Dubai, United Arab Emirates

My favourite part of travelling is walking out of the hotel on day one, with an empty mind, not knowing anything about that destination, and knowing that when you walk back through the doors that night, your mind is filled with knowledge, culture, experiences and memories. Dubai, especially offered us that, as all I knew was:
1. There’s a desert so there would be camels and I like camels, so I knew I’d love it,
2. There are two carriers, Emirates and Etihad.
3. Dubai is a world hub due to its central location and tax-free benefits
4. There are Sheikhs. I assumed this meant royalty
5. Falcons fly business class.

Four days later, I am pleased to report my mind is buzzing from this unique part of the world. This city stood out on the world stage for three reasons. Let me indulge you, in the world that is Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

1. DELIBERATE – A town planner’s dream

Imagine this, ten years ago Dubai was nothing more than a desert with a couple of skyscrapers, and is now transformed into a global icon. As a tourist in awe, it felt like the town planner had grabbed a crayon and drawn out the perfect, no expenses spared city on blank canvas. With money no object, this is what they came up with:

Dubai seemed like a ‘long city’ that runs for 74km parallel to the ocean, with a perfectly straight 12 lane arterial smack bang down the middle. Alongside, is the world’s longest driverless metro with connecting bridges providing access directly into the malls. Dave and I stayed out of the main tourist area, mainly because we are tight ***** but with the added benefit that we stayed on the creek (river), next to one of my favourite places within the old city, as opposed to the new. The old Dubai is scattered with traditional markets, known as souks. With two hours sleep to our name, we went exploring. Firstly, the textile souk (“oh o”) but Dave was pleased when I only came away with one scarf! The “oh o” actually came from me this trip as Dave ‘struck gold’ with his purchases – four suits, two shirts and three ties for $400 AUD, but no gold. He can now finally go to his weekly work functions without wearing mismatched op shop suits.

Just beyond the textile souk are the wharves where the locals catch these old traditional boats for .40c a trip. To further explore the waterways, we took a private tour all the way down to the retractable, floating bridge that only opens after 10 pm to let the ‘cargo ships’ through, and back the other way to the mouth of the entrance to the Persian Gulf. From the water, we witnessed rickety old wooden transporters called dwals, lined up along the footpath with goods such as refrigerators and spices waiting to be taken to Africa, India and other countries within the Gulf. It’s all about timing, Dave and I were the only ones on the creek early that morning, unlike the night before, when the network was as busy as Delhi at rush hour. We could have watched the boats swirling around the current, arriving at the dock like bumper cars all day but instead, we pushed on to the Gold Souk and Spice Souk. All our senses were heightened with the sound of the Call to Prayer from the minarets that echo gracefully through the city. They are one of my favourite things about the Muslim religion. The second thing is how calm and welcoming the people are. Unlike many market places throughout the world, often with pushy and demanding attendants, we felt genuinely welcomed to come in and try all the spices, nuts, teas and saffron ‘by the bucket’ without any pressure to buy. The smell, the taste, the sound and the colours of these souks transported us back to the medinas in Morocco. The gold market, however, was as over the top as the ATMs that dispense gold bars – truly. Sadly in this visit, I couldn’t find a gold dress in my size. Can you believe it?
Ironically, Gold and money go hand in hand here, with 40% of physical gold traded in 2013 occurring in Dubai. In case you’re wondering how much that is using elephant metric, it’s 354 elephants altogether.

Back to the town planning. As dull as this topic may seem, this is what fascinated me the most. The New Dubai is like a Monopoly board with businesses segregated into different areas depending on the industry. The following suburbs are a few areas within the free zone and are exempt from paying company, import export, foreign ownership or personal tax: Media City, Health Care City, Internet City (IBM, Microsoft, etc.), Commodities Centre, and Knowledge City where the leading universities of the world are located. Although I’m not a big human-made fan, my favourite was the Financial City. I appreciated the skyscrapers in different shapes and sizes located together, most covered in shiny black glass. There was no limit to the creative juices flying within the design room with buildings that are triangular, holes within, solar panel-like structures, spheres, and when all else has already been built – build a 150-metre-high, 93-metre-wide photo frame which allows ‘people to see the old Dubai and new Dubai through a frame’ (WTF or OTT, I can’t decide). Then, when you find out that’s probably been done before, you build the world’s tallest BUILDING, the Burj Khalifa at 164 floors. Then, just to be sure you’ve covered all bases of over the top structures, you then need to start building the biggest TOWER – I’m told there’s a difference between a tower and building…

