Good-bye Dubai👋

Well, on to the next part of the trip. We are at the Dubai airport and are scheduled to leave before too long.

That’s the plane that will take us to Manila. Track it here, if you wish.

When I looked up the flight tracker, I found my phone has switched to Arabic!

I’ll post about today a little later, maybe from the airplane…

 

Dune Bashing and Burj Khalifa

Its night here, Brent and Jordy are sleeping already, and I should be but I’ll type this up yet.

I woke up early to a mournful singing or wailing or not sure what to call it. Later in the day I figured out what it was.

Breakfast was the hotel buffet again, and we got up a little early to be ready to meet the desert tour guy. Munaf showed up a little early and we jumped in his Land Cruiser and went to pick up the other two women who were part of our tour. Munaf is from Ocean Air Tours, a company I found online with good reviews.

Munaf was a very good guide and told us a lot of things about the city of Dubai. He had three points he brought out that were interesting. First, Dubai is safe. “0% crime rate,” he said. His view is that crime is caused by poverty and homelessness, which are absent in Dubai. There is work for everyone and if they do their jobs and obey the laws, there is no trouble. Disobeying the law is serious and for the foreign workers (he came from India 11 years ago) its simply not worth it because they will have their visas revoked. Traffic speed is controlled by cameras every kilometer on the highways and every camera you speed past is 200dhs (3.67dhs to $1) which gets expensive pretty fast. He says prison usually contains people who have missed loan payments; if he would lose his job and not make his payments, he could be sentenced to several months in prison after which his debt would be forgiven but he would be unable to take out a loan for a long time. Another point was how clean the city is, and its true, it is very clean. The fine is 400dhs for littering and I have seen numerous people cleaning here and there. And it shows. The last point is how friendly the people are. Tourism is a huge source of revenue and the people are very respectful to tourists. Those were his ideas and I can’t say whether its true or I even understood it all correctly. I do know walking around late at night feels safe.

He also says the freight boats are bringing stuff up from the larger shipping ports.

We started the desert tour at the bottom left hand pin. It was a place where for a nominal fee you can rent quads and go riding on your own. We decided to do it but it was a little underwhelming. The area we had to ride in was fenced in and not really that big and the quads seemed a little weak and they made us quit jumping them on a dune:) I think possibly we rode them harder than most people do.

We got on the sand with the Land Cruiser at the pin just to the right of there. It was about 30 minutes of incredible dune riding. Munaf was a good driver. I would say it was quite a bit better than Silver Lake with more small, sharp dunes. We drove straight down some, up some ridges and slid sideways down them, and bottomed out the shocks a few times.

We stopped at the pin on the far right for photos and sand boarding. Sand boarding is done with snowboards with only the heel brace left on the binding, so kinda hard to control. He also had a sled type thing some people slid down on. There were four of their vehicles in our convoy so there were a number of people there.

Next stop was the top pin for brunch and camel riding. They have a camp there where they serve meals and do evening entertainment shows and possibly host overnight guests. Brunch was located in a cloth tent and served on low tables with these round bean bag chairs to sit on, Arab style I guess.

We were served Arabic coffee, dates, little fried sweet donut type things, lamb, beans, hummus, salsa, pasta, olives, cucumber, and Arabic bread which is kinda like a thick tortilla. Possibly more but I can’t remember for sure, it was a typical Arab breakfast I guess. It was good but personally I wouldn’t say the food was the best ever. The other guys might disagree, I don’t know.

Afte brunch was a short camel ride. It is something that was cool to do once. If you’ve never ridden a camel it’s like this: the camel is kneeling, you climb on, hold on tight, he stands up back feet first so it leans you forward a ways, then he gets up on his front feet, which tosses you back, and you ride a few minutes, then the standing up process happens in reverse. It was definitely a new experience.

We were dropped back off at the hotel and we took the abra and metro to the Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall station. From the station to the mall is close to half mile and I bet well over half is moving walkways.

Here is a map of one floor of the mall. There are four floors. We walked a long time trying to find the desk for the Burj Khalifa tours which we had already booked. Once we found it, we grabbed a little lunch and headed for our tour.

