Of Places I Go...: Dubai

Day 2, 14th May 2016

I had booked this tour as a group departure through a travel agency. The agency will take care of our stay, pickup, sight-seeing, breakfast and dinner. They provide an itinery which will state the time of a particular program. On this day we had Dubai City tour for half day and Desert Safari in the evening. The agency will hire a mini bus (mostly 34-seater) which will pick up tourists from several different hotels.

The first destination was Heritage Village. This place depicted the ancient culture of UAE, how people lived in the past, their life style, how the seven emirates were united, etc. Dubai is a tax free city. The government doesn't levy tax on the people. Their economy runs on three major sources: tourism, real estate and ports. The government doesn't allow people to own their houses. You have to rent it. A decent 2 BHK apartment costs about 3 Lakh Dirhams annually. A real cheap one costs 80,000 dhs per annum.

The next destination was Saga-world shopping mall. Dubai is well known for its craftsmen and beautiful designs. The shops here reflected the very qualities. These shops were a bit expensive. But not more expensive than the ones I encountered at Dubai Mall. I'll elaborate more on Dubai Mall later.

Next was Jumeirah Beach. It is really beautiful beach with the view of Burj Al Arab and the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The beach is clean and you can see lots of people enjoying the sun. It was a bliss! The water seemed to be blue and clean. Burj Al Arab is a most expensive hotel in the world. The rent is about 30,000 Dollars. It has a tennis court and a swimming pool on the terrace. “Burj” means “tower”. “Al” is a very common prefix here. It doesn't have a meaning as such but people usually put “Al” before most names, e.g. Al Raffa, Al Saffa. “Emirates” refers to the people living in this country.

From Jumeirah Beach, we headed towards Palm Jumeirah. Palm Jumeirah is a man made island in the shape of a palm. This island was created within 5 years. The main stem of the palm has high-rise luxurious residential apartments while the branches have villas. Shah Rukh Khan (Bollywood actor) and David Beckham(Football player) have their villas at Palm Jumeirah. Palm Jumeirah has the world's largest hotel Palm Atlantis. It has about 1539 rooms and is a really gigantic one. As the month of Ramazan approaches, this hotel gets flooded with big Sheikhs across the world. So as of this date, Dubai has the biggest hotel, Palm Atlantis, with 1539 rooms; the tallest building Burj Khalifa, with height of about 830 meters; and biggest mall Dubai Mall with over 1200 shops.

The city tour was of about 4 hours.

After some rest in the afternoon, we had Desert Safari in the evening. The schedule time for Desert Safari is at 3pm in Winters and 4pm in Summers. This is a standard time followed by most agencies. They will pick you up in a SUV, for us it was Toyota Land Cruiser. It took about an hour to reach the Desert Safari Camp from our hotel. The roads are really smooth, and the average speed of our SUV on the highway was about 130-140 km/hr. Yes, you read it right 130-140 km/hr. The drivers are so trained that even at such speeds, the car remains stable. After we reached the camp, we shifted to another Toyota SUV with really huge and strong jumpers and a driver trained for desert terrains. They would drive you through really rough terrains, will climb on high sand dunes and manouver sharp turns. It is a real thrill to experience this. After this journey, I started realizing the importance of seat belts... ;)

After the safari for about 30 minutes or so, we were taken to the Safari Camp. Here you can even ride scooters for 150 dirhams. There is also an option of riding in the Hummer but it is really costly. The camp had activities like Tattoo making and photo-shoot in Sheikh-type attire. There will be three types of programs: Belly Dance, Taruna Dance and Fire Show. I did not like a single program here. Okay, at least Taruna Dance was worth appreciating because of the efforts put up by the artist. In this dance, the performer rotates on its place for about 10 minutes and performs various arts. For me just 5 rotations are enough to make me feel dizzy. The dinner here was okay. You can get complimentary hookahs but have to pay for liquor.

Heritage Village

Leaders at the time of union of the Emirates

Heritage Village

Grand Hyatt Hotel

Jumerah Mosque

Jumerah Beach

Palm Atlantis Hotel

Provided by our hotel

Desert Safari

Desert Safari Camp

Day 3, 15th May 2016

This was almost a leisure day. We had Dhow Cruise scheduled at 7pm. So we were free till then. We explored lots of shops and supermarkets in the locality. There are shops which have all products in a particular range, e.g. from 1 to 10 dirhams, from 1 to 20 dirhams, etc. There were also electronic shops. There were a lot of attractive LCD TVs of quite reasonable range. I came across one huge LCD TV of size of about 9ft x 13ft.

Custom Duty is levied on LCD TVs. The aircrafts connecting Dubai have a special space just for keeping LCD TVs. Each person is allowed to carry one laptop, any two electronic items, one gold coin, 50,000 cash in INR or equivalent and two liquor bottles.

In evening, we departed for Dhow Cruise. There is a creek which seperates Old Dubai and New Dubai. It is known as Dubai Creek in general. Dhow Cruise runs in Dubai Creek. One can see a contrasting view from the cruise. On one side (New Dubai) there are lots of high rise buildings while on the other side(Old Dubai) there are none. Old Dubai is known as Deira. The time of the cruise is mostly 8.45pm to 10.30pm. Just before starting the cruise they will serve refreshments and starters. Once the cruise starts, there are a couple of programs, one of them being the Taruna Dance (same as the one at Desert Safari camp). After the programs, dinner starts at around 9.30pm.

Most of the Dubai Tour Packages involve breakfast and dinner, but no lunch. The Breakfast and Dinner are both buffet-type and there are lots of varieties including Indian and Continental. It is advisable to carry some snacks like Puri, Thepla, Khakhra, Wafers, etc. I used to do a heavy breakfast, some snacks for the lunch and in the evening. Then even if the dinner is a bit late, it was fine with me. For me, the dinner time is about 8pm.

The dinner at the cruise was good. You have to be careful if you are Jain, but otherwise the vegatarian food was good.

We reached our hotel at about 11 pm.