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Published: June 26th 2017
Start of a very long flight, a
Start of a very long flight, at least alcohol will help! Geo: 25.116, 55.2007
Stayed the night in Auckland at the Novotel Airport hotel, they very nicely gave us a late checkout until 6pm at no extra charge so we got to spend the day chilling out - our room is in the perfect position for people and plane watching. Spent an interesting half hour watching a family - mum, dad, baby, grandma and grandad trying to fit themselves, their bags and about 8 boxes, ranging in size from 60 inch tv to a standard square carton into their average size station wagon. Entertaining as hell, bags in, one box in, bags out, 3 boxes in, baby in, baby out...... repeat, repeat, same outcome, mum and dad gesturing and arguing, grandad has a turn, dad walking away, coming back, whole dance starts again, till finally he rings someone and another car arrives packs up all the boxes and drives off. I could go to Auckland and stay here, never leave the Hotel and people watch for days!
Checked in for our flight, did a bit of duty free shopping, as you do......gotta say it's not like the old days less shops, not as cheap, and very little choice of product, filled in an
Cake!
What to choose??? hour though and took my mind off the upcoming flight marathon. After the nerves, flight in fact wasn't that bad, helped by the cheap upgrade to business class we had managed to get at the last minute, certainly made travelling with the broken rib as comfortable as it was going to get. I even managed to doze off now and then, Stephen of course got an hour or four.
As you arrive into Dubai they show you a video of lovely smiley customs officials etc welcoming you into the country.......yeah...nah... must of been those guys days off, the guy we got at no point looked at us, in fact appeared to be staring off into the distance to the right of me.....processed my passport, he then took Stephens passport from him, stopped and chatted to his friend for five minutes, snail like looked at Stephens passport, slowly scanned it and stamped it, again never looked at him and waved us on our way....was weirdly intimidating.
The airport is cavernous, and fairly empty at 5.30am, fortunately there was a young girl who seemed to know where she was going and what she was doing, a group of us that got off the
plane at the same time, followed her, otherwise I think we would all still be wandering around lost. Finally found our transfer, again another mission in an unfamiliar environment and headed off to our hotel. The most uncommunicative driver we have ever encountered anywhere in the world, this guy did not speak to us at all, he spoke English, he answered when asked a direct question but didn't elaborate or initiate any conversation, so far our welcome to Dubai feels a bit lukewarm.
I'm not sure what I was expecting but first impressions of the city itself are a bit of a letdown, it's very smoggy/hazy and you can see very little. The buildings you can see are interesting architecturally a variety of styles both modern and traditional, everyone seems to drive very, very flash cars, very, very fast and it's very very hot, even hotter than Rarotonga in January hot!
Checked into our hotel and dropped our bags, had breakfast number two for the day and slept for two hours! Then found the mall..... not hard to find, we can see it from our room. Stephen bought the biggest heaviest jacket he could find ...cos that's what you do
Dubai Mall
Mine looks better, raspberry cheesecake! in temperatures of 35 plus, at least he will be warm when we eventually get to Scotland! I managed to find a couple of bargains....lucky for some unless I decide to keep them for myself. Most of the shops are really high end and prices are definitely better than home but still mostly way above what I am prepared to spend at the start of my holiday anyway - might starve later on if we over indulge now! There seem to be a lot of fancy cake shops here and we had a fancy cake shop afternoon tea (which cost as much a full meal anywhere else) bit of window shopping then back to the hotel for another dinner (since 7pm last night we have had three dinners, two breakfasts, and a fancy afternoon tea) - a soak in the spa and bedtime.....finally ....absolutely exhausted at this point.
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