Dubai - Land of the brunch

Hello again,

Following the tightarse back-packing theme of our last blog, we flew from HK to Dubai on the red eye flight via Doha, Qatar and arrived at 3am. Despite this ridiculous time our friends Trev and Alli (T&A) were there with open, albeit tired arms! Finally we were in Dubai - After 18 months worth of emails, phone calls and late night text exchages we had finally arrived to see their current home!


Even though we arrived in the early hours of the morning, the first sightings of Dubai brought to mind one word... sand... and desert-loads of it! For those not familiar with Dubai it is essentially 50 billion dollars worth of construction in the middle of the desert. Imagine high rise office towers, residential buildings and hotels sitting in a giant sandpit - That's probably the most basic (ignorant, but true) way to describe it.

Dubai to me seemed like a movie set for a 50 year post-apocalyptic-oil-boom-town film featuring Kevin Costner and cost(ner)ing $300 million to make. Whilst living in the desert might have some downsides (i.e sand in your face, sand in your car, and sand in your sandwich), it actually has a lot to offer the traveller.

Before we get started on all the great things we did/saw, we must first give a very big thankyou to Trev and Alli (T&A) for having the generosity to rent a two bedroom appartment at the Dubai Marina for the duration of our stay. Many thanks T&A&BS :)

Having not seen T&A since Byron (Sorry Trev, individual visits don't count), we were extremely excited to be in Dubai. Alli didn't mess around and our fist afternoon was spent on the 29th floor of the famous Burj al Arab (the 'Sail' hotel) overlooking Dubai's coast and the Palms. Wow, 7 class hotel high tea goes down like no other!

The next day we set off for Abu Dhabi to visit the Grand Mosque and a series of oddly shaped and masterfully designed buildings. The Grand Mosque certainly was.. well, grand (see picture). The mosque is the 2nd biggest in the world and houses up to 1 million devotees at a time. OK, I fudged that last statistic, but if you can immagine 1 million Muslims praying at the one time then it surely has to be here. The place is unreal - The decorative pieces and sheer size of the mosque just blow your mind. It makes the ones at Auburn look like shoe boxes.

Following on from the Grand Mosque, T&A took us across the UAE to the central coast equivalent of Dubai, called Fujerah. We visited one of the local holiday resorts for a day's worth of cocktails, sun and cocktails. Wow - Do Fujerian's know how to mix a drink!?! The afternoon was spent lazing in the pool bar side, ordering drinks and eating beer nuts with wet hands - Awesome! A special shout out for Alli's skin is needed here - goooooooooooo Red!

The next day T&A had booked us in for our first ever Dubai brunch. For those not familiar with the brunch phenomenon (which I fully intend to bring to Australia), it involves a four hour marathon 5 star buffet of every food and alcohol imaginable. Every food AND ALCOHOL... IMAGINABLE!! For a sum of approximately AUD$125, you can spend the afternoon in a glorious 5 star hotel, drinking top shelf liquor and cocktails whilst dining on imported French cheese, NZ grain feed beef, Aussie lamb and Swiss chocolate. For a duo like Renee and I, two very big foodies at heart, this was absolute bliss! It was by far the best $125 one could spend on a dining experience in the world - Sorry Mich and Snot, Laziko's and Burwood RSL don't make the cut.

Needless to say the combined team effort of Sly and McBryde represented the Aussie flag (minus southern-cross tatoo) in full pride. At 4pm when the bar area closed, there were a total 38 full cocktails on our table! Freakishly, security and the wait staff didn't kick us out but encouraged us to drink the cocktails quickly so they could set up for dinner!! Now, that's what I call service.!

Our 2nd last day was spent nursing a pretty heavy hang over and not much else. Trev did serve up a batch of his homemade sausage rolls, which I (John) eventually got food poisoning from!! It wasn't the 60+ standard drinks from the day before, it WAS the sausage rolls... The next 24 hours for me were spent vomitting or crapping, or both (combined toilet and bath) and were pretty painfull. Less than 2 weeks into the trip and I'd already lost the battle against e-coli! Jesus, downtown Kenya is looking good...

Overall Dubai was a very cool experiance made better by the fact that T&A lived there and could show us all the hot spots (Trev, thanks for taking me to the Snakepit - This was another international style buffet; it didn't include food and alcohol, but Russian, Mongolian...).

Next stop Jordan!! Thanks for reading :)

Johnny and Renee