An extended stopover to explore Dubai…

I had an overnight flight from Adelaide directly to Dubai which meant I arrived in the very early hours of the morning.  A full day ahead of checking out this new city..

Cruising down Sheikh Zayed Road

I took my time getting to my accommodation which was located 5 minutes away from Burjuman metro station and dumped my bags ready for two days filled with non-stop exploring.

I don’t normally do this but I bought a ticket for the “hop on, hop off” busses as this seemed the easiest way to get around to the main sites with a bit of an explanation in-between.

Exploring by dhow

I got to stop off at a few places such as Camel/Horse Museum, Coins Museum, Architect Museum (I didn’t go into most of these though), and walked around the areas.  The buildings here are just so huge and it felt strange to be back in such a big city again (especially as it was all built in the middle of a desert).

The spice market was cool to walk around and continuing onto the Gold Souk after a dhow cruise up the Dubai creek.

I stayed on the bus to check out the Palm Jumeirah and onto the Atlantis The Palm where I hopped off to go for a bit of a walk around. 

Next stop was at the Dubai mall where I, of course, went to the top of the Burj Khalifa.  Now this was a damn impressive view.  Such a contract of desert to sea with massive sky scrapers in the middle of all this.

The view from the Burj Khalifa

The Dubai Mall was also pretty cool as I stumbled upon the aquarium and stood watching the fish for a while.

The Burj Khalifa

I managed to fit in a spot of last minute shopping before heading outside to check out the cool show of the Dubai fountains as the sunset – beautiful.

The water fountains outside the Dubai Mall

The next day I organised for myself to go on a desert safari for majority of the day – this involved four wheel driving (nowhere near what we are used to doing at home however) through the desert and stopping off at a desert camp where there was entertainment (belly dancing, henna painting, camel rides etc) and dinner.

Through the dunes..

This of course, was extremely touristy but hey I had to check it out..

I had arranged for the company to then drop me off at the airport for my overnight flight to New York and then finally back to the rock..

Chilling with my mate..

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