Holiday 2011 Day 4 and 5 – Desert Safari and Palm Island
Posted by 2000mph on September 7, 2011
Thusday 2nd June 2011 – Dubai Desert Safari
I think it’s time I started updating this a bit quicker. So this post will cover two of our days in Dubai, the first of which we spent in the desert and the second shopping and visiting the Palm Islands. On our 4th day in Dubai it was time to venture out of the urban jungle and into the desert. We booked a 4×4 desert safari for the day and were picked up from our hotel mid-afternoon and after about a 45 minute drive we arrived out in the middle of the baking hot desert. We stopped for a photo opportunity and a chance for our driver to deflate the types to help with grip across the desert sand.
We were then taken off road across the sand dunes for some dune bashing, which basically translates to driving quite fast across the sand and up and over the sand dunes. It was quite a bumpy ride but was very exciting. Our driver did his best to mount each sand dune at increasing speed which did nothing to help the stability of my camera as I tried to film the event.
We had a few stops along the way but no more than 10mins each time as the heat was quite unbearable. The final stop was at the desert camp, where there was buffet foot, a bar, and entertainment. This included sand boarding, which I was generally pretty bad at, camel riding, which we passed on as we had done that already when in Lanzarote a few years back.
Cecilia had a henna tattoo done, which is basically painted onto the skin in a nice pattern and when it dries it falls off and leaves ink stain on your arm in a nice pattern for a week or so until it washes off. Once the sun had set it got a lot cooler and we were able to sit outside in the starlight and enjoy the evening’s entertainment in the form of a belly dancing performance. Then it was back into the 4x4s and back to our Hotel.
Google Maps Link – Satallite Map of the Desert Camp and Camel Farm
Friday 3rd June 2011 – Mall of Emirates and Palm Islands
The next day we decided to check out the second of the massive super malls in Dubai, the Mall of Emirates. This was just as massive as the Dubai Mall we had been to the other day, and included just as many of the world’s big brand stores. The only difference really was the addition of Ski Dubai, the world’s largest indoor artificial ski slope. Although it would have been nice to give this a try we decided to pass on grounds of cost and being too much of a chicken to give it a try as neither of us had ever been skiing before. So having looked around and done some shopping we decided it would be nice to go have a look around the Palm Island, the manmade island built in the shape of a palm tree.
We got a taxi straight up the main road which runs the length of the palm island, basically the whole length of the palm tree, and went to have a look at the Atlantis Hotel. A very impressive building, it looks like something that would be very much at home in La Vegas. The hotel is guests only so we couldn’t go for a look around but the hotel does have an Aquarium that is open to the public so we went for a look around there. We decided after seeing the aquarium and the water park earlier in the week thought that it wasn’t worth paying for entry here. So we had a little look around and then decided to head home. We were planning to get a taxi back to the nearest metro stop but we found that there was actually a monorail that ran the length of the palm Island from the Atlantis hotel back to the main land so we got that and did some sightseeing from the monorail. However it was getting dark by that time so we had no luck with getting good views of all the expensive villas apartments on the island.
When we got back to the mainland monorail station we found that it had not yet finished being built so we had to find our way out of what was basically a building site and try to find a way back to the nearest metro station. That was not easy as the only way out we could find took us out to the main freeway through Dubai, with no apparent way to get across we had to instead do our best to flag down a taxi which we managed to do about 15 mins later. Apparently they plan to eventually connect the monorail to the main metro line, which would have been handy, but like a few things in Dubai it’s currently only planned, just like Trump Tower Dubai, which had its own monorail station on the palm island but all that was there was a big brown patch of empty land.
