DUBAI 2011&2012

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DUBAI AND THE UAE



While living and working in Kuwait I have had the opportunity to travel to Dubai and the rest of the UAE on several occasions. I usually rent a Harley and ride thru the emirates. In fact if you go to YouTube and search (henry rides a Harley in Dubai.) you will see a very well made video of me riding that a friend of mine who owns a touring company made. I do have several videos that I did but not near as good as his.



This blog will include stuff that I did while on all the trips to the UAE. The first trip to Dubai was specifically for a 2-day motorcycle ride. I got into Dubai late in the afternoon; I went straight to my hotel. I had asked several people I worked with where to stay, a lot of them spend every weekend in Dubai so I figured they knew. I was wrong. Everyone said to stay at the dolphin hotel downtown because it was within walking distance to a lot of stuff and inexpensive. I found out it wasn’t near anything I wanted to see. If you were looking for nightclubs full of hookers than I guess that would be the place to stay. I stayed that one night than moved to a holiday inn.



The next morning I took a taxi to meet a friend of mine who had the Harleys and we took off on our ride. We left his place at 8am and didn’t return until 9pm, it was a good days ride. This was in March so it wasn’t really hot yet; we had to ride thru part of Oman to get to where we wanted to go. As we pulled up to the border checkpoint I turned off my video camera, not being sure how they would react to being filmed. It was a good thing I did, it was the first thing they checked on the bike, as I had it mounted to the windshield. The guards were friendly enough and asked what we were doing, serge told them we were just passing thru on our ride around the emirates and I wanted to ride the mountains so this was the best way to go. They looked at the bikes a bit and than handed our passports back and told us to ride safe. We were only in Oman for about 30 minutes and as we came out of it there were some large sand dunes so we stopped so I could take a few pictures. We then continued on towards the mountains, which were tall but had no vegetation on them. We had to go thru one mountain in a tunnel and came out on the other side heading towards the gulf of Oman. As we wound our way down the mountain we came to a small town with a round a bout and what appeared to be an old fort. We went around the round about and exited in to a resort that had many little cottages, we parked the bikes and went to the patio café and had a cup of coffee and serge told me some more about what we would see and do today and tomorrow when we went to Abu Dhabi. After coffee we continued towards the coast you could see the gulf waters out ahead of us and they looked really clear. The first emirate we entered was I believe Sharja, the water really did look inviting here unlike the waters in Kuwait where I work. We pulled into in the gulf of Oman they were blue and clean and in Kuwait they are usually green and cloudy. We pulled over at a gas station and convenience store to fill up the bikes and get something to drink. While we were there a car pulled up next to us that had 2 young ladies in the front seat and 2 guys in the back seat, I was talking to one of the ladies who were looking at my bike. One of the guys in the back seat was her boyfriend, is what she told me and he didn’t look too happy that she was talking to me. She than asked if I would take her for a short ride. I told her it wasn’t my bike that it belonged to my friend and I was just borrowing it. I am always hesitant about taking someone I don’t know for a ride. A passenger can cause you to wreck very easily. I did take her for a ride maybe 10 minutes total but when we got back the other passengers told her that her male friend had left. She didn’t seem too concerned. Serge and me said our goodbyes and continued our trip. We continued down the coast stopping periodically to snap some pictures. The plan was to stop at one of his favorite places for lunch. This ended up being a 5star resort on the water. When we pulled up the doorman indicated for us to park right next to the door. So that is what we did. We ate an excellent lunch and then he showed me around the resort. There was a very large swimming pool surrounded by palm trees and lots of lounge chairs and umbrellas on the beach, which was mostly empty, I did notice that the beaches were clean. We spent a couple of hours here and than continued on our costal road until we came to our turn off. We took a right, which took us back thru the mountains on a twisty highway. I named this part goat alley, it seemed like there was a goat on the side of the road every 50 to 60 yards and not a person in sight. I seen these goats for about 5 miles and was praying that one would not decide he wanted to walk into the road. We made it back over the mountains and came back into the some what flat desert, we rode thru several small towns and what appeared to be just market places on the side of the roads. Anytime we stopped we had people gathering to look at the bikes. We were the only 2 Harleys I seen on this trip, I did see a few sport bikes but most of the 2 wheel traffic was mopeds and scooters. It’s amazing what these people will pack on to a moped. I seen 1 that had several baskets of chickens tied to the back seat and a small goat tied to the handlebars.



We were heading back towards Dubai and I could see the late afternoon sky turning dark, when we got to a stop light I asked serge what the chances were of us getting rained on, he said they hadn’t gotten any rain in over a month so it was probably unlikely they would get any now. Well we got back to Dubai and it was raining and traffic was heavy, serge started lane splitting so I followed him and the people in the cars were pretty nice about it and pulled over to one side or the other to give us room. I don’t think that we did more than 20mph at anytime while lane splitting. The rain actually felt pretty good. While on our ride serge had gotten a call from an individual who said the Harley heritage he had rented was over heating and burning his leg so we were headed over to check it out. I told serge that the bike wasn’t over heating that it was just that both exhaust pipes were on the same side and the oil can was also there and that is what was burning his leg in city traffic. My leg and I new this because I was riding the style bike was cooking when we stopped or got into slow traffic. After checking on the bike and explain it to the guy we headed back to serge’s place to park the bikes and make a plan for the next day. I had taken all my stuff with me when I left the hotel and when I got a taxi at serge’s place I told him to take me to the nearest holiday inn to see if I could get a room there. I was able to get a room and checked in. after getting settled in my room I went down to the bar and got a beer and a cheese burger than hit the shower and called it a night it was now 11pm and I had to be back at serge’s at 8am.