Our hop on hop off bus did a mighty fine job of touring us around the city before dropping us at the spectacular, Dubai Marina. This premier address (not post code, as the UAE doesn’t have a postal area/zip identification system) is home to the world’s tallest GROUP of buildings, with a magnificent human-made canal system wrapping it’s way through the waterfront markets, restaurants, shops and under bridges. Children’s playgrounds are under most of these bridges to protect the kids from the heat. The marina itself is lined with super yachts of all sizes: big, bigger and biggest. Many of the beaches along the coastline belong to the plenitude of private residences, luxury hotels and palaces. The poorer folk, like us, found comfort in the public beaches, albeit scattered between $100 per day for deck chairs…. come on, as if we’d pay that! We found a free entry beach club to enjoy the quintessential photo of floating in the salty Persian Gulf with skyscrapers as the backdrop. Most importantly, we had 1 hour of relaxing by the ocean followed by a 5-minute relaxing swim in the 29degree hotel pool. Chilling out for 1hr and 5 minutes this weekend, nice and relaxed….

Some people (not me) may know the UAE has the seventh-largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, but Dubai’s economy is primarily real estate and tourism. Considering Dubai was a desert a decade ago, that is pretty impressive. I was talking to a local about how the locals cope with the dry arid conditions. In pidgeon English, he said that the tap water is drinkable, but it is not advised due to the high salt content, causing his dad to have kidney failure so to avoid kidney issues during our stay we should drink bottled water. Seemed like good advice. In all seriousness, we saw the huge desalination plants up the highway and to give an idea of the scale of the plant’s output; the golf course requires 4,000,000 gallons of water a day to maintain.

2) EXTRAVAGANCE – what money can buy

When the Dubai police fleet includes a Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Bentley you know that the ‘people’s cars’ can’t be half shabby either. I don’t think our windowless bogan-mobile would stand up here. Needless to say, I’m not exactly a car guru, but I was surprised that each luxury car brand had a super-duper luxury model on offer. Brands of cars that I’d never even heard of, were built in ways I never knew existed, all parked on display outside the world’s biggest mall. Aptly named, the Dubai Mall, with 1600 high-end brands. Shopping wasn’t the only attraction on offer, with other attractions including the world’s largest aquarium (33,000 aquatic animals with opportunities for scuba diving), an Olympic-size ice skating rink, the world’s biggest retractable roof, a high end souk with Falcons, a three storey waterfall, and of course the 150m water fountain with 6000 light projectors positioned within a man-made lake. My favourite was The Village, a streetscape designed to make you feel like you’re outside with overhanging balconies and hundreds of brightly coloured umbrellas hanging head first displaying a myriad of designs. After eating lunch in ‘the jungle’ with moving creatures complete with a night sky and lightning show, we moved on to a shopping centre that has affordable products, The Mall of Emirates. Our yearly Christmas decorations were sourced next to the indoor ski resort (85m high and 85m wide) in with 22,500 square meters covered with real snow for skiing, a 400 ski run and five chairlifts. With this much to see, malls are open till midnight; with this much to pay for, so are the banks.

For Dave’s birthday we went to a 5-star hotel for a wander through the most amazing new souk – on the hunt for a golden Aladdin’s lamp for Dave – to complement the trio of gifts this year: The Porsche sunglasses and puzzle (representing ‘time’ from his wife). Designed to look like the traditional souks, it has multiple alleyways and hidden entrances. The more we kept walking, the more we found until we finally hit the grand entrance of the elaborate hotel. Embarrassingly, we stood at the concierge desk, dressed in thongs and clothes from the rugby and ever so quietly questioned whether there were ‘affordable’ dining options. Their version of affordable was different to ours, but we thanked our lucky stars that he allowed us to continue on our adventure, dressed like hobos. With a dinner voucher in hand, we headed down a few more alleyways until we hit the canals. As we waited on a park bench under the Venetian – style canopy waiting for our gondola-like boat to whisk us away to our dinner reservation, we both looked at each other with excitement and disbelief. This was the resort we had seen on a luxury destination TV show a few weeks ago. The resort spans acres of beachfront real estate and is complete with summer houses, villas and hotel rooms all designed to look like an Arabian castle lining the 2.5km of canals.

Luxury hotels need to be a little over the top here, with some seriously stiff competition. The 7-Star Burj Al Arab (the sail looking building on a man-made island) has a stunning 1,790 sq-mt. of 24-carat gold leaf covering the interior of the hotel. The Atlantis resort is built on a very creative island shaped like a palm tree. The Palm’s fronds are lined with exquisite villas. The famous Atlantis resort and aquarium aren’t actually on The Palm islands, but rather on the crown of the crescent surrounding the palm with a tunnel connecting the two. There’s already a second Palm, with plans for a third bigger and better one underway. I suppose it’s inevitable.You must keep designing and building bigger, more creative and unique creations – such as Dubai World, a theme park twice the size of Disney Land. To top it off, just off the mainland, there are 300 artificial archipelagoes of various small islands constructed in the rough shape of a world map. Most ‘countries’ are available for purchase. I get the feeling that if you had money and an idea, this would be the place to make it happen.

