Advertisement
Published: February 21st 2008
Edit Blog Post
Approaching Dubai after a mere 7.5 hour uneventful flight in the early hours of Monday morning, waking to hear the pilot announcing that we we in a holding position some 10000 feet above the Gulf straits.
Fog seemed to be the problem (Well I'll be....) Flippin fog in Dubai, it just doesn't happen.
So we were held for about 20 mins before suddenly there was a whirring of gears and hydraulics, then the inevitable sudden bump you always get when the flaps drop and the under carriage appears from the belly within.
There must have been a small envelope of clear sky, as the pilot decided to go for it, as we plummeted from the sky, hell bent on getting in before anyone else did.
Another 5 minutes and a couple of bounces later some of the passengers were already in the motions of reaching for the overhead lockers in readiness to get off first.
Safely on the ground we proceeded to taxi around the runway for about what seemed like another 7.5 hours before finally deciding to park about 2 miles away from anywhere vaguely looking like a terminal. Seems we had missed our slot for a
Mmmm Latte
Cup after cup after cup finger (one of those big mechanical corridors on wheels which umbilically attach themselves to the aircraft to get the y'all in and out).
So after disembarking we made the rest of our journey back to civilization by airport transit bus (dodging all the other aircraft busily looking for their missed allocated parking slots). This wasn't too bad for me as I am happily above sweaty armpit height but could see that others were not so lucky.
So you can imagine on arrival, stepping into 30 degrees of blistering heat, those who could not resist the slightest chance of being upgraded, were by now pretty much disheveled with the increasing overwhelming desire to get any opportunity to air their armpits.
Once in the terminal, it was a brief moment to escape
from the crowd, until you reached the never ending Immigration queues. At least 30 rows wide and 40 to 50 people deep. These Arabs certainly know how to let you know who's in charge.
It actually only takes minutes once you get to the stern looking nightie clad official, but when you are stuck behind an uneducated group of work visa applicants teaming in from the farthest reaches of Asia, it took what seemed to be another 7.5 hours to get through to the baggage hall.
[Let me elaborate on the uneducated group. - Dubai is increasing it's infrastructure extensively, and needs tens of thousands of labour resource to help it ruin what was once known as a beautiful spacious country i.e desert. To achieve it's goals, it employs these labourers through various contract agencies throughout the world and is currently signing up just about anyone who can hold a hammer, regardless of whether they have the ability or intelligence to use it. Therefore a large number of the applicants seem to have had there visa applications filled out for them, and on being questioned by the officious looking man in a dress about any part of the afore mentioned
application, there seems to be a period of uncomfortable silence and blank looks from either side, before the applicant then being escorted off to another room for further investigation. Also consider that these chaps come to Dubai to make their fortune but actually get less than 30p per hour, and work 12 hour days, so are already getting to understand what the Arabic hospitality feels like before entering the country]
Once we actually got through immigration, it was only minutes before we found our over heavy bags (all 6 of them).- Most of these containing Ang's shoes.
We finally get all 9x bags in total on to 2x trolleys and scuttle through hoards of toothless leather skinned welcoming parties with name boards and shouting out incomprehensible names in our faces at the exit gate.
Finally into a large people carrier type taxi, and off we sped to our luxurious hotel about 30 mins drive up the sun drenched Jumeirah coast - or so we thought............!!
Seems that much like the the rest of Dubai, the airport road is under reconstruction to make way for the new monorail and we were detoured around the city along with another
zillion cabs, cars, trucks and buses.
About an hour and a half later we arrived at our first destination at long last.
The Jumeirah Beach Hotel maintains a long list of famous guests and boasts at least 68 nationalities on its staff, so can deal with travelers from all cultures from all four corners of the world.
On checking in - You have your bags put somewhere by the concierge and are given a mobile phone and asked to make use of the facilities as you wish until called. As we had arrived around 11am we would have to wait as room allocation in the hotel is from 2pm onwards, so we decided to have a coffee (or two, or three) whilst we waited patiently for the damn thing to ring.
The hotel its self has more coffee bars and eateries than you can possibly imagine, a gym, it's own marina, its own private beaches, several pools, including a water park (The Wild Wadi). But none of it any use when you have left your swimwear in the bags which are now securely locked away with some funny looking Thai kid called Cecil, in the depths of the
Our new room
Much bigger than the Travel Lodge!! reception area.
So around 3x hours later, and bursting to the point of exploding udders with Cafe Latte and at least £35 worse off ,the courtesy mobile buzzed and beeped, and we made a bee line for the Reception desk to claim our room and get the bags delivered.
Cecil arrives with the usual puffing and panting and making out he carried the whole lot on his aching back up the rear stairwell, expecting an enormous tip from such fine guests, he persists in showing the ins and outs of the room and taking as long as possible to ensure we have time to find some large denomination note to hand over, so we duly obliged (not quite so much as I guess he expected though), if for nothing more but get him out of the room so that we could relieve our now bursting bladders and avoid any "seepage"
So off to the pool we went for as long as we could stand the afternoon sun.
A few hours later we had absorbed enough ultra violet rays to glow after dark and decided to go shopping.
If you have ever been to Dubai, you will
understand that shopping there can be a pleasant experience with fantastic bargains which are only to be seen in the emirates.
If you can remember though we spoke of the traffic being slightly worse than we remember on previous visits due to the monorail construction work being carried out.
Well I can tell you, that in all our worldly travels, we have never seen traffic like this.
Dubai has 7x lanes per side on the 9 mile stretch of motorway into town, of which all are full, bumper to bumper from 4pm til 9pm.
Full is possibly an understatement, as it is just manic and not to our surprise we hear that there are on average 160 crashes on that stretch alone every single day.
Our taxi driver amongst tens of thousands of vehicles in this absurd jam, suddenly spots his friend in a lane three rows over and mentions he has just seen his pal from his old town somewhere in southern India, and then proceeds to squeeze through a mass of non too happy other motorists, missing them by millimeters, just so that he pull along side and wave at him. The other taxi driver waves back
and then sees a gap and leaves us in his dust. ((Ang is at this point spitting feathers, as the journey almost 3 times as long as it normally used to take. And there is no sign of any significant movement which would indicate we were going to make it before they all closed.
Eventually we do arrive, and alight in the area of Dubai known as Karama.
More about the shopping next episode.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0286s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb