A Camel, a Mall and a Gold Souk in Dubai

Dubai! What a weird place for us to finish our trip...well at least a very big contrast to Italy. As I only had 3 days there we agreed to do the touristy thing...we stayed in a hotel!! And we visited shopping malls! But the shopping malls did have ski fields, Arabic castles, fountain shows to the theme of mission impossible and looked like palaces. On our first day there we swam on the beach with full view of the 'Sail' hotel which claims to be the only 7 star hotel in the world.

A ski field in a shopping mall. What next?

Swimming in the warm Dubai waters...

For breakfast we ate curry which was a delicious variation from pizza and pasta. On day 2 we went on a 'desert safari' which involved a large amount of hooning around sand dunes in 4wd and rather less camel trekking than we had hoped..but nevertheless the camel was very exciting and I am keen for more (desert and camels that is). We had opted for the overnight safari..which transpired everyone else left at 9.30, Chris and I got left at this camp thing with 2 sleeping bags and many ants! Rather interesting, we sat on a dune in the dark and found some scorpion tracks..yikes!

In the morning we were picked up from the desert then delivered back to the hotel. The roads in Dubai are wide and busy; everyone travels by car, big car, here. We visited the gold souk, a famous gold market brimming with diamonds and gold, then the spice souk. We ate at the food court for dinner (all we could really afford) surrounded by women in black veils and men in white suits and an elaborate Egyptian ceiling.

After a 3 hour long bus ride home (the bus system in Dubai is not so flash!) we started packing for me leaving and Chris staying at 1 am. At 3am we were ready and set the alarm for 6 am, great. All was packaged in our ginormous highly patched yellow pack liner sack (rather eye catching and we got strange looks from the fancy suitcase wheeling types). After a short taxi ride I was headed home for NZ, and Chris on the bus to Abu Dhabi for his adventure race. If you want to see how he gets on check out the race site and Sleepmonsters covers adventure races well too. (Chris's team is Nike).

This is a picture of the NZ team Adventure Sport coming in to land on Day 2 of the race this morning:

I am now back in sunny Christchurch for the next four months, Chris is back after the race...then we are heading off on another adventure to Malaysia and then back to Europe again, so you never know I might just have to let silly billys roam the world again and hopefully entertain you again with my appalling spelling (0: Thanks everyone for reading my blog, it was neat to think people were finding out about our adventures as we had them!

Goodbye and Ciao for now,

Em

Mmmmm...looks like scorpions to me!