Dubai

You must think that I never even went to Dubai!!! It has been well over a month since Mum and I went to Dubai to visit my Aunt and Uncle and I still haven't put up any photographs or told you anything about it! (shame on me!). So...I thought that I had better say something about it before I forget what we had done.

We had a fairly early flight so we decided to get to the airport nice and early and get some breakfast there. We were in fact so early that as we were having breakfast we saw the main drop-off area go from dark to light - we saw the dawn!! (which, if you know me - I just do not do!)

Anyway, the flight over was long but uneventful - what was really fun was that the plane had two cameras just for intrepid fliers like us - one camera on the nose and one facing down so that we could see what the pilot saw on take off or look down to see what was underneath us - such a cool idea!! Although I can appreciate that those with a fear of flying might not like that quite so much!

I forget just what the temperature was when we got there, but it was certainly warm! As Mum had been to Dubai before she offered me the front seat in the car so that I could gawk at everything!! It wasn't far from the airport to my Aunt and Uncle's house, but what I could see of Dubai was that it is a very modern city - all skyscrapers and new buildings, at least at this point I couldn't see very much that was of the old city.

We didn't do much that evening as we were tired and it was fairly late by the time we arrived as our flight had been delayed taking off from London. The next day however we went up what seems to be the only mountain in Dubai - the Hajar mountains - there was a road that went nowhere except up to the top of the mountain to a carpark and then back down again! Mind you, there was also a hotel and a rather posh looking private residence at the top.

The views from the carpark were pretty impressive, the photographs look a bit hazy but you could really see quite some distance. In fact we were so high up that as we drove up this very very bendy eight mile road my ears popped!!

Of course, we had to have lunch in the hotel on the mountain top. I thought that I had a photograph of me enjoying lunch, but it would appear that those photos are in Mum’s camera not mine!!

It was an interesting lunch – a set menu with various arabic style foods. The starter was bread with lots of different types of dips, I even surprised myself by being a bit adventurous and tasting some them – and I liked them too!! I wasn’t prepared to be quite so adventurous with the main meal but there was enough on the buffet table for me to pick and choose. Mum and I shared a plate of puddings because we wanted to try all the different offerings available so we picked a little bit of each. What I remember most is this very strange hard fried doughnut type thing – it was weird.

After lunch we went to see the local oasis. It’s not what you think, at least it wasn’t what I expected as I expected to see an open space with a pond in the middle and lots of greenery surrounding it.

There was certainly a lot of greenery, but the actual water source has been corralled and managed so that it can be used to better effect. In the next photograph you can see channels in the ground – each little walled garden has it’s own set of channels, which I thought was a rather effective way of distributing water, it is just that this did not even meet my usual ideas of an oasis. It was however, very green and shadowy and I thought that it was a very nice way to spend an afternoon.

And I think that this post is getting long enough. Will write more later as I wouldn’t want to bore you all at once!