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Shukram! Ahhh the glitz, glamour and sand that is Dubai! Well, is it all it's talked up to be? Is our ever-increasing fuel price actually creating anything spectacular over there or is it all going straight into the bank accounts of the needy multi-billionaire Sheikh's of Arabia? Do 50c cones actually cost 1c in the UAE? And if so, how long does it take for such ice cream to melt, run down your arm, all the way to your elbow, into your brand new 100% cotton shirt of which you walked for 2 hours in the boiling hot heat to buy primarily to wear to the world's only 7 star restaurant because all the rest of your good shirts were covered in a mixture of wine stains and smelt like Amsterdam coffee shops? All will be revealed in the next instalment of Steve's travels!
25/5/08 - London to Dubai 😞
Why are we leaving London Shane? I have no idea. We had an early flight at 8am, which meant we had to be up, packed and ready for our shuttle at 4:30.... AM. I was writing about how I thought it would be a great idea to check in
Dubai Mosque
We heard their chants from ages awayonline - I'm so glad we did, we got straight to the front of the queue and were checked in in about 5 minutes. We were slightly worried about our suitcases, because even leaving Australia I just scraped under the 20kg of luggage, and considering I had bought so much crap in 5 weeks of travelling, I should have realised that mate, you ridiculously over packed how are you going to get it all back. Lucky we were flying one of the best airlines around, so they did not charge us even though my suitcase weighed in at a huge 33 kgs. Whoops.
After checking in we bummed around the chaotic Heathrow airport - Venice Gondola Boat Hat on Head, until our flight. My carry on luggage bag that had the German Steins in it had started to deteriorate so I stopped into some dodgy shop to pick up a cheap environmentally friendly green bag or something similar. That shop turned out to be Harrods, and that bag turned out to be about $60AU. Oh well, I have a Harrods bag now, so that means im pretty fancy or something like that.
Our 7 hr flight was really
great - the service was unreal and so were the movie selections. 2 movies and we were nearly in Dubai already. Nobody would ever go hungry on Emirates either - we had enough food to feed us for 2 weeks on one flight, plus the bottomless cup of Bourbon and Coke and Heinekens. Salute!
We arrived in Dubai at 8pm, right on schedule and had a tour package that included a free transfer to our hotel - Hawthorn Hotel in Diera, the shopping area in Dubai. Our rooms were awesome, it was a 4 star hotel and I had never experienced such great service at hotels before. By the time we got to our rooms, it was 9pm, and in the middle east, that's practically right in the middle of the business day because of their siesta over lunch hours when everyone goes home to jump in the freezer because it's about 452 degrees outside. Sounds good to us - so we headed straight out to have a look around.
At 9pm, it was only 38 degrees, so all the locals were in jumpers and genuine camel skin uggboots. We were walking around in thongs, jeans (bad idea)
Hawthorn Hotel
Nice room in Diera and t shirts. We grabbed some dinner at Maccas, where they had the best combo ever - 2 cheeseburgers in a meal. Why Australia hasn't adopted such ingenious options for their customers I have no idea. A large meal cost about 20DHS, so about 3 bucks. Sweet. And yes, 50c cones are 1c. We then headed down to the gold, spice, clothes and electronic souks (markets) where it was like Oakey on Pig Day. Everyone was out, maybe it was Cheap Tuesday or something. We had just arrived from London, but we'd never seen so many people in our entire 4 weeks in Europe. We walked past a few areas where the locals congregate and smoke these huge pot-belly fireplace type bongs with pipes which we later found out you could get a mixture of flavours, including strawberry, musk and chicken (? right then). After walking through the souks, amazed at the prices of things like TV's, mobile phones, assorted ranges of other whiz bang new technology items that won't reach Australia for another 5 years and clothes, we grabbed a few nice shirts from a menswear shop around the corner. A nice cotton business shirt and tie cost around
Mc Arabia
2 cheeseburgers. Innovation in a Meal. 5 bucks - but thinking back to the 35+kg bag weight, I controlled myself and only bought a couple. We had no idea what time everything closed around Diera, but headed back to the hotel to crash for the night at about 11:30. We didn't need a shower, we were already soaking wet, just had to dry ourselves off. Gross.
