Got here…just.  The incoming plane for our flight out of Wellington was late – 4 hours late!  So it was a long wait at the airport and then a tense flight to see if we would make the flight from Melbourne to Dubai which was scheduled to leave about the time we were due to arrive.  Fortunately it would seem there were enough transferring passengers for Qantas to hold the plane so all was well in the end.  Did make us realise that the extra flight across the Tasman at the start and end of a trip is going to add a degree of complexity to international trips we hadn’t banked on.

Anyhoo… here we are in Dubai!  We arrived Monday morning here and after trying to keep going to adjust our body clocks we fell in a bit of a heap Monday afternoon.  So all we managed to do was explore the large shopping mall adjacent to the hotel and then check out the outdoor pool and bar area – pleasant at night when it’s 30C and blistering hot during the day when its 37C.

Yesterday was a big sightseeing day – a city tour for the morning and then late afternoon a metro ride across the city to go up the world’s tallest building – Burj Khalifa.

Dubai is both very western (big, shiny skyscrapers, huge malls, lots of traffic but big roads (makes NZ State Highway 1 look like a side street!) but also traditional.  Many men and women wear traditional dress (with many variations), and it certainly helps to be sensitive to different cultural norms.

We enjoyed the city tour very much as it helped us appreciate the size of the city (it has multiple different commercial and tourist-centred areas) and how spread out the tourist sights are – and as we experienced during our visit to Kuala Lumpur to visit John’s family – you really can’t walk to anything – taxis or tours for tourists, although the mall adjacent to the hotel has a metro stop so we experienced Dubai at rush hour last night!

As with all tourist-oriented city tours you never get as long somewhere as you might like but we did get photo stops  for Burj Al Arab, the Jumeriah Mosque, the Zabeel Palace, a quick visit to the Dubai Museum (very small), take an abra across Dubai Creek (the Dubai version of the public traghetti in Venice), and visit the spice and gold souks (you are so obviously as tourist that you are an instant target for touts but interesting nonetheless and some of the gold jewellery is incredible).

Late in the afternoon we headed via the metro to Burj Khalifa – which is attached to Dubai Mall – the world’s biggest (there are lots of surperlatives used to describe various things in Dubai but 1200 shops is pretty big!).  While it wasn’t a crystal clear day, the view from the observation area (a bit below the top) was amazing – and makes clear the sheer amount of construction going on here, some of which is related to developing new hotels and facilities for World Expo 2020.  No planning or resource consent issues here: what the ruler says, goes!

Some pics to follow…