My little slice of touristy cheese

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Saturday, May 26, 2007

The Desert

By the title of the entry, I don't mean that I was eating a piece of cheese. I mean I went on a little touristy adventure here in Dubai--namely, a desert safari. It was cheesy--but so blissfully fun.

Eight of us booked a trip--and it was probably one of the zaniest groups you can imagine. We consisted of a quintessentially gay man, a farm girl from Maryland, a foul-mouthed, half-Filipino girl from Hawaii, a middle-aged Guatamalan, and a strictly moral, conservative Texan. Plus, a couple of less noteworthy people, like me.

You'd think that would be quite an adventure--and it was! The Safari company starts you off by driving you over all these red sand dunes. Now that is a lot of fun, because you can never quite tell which way down is, and you ride on the crest of the dunes like waves. You think your cars will roll over at least once, but they never seem to. Instead, you just sort of skid down the dune sideways. They call this "dune bashing" I believe.

My exiting moment in all this was me pretending that I could run down the side of a dune. I can't do this. I landed flat on my face. So now my cell phone crunches with Arabian sand when I try to call someone, and when I adjust the lens of my famous camera, you can hear the sand grind. What a hoot!

Nursing baby

This is what it looks like when you ride a camel

After that, you come to a sort of corny campsite, where you can pet camels and ride them, drink coffee, get henna, wear clothes, and get food. And let me tell you something, those baby camels were just adorable! The sweetest, most friendly critters I've seen in a long time. For those who know about my pet rats, try to imagine them as camels. For those who know nothing about pet rats, try not to imagine anything, because your attitude will inevitably be biased.

We spent the night there; they laid us out on a concrete circle that resembled a helipad, only it was covered with blankets and mattresses. And it was nice to just stare up at the stars, inhale the dry fresh air, and run around through the desert in our underclothes until the authorities noticed we were missing and drove after us and we all hid behind a bush.

Yeah. It was that nice.

There was only one thing about this I didn't like. For such a diverse group of people, they seemed to have one common preoccupation--Facebook. So--most of what we discussed was about what they were going to put on Facebook, what was already on Facebook, inside jokes from Facebook, people they know from Facebook...I'm starting to feel a generational gap here!

I get it, I get it: I should just start using Facebook already, rather write inane little stories in this blog.

This grows in the desert?!

Desert sunrise

Scary beetle!

Proof I was here