Moevenpick Bur Dubai

... last time I was here. I kept two hundred dollar bills in my pocket in case I got caught. Great dessert bar. You can land you chopper on the roof and walk to your table, You can also look down and see the Palm Island development, big beyond comprehension. Scores of hotels, hundreds of big houses, all built on a manmade island in the Gulf. <br><br>Tomorrow...Return to Africa!

... in. It was enormous and had everything that you could need to find at a mall. It even had a huge aquarium in the middle of it, pictures to follow sometime. The funny thing about Dubai is it is very Muslim. About half of the women are dressed head to toe in those black robe things that only exposes their eyes. Some of the men walk around in the white robe things like a traditional Arab man. The people who are not decked out like ...

Picked up at 4pm by Sunflower Tours and 6 of us headed out to somewhere in the Desert.....It was hot, dusty and bumpy and BRILLIANT! We made a stop at the beginning of the desert and the dunes spread across the landscape that seemed to go on for ever.....with the hot waves rising from the piping hot sand.<br><br>The sand is red and the dunes are steep. We headed off with the 3 Landrovers. Sanding bashing or dune bashing is scary and I was very ...

Hi, Can you belive it, here we are enjoying ourselves in Dubai. Weather has been a gr8 25 degrees not bad for winter weather. We have been doing lots of sight seeing with the hop on hop off bus and managed to see everything we think !! This place is quite amazing, culturally diverse and very opulent. seeminlgy ...

... to the table. The rapidly setting sun signaled that the Ramadan fast was about to be broken. I got to eat a typical Ramadan feast with a bunch of Jordanians I had never met before in my life and the food was delicious. It was bowls of stewed lamb in all kinds of flavors with rice and pita. You take a piece of pita, fold it in your hand and then scoop some meat into it right from the platters. I am left handed so I had to make an effort to do it with ...

... but too good to pass up). Another taxi ride took us to the biggest mall outside North America, the impressively named Mall of the Emirates. Claimed to be the size of seventy three football fields and containing over four hundred shops, the mall is most renowned for its indoor ski field. We were amazed to see people in ski clothes zipping down a mountain on skis and children hurling themselves down toboggan runs. There were even ski lifts. The Virgin Megastore in this ...

... but it is safe to say that i was mightily ****** off. On leaving that room i was taken to a table where several customs officals went through my main bag with a fine toothcomb. I realised that i had some pirate DVD's in my bag that were wrapped up in a black big bag. When they found this bag it did look very dodgy and they got very excited and were dissapointed to see it was only DVD's. In the ned they let me go but it ...

... what is known as The Creek. The Creek is a bit of a misnomer as it is really an inlet off of the gulf that extends fourteen kilometers inland. It was dredged in the twentieth century to make it easier for trading vessels to make their way into more usable port areas. The area has several museums, one of them in the old fort, including the former home of the Al Maktoum family. The museum houses an outstanding collection of old black and white photographs ...

... and did a bit of people watching. Even better was a man comes around and offers you a cold drink...! I walked the streets for a bit looking at the various shops then made my way back to the dock to get the abra to Bur Dubai again. I went and put my SD ...

... it did kind of come that close---more on that later). We concluded our city tour at a mall - yes, a different one from which we had begun the tour. The beach tour was similarly lacking in breadth, but this was really what we were waiting for, as it featured two sites we had heard so much about: Burj al Arab, and the Mall of the Emirates. First up, Burj al Arab. "Burj," as we affectionately called it, is the only seven star hotel in the world. It sits on its own man-made ...