Now or Never

When we were initially planning out our rough itinerary for cities and countries to visit, Dubai was definitely not at the top of our list. However, considering its reputation as an international mega city and a natural transfer point between Europe and Asia, we figured we needed to stop through “just to see it.” We first planned on only staying two nights, but after some deeper research on everything to see and do, we settled on four to make the most of our time in the desert.

We have been able to travel pretty cheaply up until this point but that’s nearly impossible in Dubai so we had to reset our expectations on daily spend a bit. Lodging is expensive and even though taxis aren’t too pricy, you need to take them to get basically anywhere because the city is absolutely massive and public transit is limited.

Luckily we did end up finding a steal of an Airbnb, by Dubai standards, for less than $100/night in a residential complex on the Palm Jumeirah, one of the huge artificial island developments just offshore. While it was a journey to get out there, we had access to a nice pool, private beach, and gym onsite – we honestly thought it was a scam until we arrived, fortunately we were wrong and were happy to have a nice place to lounge in our downtime.

One of Ian’s friends from college, Greg, has been living in Dubai for six years and we happened to catch him just two days before he left for good to move to Australia with his wife (who had already moved down). We met up with him and a few of his friends for dinner and drinks, played catch up, chatted about expat life in Dubai, and made plans to meet back up in Melbourne during the Australia leg of our trip in January.

It’s well known that Dubai has the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, which at 2,716.5 feet (828 meters) can easily be seen from all over the city since it’s about twice as tall as anything around it. One day we made our way to the Burj both to stare at it from below up close and also visit the Dubai Mall, the second biggest in the world. The sheer size of the Burj, the massive fountain in front, and the scale and insanity of the Dubai Mall is difficult to put into words but all we can say is it lived up to expectations and was definitely worth the visit. Consumerism at its finest!

For our final day we escaped the city for a trip inland on a group tour to the Arabian Desert near the border with Oman. We managed to check off all the classic tourist desert activities: dune bashing, ride a camel, and even a little sand boarding. We ended up with sand everywhere but had a great time and it was a fun way to cap off our time in Dubai.

Next stop Mumbai to kickstart more than two weeks traveling along the western coast of India. Let the real backpacking begin…