The next day had us heading for Abu Dhabi; our first stop was a hotel that had been converted from an old palace guesthouse after the palace had been taken by a sinkhole. The walkway that lead from the guesthouse to the palace was still in tack but at one end it just ended and the palace was no longer there. We had coffee and breakfast there and then continued onto Ferrari world, which was interesting; at the time they had the world’s fastest roller coaster so we rode it. And did some things on the inside. Most of the stuff is geared towards the kids with several racetracks in this huge building where the kids could get into small electric cars and ride around the track. They also had some simulators for adults that really made you feel as if you were racing a Ferrari around a track, in all we spent about 3 hours here. We then road over to the formula 1 track that has a 5 star hotel in the middle of the course, the design here was nice. They had built canals so that the rich could drive their yachts up close to the track and watch the races from their boats, they also built some condos along the track that allowed you to sit on the roofs and watch the race, if you were rich enough to rent one or own one. There is also a place here that you can rent a formula car and race it around the track this will set you back about 450 bucks. All of this was on YAS Island. After we left hear we went to the grand mosque, which I thought was Hugh, but come to find out its like number 16 in size. We parked the bikes and went inside the compound but not into the mosque, I didn’t feel like taking my shoes off, I got some photos of the place and we spent about an hour here. We than rode downtown Abu Dhabi and went to the marina for some lunch. The food there was pretty good and had a good view of the water. We then started back towards Dubai on a route that would take a few hours. We would finish this day of riding about 430pm. I had one more day to spend in Dubai so I figured I would do some sight seeing around the worlds tallest building the berg khalifa. I did not do the ride to the top on this trip but I did on the next one I made to Dubai. The elevator takes you from the ground floor to the 124^th floor in 1 minute. My apt elevator takes 45 seconds to get me from the ground floor to the 8^th floor. The view from the 124^th floor observation deck is fantastic you can see all of Dubai on a clear day. The water fountain and pool at the base of the tower puts on a good show about every hour I believe. And it is set to music, there will be probably a couple of thousand people sitting around at one of the cafes that line the area around the pool or sitting off in the grass just waiting for the show to start. The Dubai mall is adjacent to the pool and it is huge. It has a very large indoor aquarium that you can by tickets for and depending on the level of ticket you can do anything between walking through and looking at the fish and other items they have to actually getting in the water and swimming with the fish and sharks and feeding them. I just elected to walk through and look and take pictures.



The second time I went to Dubai I stayed at a hotel I was familiar with and with in walking distance to the Dubai mall and the metro line. I liked the rail system you could buy a ticket and it was good all day the cars were clean but sometimes over crowded. I took the train to the Dubai creek area and walked around for a while and than took a waterbus across the creek to the old market (souk) and walked around and found an old fort. To get back across the water to the metro line I took a water taxi. The bus was 3 dirhams and the taxi was 1. The bus holds about 30 people in comfortable chairs and the taxi holds about 10 to 15 and you sit in the middle of the boat, which reminded me of a giant canoe. The sides were open and if it rained you got wet. The bus was enclosed and climate controlled.



After touring around parts of Dubai that I had not been to before I went back to my hotel to clean up before I went to supper. I had sent serge an email earlier in the day and he had responded when I checked my emails. I wanted to get a bike and take a day trip to Al Ain its an oasis between Dubai and Abu Dhabi but is owned by Abu Dhabi it also has the only mountains in Abu Dhabi and the tallest one is jebel hafeet at the top is a resort and the road to get there was as twisted as a pissed off snake and I wanted to ride it. We made plans to meet up on Thursday morning at his shop; I was hoping I remembered how to get there. I didn’t do much on Wednesday, just walked around and took pictures and finally took the ride to the 124^th floor of the world’s tallest building. I did ride the train some more. I was going to do a few things but when I went to do them I found out they were no longer available. Like the bungee jump. And, some off road riding in the sand dunes. I am not one to walk around the malls but the Dubai mall is enormous, it has 3 floors they even have an electric taxi on each floor that will allow you to get across mall easier. I got lost in there a couple of times trying to find the exit that I came in since that is where my car was going to pick me up. I did finally make it to my pick up point with about 10 minutes to spare, but as usual the driver wasn’t on time, nothing seems to be on time in the Middle East. The driver finally showed up 36 minutes late and got me back to my hotel. I was actually looking forward to getting out of Dubai. I guess a lot of people like it but unless your into shopping or eating there is not a lot to do with the exception of the night life you can go to one of many night clubs and get falling down drunk. But that’s not my thing anymore and at nighttime it takes 4x as long to get anywhere due to the traffic, but that is also true for Kuwait. The next day I got a shuttle to the airport and went back to Kuwait.

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