3) CULTURALLY DIVERSE – acceptance

I now know what ‘Emirates’ actually means, it’s more than just an airline or the third word in the country’s name. Emirates are like states, and there are 7 Emirates in the UAE! Each of the seven emirates has a capital city with the same name, each ruled by an Emir or ‘ruler’. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi accounts for 87% of the UAE’s total area but with 37% of the population, wth Dubai Emirate closely following. Quite impressively, only about 13% of the people currently living in UAE are citizens (Emirati’s) with more than half of the citizens under 25years. The rest, 87%, are foreigners. The majority are split between India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and European countries. That’s a lot of stats I know, but what I’m trying to say, in not a very simple way, is that this is a multinational nation. It works so well together, with mosques, temples and churches next to each other. While walking through the streets one morning, it was fascinating to see locals in their religious attire off in different directions towards their choice of place to worship. Many Emirati men wear their white dress-like robes with red scarfs with black crowns holding them in place on their heads. Ladies wear varieties of burkas. They’re doing something right as this is a city with a crime rate around 0%. It is completely safe, completely clean and the people are notably helpful.

The government looks after the Emerati with free education, weddings, housing and support which is great to see considering their whole country is inundated with foreigners here to enjoy the tax benefits and 50 degree temperatures. I was talking to a tour guide on the trip to the desert. To give a scale of cash, most Emeratis keep their luxury cars about a year, and with depreciation at 20% you can only imagine the money regularly changing hands. Another source of income is this clever concept: unless you’re a business within the free-zone areas, foreigners wishing to start businesses, must be sponsored by an Emeriti who would then own 51% of the business. Hence why the can buy oddly shaped luxury cars.

The same tour guide took us on our desert safari. We chose a premium product for this excursion to try and get as close to an authentic desert trip as possible. This luxury company is owned by the Royal family and took us on to their land. The 1950s open top jeeps we went out in were gifts from the British many years ago. The British had owned the land before the Emirati found oil. Sucks to be them! To encounter the desert, we decided that in the back of an open truck was the way to go. Awaiting our arrival was a camel trip, falcon show, authentic dinner under the stars and traditional dance. We ate camel as well as drunk the milk and rode them. As odd as that may seem to eat the entertainment, the camel is one of the most important animals for the Emirati, therefore common practice. Unsurprisingly, it’s Robots that take part in the multimillion dollar camel racing industry. BTW – camel doesn’t “taste like chicken”, it tastes like a lamb casserole.

Of course, I cannot forget to mention the main purpose of this trip, to take Dave to the Dubai Rugby 7s for his birthday. 12 hours of rugby with 28 nations competing over three days for the Title. Regardless of whether you were a rugby fanatic or not, this was a super cool day. Each team / country has seven players on the field, playing with two 7 minute sides with a 1 minute at half time. Some would say, that short break is hardly worth it, but such a small team and such a big field makes for a heck of a lot of running. Obviously, there are four grandstands surrounding the field, but I’d say the majority of the supporters were in our stand – the stand with the shade which was much needed as this rugby field is located in the desert under the hot, dry Arabian sun. What also makes this different to the traditional rugby games, is that you’re surrounded by hundreds of nationalities, supporting multiple teams. How can you not? It’d be daft to come all the way from Australia to watch a 14-minute game! New Zealand played once against Australia and once against South Africa which was quite the hoot as we were the only Kiwis surrounded by South Africans, and we got smashed. Like true rugby 7s supporters, our South African neighbours swapped their supporter shirts for other nationality’s shirts depending on who was playing. Those that weren’t in their country’s shirts were in dress up and my goodness did we see it all. My favourite was an American flag draped over a supporter with two Mexicans in front, with a wall… All in good fun with the Kenyans and the Fijians proudness shining through in local songs and chants. The rest of us yobos sang to the 80s singalong that played throughout the day. But the real winners of the day were the South Africans who narrowly beat Fiji in a nail-biting finale.

Happy Birthday Dave, I hope it was everything you hoped for, and just a little bit more because you deserve it. As I finish writing this blog you are enjoying a scotch or two in the VA business class bar. As for me, as I am going straight to work when we land with a total of 20 hours sleep over 6 days, I’m tucked up in my flatbed, in my PJs and am reflecting on the four days that was. We travel not to escape life but to ensure life doesn’t escape us. It’s easy to become stressed and wrapped up and not take time for the things that matter. For Dave and I, travel not only represents time together but represents the opportunity to fill our minds with cultural variety, impart new vigour to the mind, to think openly and freely and to absorb everything that our world has to offer.