World Tour 08-09: December 29-30, 2008

The Sand In My Shoes Edition:

Monday, December 29, 2008, was quite the long and eventful day. We started by going to the Madinat Jumeirah complex to do a little shopping and take some photos of the Burj al Arab Hotel (the most famous building in Dubai and probably one of the most famous in the world)


After a couple of hours there, we went back to our hotel to get ready for our Desert Safari that left at 3PM. When the 4x4 arrived to pick us up (along with a nice couple from west-central Illinois and a couple from Pakistan) we were off to the races, literally! Our driver drove like a maniac as we crossed the streets of Dubai. I think we were on 2 wheels on a few of the corners. We all just hung-on and prayed that we’d make it alive. Little did we know that this would be good practice for the crazy driving we would face once we got to the dunes.


Once at the dunes we took a quick break and returned to the 4x4 (reluctantly) and began our four-wheeling adventure. Up the sand dunes, down the sand dunes, along the side of the sand dunes. Every time one of the other vehicles in our caravan spun out or slid down the side of the dunes, our driver (who spoke very little English) would shake his head and say, “tsk tsk tsk”. At one point he even said something to the effect that we were lucky, “those other drivers are from India and Bangladesh, what do they know about sand!?!” I have to say he was right. The boy who was 2-wheeling while talking on his cell phone didn’t do us wrong. (video of part of the ride is embedded in the blog, and linked to Facebook friends – and note that while this part of the ride didn’t look too bad, this was the part that I felt comfortable taking my hand off of the “oh crap” bars).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUCJr7ZZFuM

Once we were finished with the dunes, we went to a desert camp where they fed us some wonderful BBQ, Chris smoked the hookah (or however it is spelled) and gave us a belly dancer show. Walking around in the sand dunes put a great deal of sand in my Pumas (UGH!). And, finally, no trip to the desert would be complete without a nice camel ride.


We made it back to the hotel around 9PM and we crashed as we had to be up early this morning (Tuesday, December 30, 2008) in order to catch our flight to South Africa. The flight was long and uneventful (about 8 hours) and I had a window seat in economy – yep, no Business Class Upgrade for this leg. Hopefully we can make it back. At the time of this writing, I am in the Johannesburg, South Africa airport awaiting our transfer to Cape Town, where we will spend the New Year’s Holiday.