bottom of the pipe. This allows you to taste the tobacco flavor which is really very nice and refreshing. Kel really enjoy the shisha, so much that when we got back to the hotel later we went to a place in the hotel that had the pipes and smoked and had a few drinks before bed.
While we were smoking at the camp many members of the staff came over and talked to us. We met Nader, a full time employee of Emirates Airlines who runs the tour company, who was Pakistani and was really interested in talking to us. He had been working for the tour group for 5 months and had never met an American. Few Americans seem to travel to Dubai due to the expense of just getting here. Because of that everyone kept asking if we were British which is of course very funny to us. They told us that the
Kel, Nader, and Adnan
Nader on the Left and Adnan on the Right majority of tourists are, in order from greatest to least, English, German and then Australian followed distantly by everyone else.
Nader told us he had tried to travel to the US multiple times but had been denied a visa every time. His sister had traveled to Johns Hopkins to get medical help and had invited him to come along but every time he had been rejected. He seemed really sad about the fact that he kept getting turned down which made us feel bad. We had to tell him that there was no advice we could give because we were unfamiliar with customs regulations.
While talking to him, Adnan (our cool driver) came and joined us and we all got some great pictures and had some good laughs. Adnan joked that we should put the pictures of him, Nader and I up on the blog and tell everyone that an Iranian and a Pakistani were kidnapping me. To this Nader said they would end up on the front page of the New York Times and that the US would start hunting for them. Everyone laughed, but it’s sadly true that people back in the States might take it
Mike and Adnan
Our Driver was awesome! all too seriously.
After dinner and the shisha pipes we headed back to the cars to go back to our hotels. I told Adnan to drop off the Turks off first so we could talk to him some more. On the way back, which took more than an hour, because he dropped them off first, we had a great conversation with Adnan and the Turks. Kel talked to the daughter for a while and it turned out that she had a masters degree in marketing and an undergrad degree in finance. They talked about the Turkish economy (Kel had learned all about Turkey in her W&M MBA program when they traveled to Istanbul back in May, 2006) and really connected. Kel felt really happy that she could connect with someone Turkish due to her experiences in the W&M program and the knowledge she now has about that country and culture.
We spent the majority of the time talking with Adnan. He was very open with us and a ton of fun. We talked about the yearly Haj at Mecca, about Iran and about Dubai. He was such a great guy and full of interesting information. He told us
that we really should travel to Iran sometime. He told us that outside of Tehran, most places in Iran have a large tourist industry that get people from around the world, Japanese, Germans, etc. He was originally from Shiraz (where the vine for all Shiraz wine originally came from) and said that Shiraz was a beautiful place and that people could care less whether people were from America or not. The only problem, no one from the US can travel to Iran unless they are sponsored by a citizen of Iran who is willing to pay all of their expenses. The US will not allow US dollars to be spent in Iran and therefore as an American you can’t spend any money there.
He talked to us about the Iranian Persian roots and that most Iranians outside of Tehran feel more Persian than Muslim. While the Iranian government is solidly Islamic in nature, many of the people who live there are not as conservative and do not always identify with the extremism that we all see on the TV. It makes you wonder how skewed our view of the world is due to the things we see on TV
and what we hear our government say. I certainly do not want to sound like a conspiracy theorist; what I’m really saying is that we only hear the negative and that it is very difficult to judge any culture by only the bad. Maybe if we, as a country, opened our hearts and minds to hear about the good things that others have to offer we might be less judgmental.
As Adnan dropped the Turks off at their hotel we saw a Ferrari parked in the hotel parking lot. I jokingly asked Adnan why we didn’t do our desert tour in one of those? He chuckled but then told me about his time test driving cars. His company does contracts with major car companies to help do SUV tests in the desert and help car magazine journalists test the cars for their articles. For those of you who aren’t car people, this probably won’t be interesting but it was very interesting for me.
In the last six months Car and Driver put our a headline article and front page picture of the new Porsche Cayenne Turbo. The article was shot in Dubai in the Desert and Adnan was
the driver who was driving the car on the cover. The cover shot was a picture of him jumping a sand dune a couple of feet in the air. How cool is that? He has also done test drives and picture shoots for the VW Toureg, the Audi Q7 and the Hummer H2 and H3. Very cool!
Adnan dropped us off at our hotel and we told him that we would love to invite him in for a drink. Since he was till working he wasn’t able to come in but he told us that if he had some time off he would come by and take us out on the town. I doubt he’ll have the time in the next day or two before we leave, but it would be fun if he could.
Additions from Kel:
This was a truly excellent day / tour and it was almost entirely due to the quality of people we met who live and work in Dubai. The desert drive was hair raising fun, the camel riding really was a blast and the food and experiences in base camp were top notch, but it’s the conversations I will remember
with the guys we met.
The Pakistani gentleman who was dishing out Arabic coffee took a special moment to point out his business partner, who is Indian and his best friend. In the political world, that would be an natural enemy and would stand no chance for a friendship. But in the shared space of being foreign in Dubai, they have become close and are making a living together. Too cool.
When I first got to Dubai, it was a little hard for me to wrap my head around being a Western woman and truly acting like myself in a place where there are women cloaked in black shrouds with only their eyes or a bit of face showing. I didn’t know how to bring the two together without feeling either repressed or disrespectful. But being in this place and seeing how it’s done every day has been huge for me - all the women are respected and people are respectful. No one looks witheringly at me in my jeans & t-shirt or pityingly at the ladies in their native dress. It has really opened my eyes to enjoy shopping, eating out and being a tourist alongside people
who I thought at first were very different from me . . . and aren’t at all.
Adnan and the other guys we met have been so respectful and friendly to me and Mike and even seemed excited we were American. In some ways, we’re really happy Americans haven’t made it much to Dubai yet . . . cause the few stupid loud disrespectful tourists aren’t the impressions people have of tourists from the USA (unlike in parts of Europe). On the flip side, I hope more American folks do get here to really enjoy what is a fantastic tourist destination and a truly wonderful example of a place where East and West are living side by side with care.
People have predicted and asked us “do you think this trip will change you? I bet it will!” Who we are hasn’t changed, except for our relationship strengthening and our confidence rising, but our worldview has. I will never read a magazine or watch the news on a Middle East issue the same. And I’m really thankful for that.
A Lazy Day of Lounging
There’s not much to say about today. We have spent our time almost completely at the pool. Its kinda chilly here (in the upper 60’s) so we had to bundle up to sit outside. It didn’t matter that it was cool, it was nice to sit outside and read. Tomorrow will probably be very similar to today except that dinner tomorrow night is at the Burj al Arab next door. Tonight we eat at a restaurant out on the water called Pierchic.
Hope you are all well! We miss you all and hope you are all having a great day.
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Jenny Schardt
non-member comment
Hi
I love reading about all your amazing adventures...I'm taking mini vacations with you as I read your blogs. It looks like you're having an incredible trip! Thank you for inviting us along!