Dubai 1

                                     First stop  ...... Dubai

 

Nothing can prepare you for Dubai!!

 

A super seven and a half hour flight spent listening to all my favourite old music, (the classic album selection being one of the many hundreds of channels available to every passenger) lovely food and a comfy seat, courtesy of Emirates, bought me to Dubai, totally chilled out with no real idea what to expect.

But,....once you leave the bright, airy, spotless airport, buckle up for the wackiest break neck, seat of the pants ride of your life!!  

Forget speed limits, lane discipline, signalling, courtesy and expect up to six lanes of speeding mayhem. You are as likely to be overtaken as undertaken and it may be a motorbike carrying a wardrobe or a race tuned Aston Martin, it's totally bonkers and not for the faint hearted and certainly not for anyone who gets wound up by other road users.

 

You feel very safe here, nearly everybody can speak English, it is spotlessly clean, has stunning beaches, no graffitti, no beggars, no drunks, no insects, the weather is fab (26 degrees), transport is cheap and efficient and you can eat here as a visitor quite cheaply as food can be from a few pence for local curry in the old town, conversely you can live the indulgent dream where hotel rooms, some even available underwater, cost up to £10,000 a night, and some of the worlds best chefs will feed you for £1000 a course. 

 

The biggest and best of everything is what they aappear to have set out to achieve and they seem to be succeeding. Shopping malls that completely dwarf anything that I have seen even in America - Dubai Mall is the biggest in the world, Dragon Mall is a maze of mainly small Chinese shops that snakes for over a kilometre selling everything from toothpicks to chandeliers the size of a VW Golf .
The worlds biggest fountains at Dubai Mall, they eclipse The Bellagio in Vegas, the worlds highest concentration of sky scrapers and not forgetting the worlds tallest building, the Burj Khalifa

This is not a guide book and there are plenty of descriptions, facts and figures relating to this incredible feat of engineering and construction available. From a visitors perspective, it is awesome although at floor 124 there are still another 30 plus floors above the public access platform!!