23 November - Dubai, UAE

Wednesday, 23 November. Dubai

Today was our last full day in Dubai. We had the buffet breakfast again in Celebrities this morning, although we weren’t the first ones today. Our plan for the day was to take the “Big Bus Tours” of Dubai – and we did.

We took the shuttle bus from the hotel to the Atlantis Hotel on Palm Island. This is a picture of the Jumeirah Palm Island that I found on the web. To get to the Atlantis Hotel, the roadway goes under the water to the encircling breakwater. It is immense. We had seen a video on the construction of Palm Island; they had workers walk around with GPS devices as they blew the sand to build up the shape of the island and the palm fronds. Wow!

The advantage of taking the Big Bus was being able to see the main sights of the city in a relatively short period of time. The bus is also called a HOHO bus – Hop On/Hop Off – because you can get on at any of the numerous stops and get off at any of them. So if you wanted to go the Mall of the Emirates and go indoor skiing, for example, you could. By the way, that didn’t interest us. We started on the Blue Bus (the beach route), and we went around the Dubai Mall where I took this picture of Burj Khalifa. To get a grasp of how tall it is, try counting the number of floors in just one of the sections of the building.

At Wafi Mall we switch to the Red Bus (City Tour), which took us along the Creek area. We got off at stop #9 and walked through the Gold Souk (it really reminded me of walk along 47^th Street in New York City – the Diamond District). We thought we were lost, and then we finally found what we were looking for – the Spice Souk. There were so many spices available from the Middle Eastern region of the world that it was hard even imagine what you would do with all of them. There’s just not enough space in this blog for all the pictures I took of the rows and racks of spices. We did buy some nice Saffron at what we thought was a good price.

We then decided to meander back to bus stop #9, hoping to find something to eat along the way. We found plenty of places to buy gold, diamonds, spices, scarves, electronics – but doesn’t anyone eat around here? We finally found a small shop with menus in Arabic (of course). We pointed, sat down, and waited. The food was pretty good, and the people watching was interesting. We paid and gave the owner a tip for his most courteous service, and we were back on our pursuit of the bus. One minute later, we were near water, which meant, the Creek, which meant, turn right and we would find the bus stop.

After re-boarding the bus and heading along the Deira side of the Creek, we crossed the Maktoum Bride to Bur Dubai, and we hopped off at #5 and took a one-hour Arabian Dhow Creek Cruise. The wooden dhow is still used today for transporting goods between ports, although it cannot carry as much as the larger container ships. While the dhow is used mainly for carrying cargo, there are many small boats to ferry passengers from one side of the creek to the other as there are very few bridges crossing it.

After our cruise, we walked the “only 10 minute walk” to Blue Bus stop #12. It was getting late in the day, and so this was the next-to-the last bus here at Burjuman. We eventually got along Jumeirah Beach Road as the sun was going down; timing didn’t work to get any picturesque photos of the sunset. We hopped off again at #16, Souk Madinat, where i was able to get this evening picture of Burj Al Arab. We had dinner again at The Noodle House, and asked them to spice it up a bit for us this time, as their “may be spicy” notation wasn’t very spicy. It still didn’t do much.

After dinner, we walked around the souk to see if there was any last-minute shopping we wanted to do (there wasn’t). Knowing that we were flying out in the morning, we decided that it would be a good thing to head back to the hotel and pack our bags. Fortunately, there were always plenty of taxis in front of the souk, and so we were back at the Royal Mirage within ten minutes.