Burkinis or Bikinis?


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Middle East » United Arab Emirates » Dubai
July 15th 2016
Published: June 3rd 2017
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First cab off the rank this morning is Aquaventure Water Park, which is out on a group of man made islands built in the shape of a palm tree, and known locally as "The Palm". We're not sure how we're going to get there, so Issy tells me that I should ask someone. She knows that I don't like asking; I always think that I should be able to work things out for myself without needing to bother people with silly questions. I eventually cave in to her intense pressure and ask the hotel receptionist. I assume Issy will be proud of me, but apparently not. It seems that I didn't ask enough questions, and there are still things that we need to find out. I bother the receptionist again and Issy thankfully seems happier now.

Our taxi takes us out onto The Palm and then through a tunnel to the outermost island where the park is. As I wait for Issy to get changed I watch a security guard whose sole job seems to be to chase men away from the entrance to the ladies change rooms. He goes to chase away a person with very short hair, and is very embarrassed when he turns them around to find that they're actually a girl. Issy's been very worried about what to wear when she goes swimming here. I think she was contemplating buying a burqa swimsuit just to be sure she didn't offend anyone, but I see girls coming out of the changing rooms wearing briefer bikinis than you'd see on St Kilda Beach back home in Melbourne......not that I was taking too much notice....

It seems that everything here in Dubai is huge, and the water park is no exception. We grab two sun lounges next to one its many pools, and then climb onto a rubber ring for a cruise along the river which meanders through the park. We reach a fork and bravely follow a sign toward "The Rapids", where a conveyor belt carries our flimsy ring up above the surroundings and we're then dumped unceremoniously into a pool on the other side. Having survived this ordeal, I'm now feeling brave enough to tackle a water slide. Issy politely declines to join me. I climb a tower that looks like an ancient Mexican pyramid, where I'm herded into a rubber raft with five young local lads. The ride starts off gently enough, but it seems they're just lulling us into a false sense of security. Just when we least expect it, we're dumped off a cliff and slam into the pool below. I stagger towards the shore; I think that's enough excitement for one day. We drift on along the river until we've just about had enough, but we manage to get off at the wrong pool and we now need to get to the right pool to retrieve our belongings. I volunteer for this dangerous mission. It is again ridiculously hot, and the paving is now burning holes in my bare feet. I spy my thongs in the distance and rush towards them to get my now charred soles off the burning concrete and onto something cooler. This is a big mistake. My thongs are hotter than the concrete and I'm not entirely sure why they haven't melted. I make a dash for the pool and make it just as my feet are about to burst into flames; at least that's what it feels like. An English man sitting nearby has been watching the show and can't stop laughing. He tells me that it's now 114 degrees in the shade. I think he means Fahrenheit, but it's hard to be sure.

It's now too hot to even get cool in the water so we catch a monorail back along The Palm to the mainland. The monorail is well above the ground so we get good views of houses, all of which look to be ridiculously luxurious. The fronds all have letters assigned to them, so a typical address would be something appropriately exotic along the lines of "27, Frond G, The Palm, Dubai".

We've booked an afternoon and evening tour out into the desert, and we're now starting to doubt the wisdom of this decision. My iPad tells me that the current temperature and humidity mean that it "feels like" 60 degrees. 60 degrees! Really?

Our guide's name is Tony, and he's from Brazil. This seems a bit incongruous; I would have thought that rain forests were a bit more his thing. Fortunately our driver is from Pakistan, which seems a bit more in keeping with our arid surroundings.

Tony points out an evolving structure which he says will soon be the Dubai Eye, and when completed it will be twice as big as the London Eye. He says that everything in Dubai has to be the biggest. He tells us that the Burj Khalifa is currently the tallest building in the world, but when the Dubai rulers found out about plans to build a taller one in Saudi Arabia, they then started plotting to build something even taller - an astonishing 1.5 kilometres high. We pass a huge mound of sand which Tony tells us is the start of a Dubai version of something just slightly higher than Mount Everest. For a few seconds I think I almost believe him.

Tony tells us that the rulers are very keen on building up the population of Dubai locals, which is currently only about 20 per cent of the total, and they've put a lot of incentives in place to encourage the locals to marry and procreate. Emiratis get their weddings and receptions paid for by the government, and then get a free luxury house and a car thrown in for good measure.

