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Back to the monorail this morning we caught the monorail out to the palms and well it is just spectacular seeing how the other half lives, the most expensive room in the hotel is around 100k per night, I have no idea what the cheapest night is but is well out of our price range. We stooges around for a while, had a coffee in the café adjacent to the hotel, you just can’t get in there if you are not a guest. The next on the list is the sail shaped Burj Al Arab situated on Jumeria Beach and only slightly less expensive than the palms, it is none the less a startling building and well worth the visit. As we are due to go on our desert safari tonight we headed back to the hotel for a few hours so Pam could do some work.
We were collected from our hotel at 3.30 in a Toyota SR5 and with a surly driver headed out somewhere west to collect some other folk and soon Tim and Tam (2 Korean ladies) and Ranjit and Mr Singh were aboard and we headed for our desert adventure. Around an hour later we
arrived at some scungy old parking area that looked not quite like a desert and more like an abandoned work site and feeling somewhat disillusioned. That changed soon after when a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers arrived and we were bundled aboard, crossing the road was like entering another world, the desert one we had waited to see. Charging across the dunes the young guy we had as driver seemed to make it his clear intention to roll the dam vehicle over and make all aboard scream, well Tim and Tam in the back sure did, Mr Singh yelled for the driver to go faster and Pam was hanging on for grim death, Screaming across the dune ridges the driver then drove over the edge and slid sideways down the dune face, then out of the blue his cell phone rings, and bugger me he answers it, chatting away to his mate on the other end. What a blast for 30 minutes but that had to end and rather more sedately we headed off back across the road deeper into the desert to “camp”
The camp was a timber palisade fort type thing that supposedly was in common use
up until 50 odd years ago by the local Bedouin folk. Invited inside we were treated to drinks, a free meal, Pam got a tattoo, and a great dance by a belly dancer and a fantastic guy doing some spinning type of dance. I can’t describe the dance but he spun in the same place for close to 10 minutes and did some things with discs that looked like tambourines and spun a blanket into a baby wrapped in a shawl, check out the video for a better idea, possibly a cross between a Cossack type dance, a Turkish Whirling Dervish and a Greek dance, it was unreal. As with all good things they have to come to an end so around 9.00 we were packed off again and returned to our hotel. Get this, one guy we talked to who was sitting at the table next to us, we ran into in the mall the next day, how random was that.
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