We had booked the whole deal, the 148th floor VIP experience so we got to cut all the lines plus got coffee before we went up. The cheaper observation deck is the 124th and 125th floors and the elevator takes one minute to get there. Its very fast. From there we rode to the top deck where we got juice and sweets. The view is amazing from there. Brent estimated we could see 45 miles. There is an outdoor deck there, too, which was pretty cool. We also had access to the lower decks, too, and spent a little more time there before heading down, once again skipping every line. Was the extra money worth it for the top story? Definitely once. It was amazing how the 25ish stories changed the viewing angle. Plus skipping the lines saved a full hour or more I would guess. Would I do the very top again? Probably not but I would definitely go up again.

Then we wandered the mall for a while. All of a sudden that same wailing singing was playing over the speakers. Then i realized it was the Muslim prayer call.

The mall has a hockey rink, an aquarium, and the world’s largest OLED display: 55 meters by 14 meters, which is 820 large TV screens all tied together.

The mall is quite high end it seemed. For example we went into Rolex, Breitling, and Richard Mille stores where watches cost up to 1 to 2 million dirhams. There were also alot of storees and brands that we had never heard of and looked like they would be hard to afford, too.

We stayed to watch the Dubai Fountains outside the mall which play after dark. They were an amazing show of water and lights choreographed with music. But first there was a light show on the side of the Burj Khalifa. One side is covered in LED and there are spotlights that shine out from it into the sky. It was really cool to see the world’s largest LED display in action, too.

We took the metro back to our hotel, no abras this time, we were getiing tired of walking, and stopped for supper at Hatam Al Tai (I can’t link to it but its behind our motel a block or so) for shawarma, which is those big skewers of meat that they shave off the sides of. It was amazing! I had a plate with lamb, chicken, and beef served with hummus and Arabic bread. It was definitely the best ethnic food I’ve had here yet!

I went and wandered the neighborhood just alittle after supper , then went back to the hotel for a mango milkshake and to type about our day.

I also found out some how my SIM had got cancelled so i guess I will only have WIFI sporadically tomorrow.

Until next time…

Dubai

Well, that gives you an idea of how our day has been. We walked and walked, but Dubai is amazing and I would say no steps were wasted.

We ate breafast at the hotel. They put on a huge buffet of American, Middle Eastern, and Asian food for under $10 It was good, especially the mango juice!

Our first stop of the day was going to be the Gold Souq a few blocks from the hotel. We walked along the creek until we started seeing the shops up the street. The souqs are set up kind of like markets in a third world country, with all the tiny stores along the walkways with the proprieters standing outside urging you in.

I think the first place was actually the Spice Souq although I didn’t notice any signage. This picture is one of the spice stores, all the round bags are spices of some sort. A guy we talked to told us what a bunch of them were but I can’t remembe them all. Saffron is a big one here and he carried lots of other edibles, but also I think he had frankinscence (for burning) and oudh which is a perfume ingredient. Some of the things he said I may have wrong because their English is hard to catch. We did buy some tea from him and he sorta ripped us off because we forgot about bartering. But we tried to hone our bartering skills on his friend who we got kanduras from (but its possible he ripped us off, too, because who knows how much stuff is actually worth?) But I had wanted to get one anyways so I guess I was happy with the price.

Gold Souq was next. It is many little

shops all selling gold jewelry of all sorts. We just walked through and on to the next place.

We walked through a few more shops and down some back streets but it was all kind of the same after while. There was a little kabob joint that was supposed to be good but it was still soon enough after breakfast we skipped and headed for the other side of the creek.

Deira seems to be the old part of town. It seems third world-ish to me with none of the glitz you think of when you think of Dubai. The streets are narrow with little stores of all sorts and the buildings are mostly a tannish gray color. We saw a few white people in the Gold Souq but basically everyone is a local of some sort.

Next was an abra ride across the creek. It costs 1 dirham and the boats leave when they get full, usually within a few minutes, for about 16 hours a day.

We spent a little time at the Textile Souq and talked to some vendors selling scarves and other things. They were VERY pushy and you hardly get past them sometimes without a scarf around your neck.

Next stop was Palm Jumeirah. We walked to the metro, got day passes for like $6, and got on board. It took a little to figure out how it all runs because Arabic seemed the language of choice and the English directions we needed wewre hard to find sometimes. But we made it, even with a train transfer, and a transfer to the tram, and then to the monorail that runs along the middle of the palm. We grabbed lunch at a food court-y thing before the monorail, so nothing too exotic.

The monorail is an elevated train so it was cool to be able to look down at the residences along the fronds. It was high class.And we could see the Burj Al Arab quite nicely.

