Sunday 3rd August - Dubai

Sunday 3rd August - Dubai

First thing to do on arriving in Abu Dhabi is leave and go to Dubai. Actually this isn’t such a bad idea in general - most of the interesting stuff to see seems to be in Dubai, which is also the city it’s easiest to admire - its rulers built it up as a business centre without the benefit of vast oil revenues.

The hotel recommends the hotel taxi at 225 dirhams (about 3.5 dirhams to the Aussie dollar). The concierge assures us the bus will cost about 160. It actually costs 25 each.

The bus seems to be getting us there very efficiently along the UAE’s overgrown freeway system. (Which is huge. Seriously, the place looks like someone transplanted all Los Angeles' roads and ten percent of its buildings then took away its water supply.) But once the bus arrives in Dubai it refuses to stop at any of the interesting places we pass, preferring to have only one dropoff point at the far end of town. Fortunately the metro turns out to be a very good way to get around Dubai as long as you’re going along the coast. How you get to the inland suburbs I don’t know.

We’re always bumping into British people who have come to the UAE for vague reasons they can’t explain. Sometimes, “because it’s different,” which I suppose it is, though the reason makes less sense from someone visiting for the tenth time. One tells us it’s impractical to get up the Burj-al-Khalifah (“tower of the caliph”, by far the tallest building in the world) unless you book way ahead so we decide to just look at it from the outside and scout some malls.

Dubai mall is, allegedly, the largest in the world. I don’t know whether to believe this, but it seems a good size. To get to it from the central bus station we have to brave the UAE climate for a minute or so walking to the nearest metro. Then it’s all air-conditioned - every time the train’s doors open and close there’s a puff of hot air that’s been dragged into the station by the train, but the air conditioning vanquishes it in seconds. At the Dubai mall station there’s a tube that takes you to the mall and the Burj-al-Khalifah, again air-conditioned, and it has travelators. Combined with the exposed structural member architecture it’s a lot like being in an airport.

If you have environmentalist or energy-saving principles you may not want to come here. The people of Dubai are marching proudly towards complete indifference to external conditions, and hang the energy consumption. Tne weirdest feature is the combination of high rise and big gaps between buildings, I mean, why? One person I asked thought it was just prestige but didn’t know for sure. If I owned a big office or apartment block I’d build a travelator walkway to link it to a main travelator walkway that linked a metro with a mall. In time this system should link everyone to everyone. And then we shall be a sort of above-ground morlock.

Adeline is a big zoo fan so I suggest we check out the “underwater zoo and aquarium”. It’s not clear to me what the difference is between an underwater zoo on the one hand and an aquarium on the other, but either way the place is kind of awesome. It’s apparently the largest indoor contained water in the world - I guess the outdoor record holder is a dock for building oil tankers or something like that - and it’s packed with interesting and charismatic species - a giant Pacific octopus, cichlid fishes, a giant crocodile they kidnapped from Cairns (I think I heard about this when I was in Cairns), all sorts of stuff. The Humboldt penguins got fascinated by our tickets - black and white, a bit like a penguin or fish colour scheme - and would chase them if you put them up to the glass. You can feed the fish and they swarm like sharks - you get used to the idea that they are all small and then a three- to four- metre grey reef shark cruises through the middle. Wonderful place, and zoos are always better with Adeline - it's like the animals hear she's there are start their act.

Outdoors for a few minutes of brain- and eye-frying heat to photograph the tower. This place would be unlovable in summer without air conditioning. Burj-al-Khalifah really is stupidly tall - the emergent of a forest of buildings that are all stupidly tall. I mean, why would anyone build high rises on five percent of the land and nothing elsewhere, it's nuts. I'm also a little surprised they haven't gone underground more but I guess the bedrock might be hard and energy for air conditioning is cheap.

Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory which is a near-complete misnomer, it's a restaurant which happens to have some cheesecakes in its desert menu. Not cheap but very tasty and a view of the Dubai ski fields (inside a shopping mall, like everything else) which are less entertaining than they sound, though there are people rolling downhill in hamster balls so that's something.

We miss our bus back to Abu Dhabi and find it difficult to investigate options - the people working in the metro are happy to phone around but don't sound confident of their conclusions. We end up sharing a taxi that gets us back at 140 km/hr all the way for 40 dirhams apiece.

Later we will talk to a taxi driver and he will ask about the things we saw. After answering no to a few things he stared at us bewildered and asked what did we see. I guess Dubai might have a revisit left in it.