27/05/08 - Dubai
We awoke at 9am to a city that obviously does not sleep. We opened the window of our pleasantly chilled 22 degree room for about 30 seconds to realise it was already stinking bloody hot outside at 9am, and we could see the hundreds of people already racing around outside doing whatever they do. Well, we only had one day here so we didn't muck around. We decided to head to Jumeirah, across the river and about a 20 min cab ride right into new booming area of Dubai to the Mall of the Emirates. Our taxi ride was interesting to say the least. To start with, it took 10 minutes and a verbal fight with a local man, his wife and his 26 children, who that could possibly have killed me to get one.
Dubai Post
It was cheaper to send a letter to Australia from here, than to buy a 50c stamp and post it from home. How they were going to all fit in a Camry I have no idea. We sped off at about 130k/h taking the backstreets due to the mid-morning traffic jams Dubai has on it's 7-lane highway, Sheikh Zayed Al Maktoum Rd. Our cabbie drove with one hand on the wheel, the other on the horn for the entire journey as he beeped his way weaving in and out of lanes dodging traffic, trucks, sand sculptures, buildings, buses and pedestrians thinking it was a life and death situation to get us to the Mall ASAP.
Mate, we're in no hurry, it's all good - relax!
We eventually came to Sheikh Zayed Rd, where we were hurtling towards the Mall at a speed I would hate to think of considering my eyes were experiencing severe speed wobbles in their sockets as I looked over to try and decipher the blurry speedometer on his sandy dashboard. I bravely decided to risk my life when I conjured up the confidence to ask him "Do you get many accidents in Dubai" thinking he might cotton on to the fact that we were SH!T scared and that he might slow down just a tad, if
he wouldn't have minded thankyou very much. He then began to explain, looking me in the eye the whole time mind you, that there are many accidents and only last month his previous cab was written off because he was hit in the passenger seat side (my bloody seat) - but everything was OK he assured me - he didn't have a passenger. Well, that's alright then, I said, having a quiet cardiac arrest as I spoke. We finally arrived at the Mall where our half hour cab ride - covering about 600 kilometres, came to 50dhs, about 9 bucks. Bargain. But was it. After our heartbeat slowed down to a healthy normal speed, Shane and I began to explore the Mall... and the possibilities of alternate transportation.
This shopping centre is like DFO on Steroids. Take Carindale, multiply that by about 5, add another 2 levels and an indoor ski field and you have probably half of The Mall of Emirates. We started with Ski Dubai - the indoor Titan Shed that sticks so far into the sky it looks like a giant ski slope. Well.... just as well, it is a giant ski slope. What I'm getting
at is these guys in Dubai have money, and architects, engineers and construction workers have the ability to make their wildest dreams, open their imaginations and put them to life in a city of amazing constructions and infrastructure. Yep, why not. Lets make a giant indoor ski field, complete with a 6-seater express ski lift, real snow falls, ice caves and an entirely ice playground for the kids. Lets pump sand into the ocean in the shape of a palm and sell prime real estate all over it. Hell, let's make 2 of them - and a map of the world while you're there. Let's build the tallest building in the world, 130 levels costing 20 billion dollars. But next to it, lets make another one where every floor can rotate giving you a 200 degree coastal view 24 hours a day. Lets make an underwater restaurant! Lets re-make Disneyland! Bloody nora. Fuel will be 5 bucks a litre by Christmas. Anywho, the rest of the Mall was full of general shops, like clothes, jewellery and electronics. I had been looking at the iPhone in the souks the night before and had been pricing around trying to barter with them
Home Delivery Hungry Jacks!
We'd had enough Hungry Jacks in Europe to last us a lifetime... even if someone delivered it. to get a decent deal. We came to one shop that had an awesome deal, so impulse buying Steve strikes again and was now the proud owner of the iPhone. Chenquee!
After trying to find our way back out of the mall and coming to the conclusion that there were no other possible means of transport back to our hotel, we prayed our last rights and jumped in another taxi. This guy was actually reasonable. He only got up to 140km/hr but we felt safer as he just continuously beeped at cars ahead and refused to merge. We got a bit worried though mid journey when he decided to stop half way there for a pray. Phew. We had a 2pm tour included in our booking, City of Merchants by Arabian Adventures. We jumped in a bus and headed right back to close to the Mall, where we saw the Burj al Arab, Wild Wadi Water Park, the Sheikh's house, Dubai Mosque and Dubai Museum. Interesting and quite unreal to see how they all survived in the boiling heat before aircon was invented. We left the tour there and caught another bloody taxi up to the Burj al Arab
for our dinner.
