The belly dancer in her jewelled
costume undulated around the dining room while the cameras flashed. Yes,
she was doing a pretty good job. But I was more intrigued by the line
of little girls following behind her, clad in sashes sewn with tiny
bells and doing their best to copy her wiggles. Among them were my
daughters Asya, eight, red with exertion, and seven-year-old Rosie,
tongue sticking out as she concentrated on the steps.
Sunshine (and the odd shower): April or May is the perfect time to visit the Middle East
They were certainly getting
into the swing of their first Arabian holiday. Like many people, I've
thought of Dubai only as somewhere you have to transit through on your
way to more interesting terrain. My husband Richard and I stopped here
on the way back from our honeymoon and, having spent five hours hanging
around the duty free, I considered I'd exhausted its facilities - and my
new husband's patience. I never regarded it as a holiday destination in
itself.
But we
weren't prepared to wait for spring any longer - and then a friend said
April or May is the perfect time to visit Dubai. So we left London in
the chill and arrived, bleary-eyed, in the promising 32c heat. (In the
summer, it gets so hot they have to chill the swimming pools.) Our
hotel, the JA Jebel Ali Golf Resort, occupies a prime spot 20 minutes
outside the city, towards Abu Dhabi, on a white sandy beach. It has
several swimming pools, restaurants offering everything from Japanese
cuisine to beach barbecues and entertainment, which included the belly
dancer. Its sizeable gardens, criss-crossed with streams full of fish
and turtles, are inhabited by dozens of peacocks.
Dune stars: Asya, left, and Rosie enjoy a camel ride in the desert
The peacocks that roost in the
palm trees like oversized pigeons woke us with their strange miaowing
calls at 7am with such regularity that the children renamed them the
'peaclocks'. Naturally, there were the usual children's clubs on offer,
but with amenities including a beautifully kept petting zoo, which had
two friendly camels alongside the usual rabbits, goats and chickens, and
a riding stables populated by Arab ponies and Shetlands, whose coats
had been clipped into fantastic swirls, we really didn't think we'd ever
need to use them.
On
our first full day, I leapt eagerly from bed, desperate to see the sun
for the first time in what seemed like months. Alas, the sky had turned
an ominous yellow colour. Then it started to rain. 'We haven't had rain
like this for two years!' one member of staff told us ecstatically.
Richard and I looked at each other in dismay. Staying stuck indoors with
our grumpy, jet-lagged children was a grim prospect. 'Take them to the
mall,' advised a kindly resident, who had arrived for a riding lesson.
'But they hate shopping!'
'Doesn't matter,' she said, somewhat mysteriously. For in Dubai, malls are far more than merely places to shop.
Fish and shops: Watching the colourful inhabitants of the Dubai Mall Aquarium flash by
The Mall of the Emirates contains one
of the world's largest indoor ski slopes, with real snow and live
penguins. And if the 1,200 shops of the Dubai Mall, ranging from Marks
& Spencer to Missoni, ever start to pall, you can try scuba-diving
with sharks in the giant aquarium, ice-skating on the Olympic-sized rink
or browsing the world's biggest sweetshop, Candylicious. Naturally, we
headed there first and the girls disappeared into a Willy Wonka world of
strangely-flavoured jelly beans, lollipops the size of your head and
sweets you can play tunes on and draw pictures with before eating them.
Just
opposite the entrance is the aquarium, so while they stocked up on
e-numbers, Richard and I watched the antics of a giant stingray. It
worked its way industriously along the 160ft tank, oblivious to the gang
of silent sharks hanging out under the dock like Mafiosi. Next on our
to-do list was Kidzania, a role-play park in which children get a chance
to try out different jobs and earn pretend money in a scaled-down city.
But the queue was off-puttingly enormous - as were the prices.
A consumerist's nirvana: The Dubai Mall
It would have cost around £100
for the four of us to go in, which seemed a bit steep to experience life
as a window-washer, house painter or supermarket cashier. Instead, we
trudged past the shops selling jewelled boxes of smoked salmon-flavoured
macaroons to Sega Republic, a computer-game theme park. The girls had a
wonderful time zapping zombies, riding jeeps through simulated jungles
and, in one particularly tasteless game, sitting on toilets firing water
cannons at the feet of cartoon bathers in an effort to win hideous
stuffed toys.
When
we emerged at last, the sky had cleared. Above us, the world's tallest
building, the Burj Khalifa, zig-zagged into the brilliant sky like a
lightning strike, its spire visible from 59 miles away. And Dubai
itself, which in the rain had appeared to be an entirely sand-coloured
version of Manhattan, revealed its true colours, the space-age buildings
gleaming in metallic skins of gold, silver, blue and green. We were
impressed by the sail-like Burj Al Arab shimmering in the distance. Hard
to believe that just half an hour away is the desert, unchanged for
millennia. Wanting to see this other Dubai, with the children enticed by
the prospect of camel rides, we signed up for a desert safari.
I felt a twinge of unease at the
sight of our driver, Mohammed, who was clad in sober white robes, but
had a distinctly piratical twinkle in his eye. Having lowered his tyre
pressure, he set off at nose-bleeding speed across the desert, charging
the jeep up sheer cliffs of ochre-coloured sand and then surfing down
them sideways. This real-life rollercoaster ride lasted 45 minutes.
Richard
loved it as much as Mohammed did. I thought we were all going to die,
and poor Rosie was sick and her sunhat blew away in the desert wind,
last seen heading towards Iran. When we finally arrived at our desert
camp, the lurching, gurgling camels seemed, by comparison, to be as
sedate as club armchairs.
As
we swayed across the sands towards the setting sun, I remembered with
astonishment how I'd been worried that a family trip to Dubai might be a
little bit boring.
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