We drive out into the desert towards the town of Al Ain. The highway is six lanes in each direction, yet has almost no traffic on it, which leaves us wondering about the need for so many lanes. There's nothing much at all out here at the moment other than sand, but I suppose it might be prudent to plan for a possible population explosion. The occasional buildings that we do see are all somewhere around twenty storeys high, which again looks incongruous in an otherwise empty landscape. I think that the local rulers might have just a slightly unhealthy obsession with size.

We pass a camel racing track. Tony tells us that camel racing is the national sport, and that people pay over a million dollars to buy racing camels. Betting is not allowed, so winning is all about the honour and the glory. Tony says that they used to use young boys as camel jockeys, but a few too many of them were getting injured and killed so they've now reverted to using electronic robot jockeys. He says that we should watch a famous YouTube video about this; he says it's hysterically funny.

We turn off the highway at the small village of Murqquab and continue on through the desert to the Dubai Nature Conservation Reserve, where we prepare for our expedition out into the dunes. Our guides dress us in traditional headgear, which is red and white for the men and black for the ladies. The process for putting this on seems to be extremely complex, and if mine comes off I doubt I'll be getting it back on again in a hurry. We're told that we can pull a flap of it down across our faces to keep the sand out if necessary.

We're loaded into an open topped jeep, which we're told is ex British Army from the 1950s, and set off into the wilderness. The dunes move with the wind and we're getting heavily sandblasted. Issy says that she won't need to exfoliate again for a while, and the flaps from our headgear are certainly coming in handy. The track is only marked by occasional pairs of poles, and the dunes seem to be moving around so much that we doubt the poles'd stay visible for more than a couple of days at a time. I hope our driver knows where he's going; all the dunes look the same to me and there are no other landmarks. Issy looks calm enough, but I'm not entirely sure what Plan B might be if we get lost or run out of petrol out here. The landscape is ridiculously barren. The only vegetation we can see is a small stand of trees on the far horizon. We're told that this particular species only grows where there's moisture below it. The roots can apparently go down up to a staggering 60 metres, and the Bedouins use them to work out where to dig for water. We see the odd gazelle in the distance, and are left wondering what they live on. We're feeling lost in the magic of nature as we spy what on first sight appears to be an exotic bird overhead. On closer inspection it seems that it's actually a drone; apparently one of the guides is using it to make a video to try to sell to us afterwards. So much for feeling lost in the magic of nature.

Next stop is some cushions and rugs laid out on the sand where we watch a falconry display. The falcon looks quite tame sitting on a leather sheath around its handler's arm, but we're told that falcons aren't really at all friendly, and the Bedouins train them to hunt and kill other birds. Our demonstrator gets it to swoop down and catch some bird meat that she's twirling around her head on a piece of rope. It's ridiculously quick. We're told that falcons can fly at over 300 kilometres per hour, which apparently makes them the fastest creatures on the planet.

We continue on to the Bedouin camp where we'll be having dinner. This includes camel meat, which tastes a bit non-descript, and I think I mightn't mind it if I didn't know what it was. Two Bedouins put on a ceremonial dance, which includes twirling fake rifles; at least I hope they're fake.

We finish eating and lie down on some rugs to smoke shisha. We're told this is sweetened tobacco that you're supposed to suck in through an exotic looking gadget that looks more like a lamp than a pipe. Everyone seems to get the hang of it very quickly; well everyone except me. The American sitting next to me tells me that I look like I'm trying to smoke a cigar, and from his tone I'm very much suspecting that this isn't what I'm supposed to look like. The lights are all turned off and we're taken outside the camp to lie on some more rugs and cushions for a session of star gazing. It's a lot cooler here than it was in Dubai, and there's a bit a breeze. It's very relaxing, and the lady lying next to Issy is snoring loudly.

We get back in the jeep to start the drive back to Dubai. It's pitch black, and the jeep's lights don't look like they're much brighter than candles. The track through the dunes was hard enough to see in broad daylight let alone at night. I don't really want to know what the driver's doing, so I take the safe option and fall asleep. I get into bed before realising that I'm covered in sand, so the bed now contains half the Arabian desert. I think I might be in trouble when Issy joins me.


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