Dubai

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Dubai…. One of severn emirates, together making up the United Arab Emirates, formed in 1971. Prosperous, growing quickly, building everywhere. Including on land ‘manufactured’, by dredging from the sea bed to make islands off the coast. An international financial and trading centre, a meeting point between east and west, as indeed it has been over the centuries. Very ‘oil rich’ and it shows!
We have travelled 21500 miles so far and are continuing our way westward, and should complete our circumnavigation next week. Here in Dubai we have three days to catch up and relax. Not being on business it is our intent to see and to shop, the latter being one reason for visiting this city. After a good nights sleep and some superb omlettes for breakfast (best ever anywhere) we head for the ‘Hall of the Emirates’, a premier shopping mall downtown. Dubai is a suprisingly large city, taffic is busy and the air is hazy with a fuzzy sun showing through the stratus. The route passes many new buildings of a unique architectural style, close to the Burj Dubai, not yet the tallest building in the world but it will be! Incidentally there are more cranes here in Dubai than in any other city worlwide.
Inside the mall, we find ourselves peering through tripple glased panels at an enclosed winter sports scene, full scale, a ski lift and run with real snow! We had heard that there was a ski centre but this was unreal, in the middle of a hot desert…. On reflection our hotel had a large ice rink so it should not have been a surprise.
All the big name stores are present, opulence and affluence in abundance! Our return taxi ride passes the Burj Al Arab, spetacular in shape and style, but traffic is heavy and progress slow. Our driver complains that the infrastructure has not kept pace with developments, the result is traffic jams, inadequaate drainage and too many absent landlords. Sound familiar? We get back too late for our desert safari exacerbated by our hotel key ‘timing out’, for which we were compensated by a dinner in the rotating rooftop reasturant.
The evening entertainment includes a safari to a barbeque in the desert, travelling by Toyota 4x4s, a whole fleet of them, the camel replacement?
Next day, a trip to the gold souk and some bargaining, spending a mix of currencies at confusing rates of exchange but it must have been a bargain? We then find a ‘beach’, manmade but all the better for it. Popular with locals, complete with all the usual beach paraphernalia, we spend a few hours in the sun and this is the first ‘holiday day’ in this adventure. Return to start packing, bags to go at 5am, breakfast at 6am and departure at 6:30am…. Next stop South Africa, Capetown and Table Mountain, can’t wait!

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Photos

manufactured land
view from a rotating reasturant

Burj Al Arab
a very arab style of architecture?

cranes galore
a building boom

Burj Dubai
will be the tallest in the world

safari transport
four wheel drive camels