Before we even booked our Contiki trip back home in Australia, I wanted to come to Dubai and do the Burj thing. After reading the reviews and all the rubbish people type, I still wanted to experience the ducks nuts of 7 star luxury and see if it was all cranked up to be. We had to book months in advance, give a credit card detail to the company so that they could charge us if we didn't show up, we had to stick to the dress codes, we must order at least 2 courses and we were only allowed to dine for half an hour. Righteo then. If this is 7 star luxury, I can't wait for 10 stars.
We were an hour early for our 7pm dinner, so that gave us time to have a look around outside at the awesome cars parked in the concierge and take a few pre-sunset snaps of the Burj as well as Jumeirah Hotel and Jumeirah Beach. We then walked inside to have a sticky beak and stared in amazement at the water features and fountains in the entry area for about half an hour. The place
Dubai Loo's
Environmentally friendly and paper free! was stunning. We could see the accommodation rooms from the bottom, and it looked like something out of Star Wars. We then caught the lift up and down a few times which had clear windows that allowed us to see the man made palm islands out in the middle of the sea. We were killing time for a bit, so we came back down and caught the lifts up to the rooms for a look. A servant asked which room was ours so that he may open our door and deliver us our complementary champagne - so we replied with "I forgot, I'm just going downstairs to find out...!" Bugger, could have got a free night out of it! By that stage, it was time for dinner. The Al Muntaha restaurant was so fancy Shane and I kept asking ourselves "What are we doing here?". The service was incredible, my imported Scotland Natural Spring Water was kept at the same level the whole night and you wouldn't even notice them topping it up. We started with a complementary, yes, complimentary entrée which were shot glasses filled with some sort of shrimp and lobster soup that was to die for. We
then had ordered our mains, Shane went the rack of lamb, and I had the "Slow roasted chicken breast, pumpkin ragout, braised lentils and jus gras". Sounds pretty good to me. We ordered a couple of bottles of coke to wash it down, thinking I don't want to even look at the Cocktail menu. Mains were awesome - cooked just right. We remembered that we had to order 2 courses, but honestly, we were stuffed and didn't bother thinking we could possibly be kicked out or shot or both. We were then treated with a complimentary, yes complimentary dessert consisting of a selection of hand made truffles. They were unreal. Our total bill came to 900DHS, which was about 130 bucks each, which we figured, was awesome considering we only ordered mains and a couple of bottles of cokes. After lapping up as much as we could feeling like millionaires living the high life, we headed back down the lift and outside for a few pics of the Burj and Jumeirah by night. We finally had enough and caught another taxi back to our rooms and crashed.
The whole Burj experience was something I'd wanted to do for ages,
and wasn't going to miss it. It was well worth it and would recommend it to anyone. The bill was reasonable I thought, even if we were tempted by all you can eat and drink KFC down the road for 4 bucks!
28/05/08 - Dubai to Brisbane via Singapore.
I was awoken at 1am by my brand spanking new iPhone that wouldn't stop ringing. I rolled back over and off it went again. Who the hell is that ringing at this hour of the morning I wondered. By the time I had found the motivation to elevate my ass out of the sack, I had received 3 missed calls and an SMS from mum saying "Hi, just outside Customs, when are you guys coming out is everything OK?"
HOLY SHIIIEEEET What THE~ AHHHH LOL!
Whoops! I rang mum straight away and it seems that somehow I had stuffed the itinerary up just a tad and Mum thought we were arriving back home on the 28th, but we actually left Dubai on the 28th. Mum had a lovely scenic drive to the Brisbane Airport before her day at work. Bugger it. Off to the souvenir shop in
Skeikh Zayed Rd
7 lanes of chaos the morning for a last minute gift for someone!
We had a 5am wake up for our transfer to the crazyness that is Dubai Airport. I was able to check in online again the night before, which was handy again. Our flight was 8am and the baggage cracked the 35kg mark. Phew. We had another great, but long 7hr flight to Singapore where we had a 1hr stopover and carried on for another 7hrs to Brisbane, where we arrived at 7am to Dad who picked us up - seems like Mum didn't trust us this time.
:'(
Well there you go. 5 weeks of beer, absolute fun and games, experiences, new friends, beer, wild shenanigans, unreal sights, a few more beers, camels, parties and a beer or two. It was no doubt the best thing I've ever done, and had the best time of my life. If there is one thing I regret from the trip, it's the fact we bought a return ticket. Nevertheless, off to work again to pay for the next one - and believe me, it's not going to be too far away.
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