The Atlantis Resort is at the end of the

palm and includes a large waterpark also. The monorail is the track on the left. The road is a tunnel. The beach is all the back side, the front is huge rocks for erosion I suppose. There is a nice walkway at the outside of the island though, but you can’t get to the beach. It’s all resort with security guards at the gates. We did grab a geocache out there. Oh, Brent looked up the room at the top of the arch there, and I believe that site wanted $27,000 per night.

About halfway between the creek and the palm, the city turns into the modern city you think of Dubai as. The buildings are newer and nicer and fancier and everything just seems classier. The roads are wider, the landscaping is nicer, and the general feel is modern. There are also lots more white people, mostly Europeans .

We still wanted to go to a beach, so we headed for JBR beach which was within walking distance from the tram. It was a beautiful beach but with all the man-made islands out there, you can hardly see open water even. JBR (Jumeirah Beach Residences) is a high end apartment/condo complex behind the beach. The beach was quite busy even though it was very windy and almost cold.

The next stop was the Mall of the Emirates. It was a fairly short stop because our main goal was to see the indoor ski slope. Between jetlag and walking many miles, we were feeling tired and hungry so just grabbed another generic meal at the food court. We did watch a Chinese dance show thing in one the atriums that was pretty cool.

The metro got us back to the Al Ghubaiba Station that is close to the abra docks. We could have rode the metro to within 250 meters of the hotel but the boats are so cheap and so awesome that we boated back across instead even though it meant walking extra.

We came back past the freight boats again and I guarantee a bunch of those huge piles of stuff had been replaced with something different. I’m going to need to figure out wher that stuff comes from and goes to.

Both parts of town have their own intrigue but the old part definitely has more character.

Well, that about concludes today. Its night here, there is a fair amount of traffic going buy the open window, a few boats on the creek, the Burj Khalifa is lit up on the horizon, a radio is playing somewhere on the street, and the wind smells like grilled chicken!

Good morning from Dubai!

Its a lovely day in Dubai! It is around 70 degrees and has that hazy look that says it could warm up quite nicely today.
A little background on our trip for whoever is reading… Brent has been wanting to go back to the Philippines for a while; it has been 10 years since he was there. So he wondered if I wanted to travel with him this winter and I agreed. That’s how I got involved.
Our other travel partner is Jordy Warkentin, from Kingsville, ON. He was in class with a Jordan Giesbrecht from Paxton that married a Filipina back in November. They are still there due to paperwork and Jordy was thinking of going to visit them this winter. Brent invited him along with us, he accepted, and we had a third person.
We left Boston about 10:30 EST on Emirates airlines. I have never flown with them and it was the best flying experience I believe I’ve ever had. The plane was 2 years old, the flight attendants were friendly, and the plane was only about 2/3 full. Pro tip I learned: take any empty seat in an empty row in order to get your own couple seats. We were in 3 seats and I was going to move after takeoff but another guy beat me to the empty seats after he had wandered the cabin for a while. The plane had good legroom, very edible food, and I was definitely impressed. The flight crew was all European, and the cabin crew were from 13 different countries and spoke 13 different languages!
At Dubai, immigrations was a breeze, and we headed to the baggage claim. Brent and Jordy both had their backpacks “delayed” and we waited a while for them to show up. There was a guy from Detroit area waiting too that we visited with. He hunts up by Farwell. Once we got our bags we walked through customs picked up my SIM card, and headed for the taxi. One driver tried to rip us off by charging us about 4 or 5 times the correct amount so we refused him.
We checked in at our hotel, Best Western Plus Pearl Creek in Deira, and headed up to check out the rooftop pool (16th floor) but the pool hours are 7am to 6pm. We were feeling like some real food so we ate ethnic food from the restaurant by the pool (a nice view of the downtown area) . We had spicy chicken and lamb dishes, I can’t remember the names. Then we went downstairs to the juice bar for falooda. I got rose and Brent got mango and Jordy had a lime juice. Falooda is a milky drink with a scoop of ice cream and maybe chia seeds and vermicelli. It was quite delicious!
We felt like walking so we walked a long ways down the sidewalk along the creek, past the abra docks and down to where the freight was loaded and unloaded. The freight was things like washing machines and tires and some rolls of maybe carpet. The boats were 50 to 100 feet long, wooden, decrepit, and tired looking. I dont know where they come from or where the stuff comes from but we did see small trucks loading stuff late at night. After the walk we headed to bed.

If you have questions, WhatsApp me at 989-763-9044 and I can try to answer them. My phone should work all the time.