Dubai and London

With the possible exception of Shanghai, we have never seen a city with so much construction going on. There are huge cranes everywhere, and many of the new projects are the biggest, the tallest etc. in the world. The photo shows what is apparently the world's tallest building, but it's status is only temporary, as a bigger one is going up somewhere else soon. There is a new metro system being built (desperately needed), but even apart from that, it seems that every street is being dig up for something or other. There is a new airport (the world's biggest) under construction, but (according to a taxi driver) won't be ready for quite a few years.

All of this is really quite amazing for a relatively small city of 1.4m people, 80% of whom are expat workers from elsewhere. The oil, discovered relatively recently in Dubai, has made the 20% very rich indeed.

The old airport, which we had to use for our flight to London, is pretty big and impressive in its own right. Getting there, a full 5km from our Holiday Inn, was another matter. Our taxi went via a most obscure route and we thought he may be ripping us off, but he pointed to the traffic jam on the main road and said the delays there were up to an hour! It looked as ifthough he may be right, but he got us there in 10 minutes. Outbound immigration was much more efficient than coming in, and we were searched / scanned 5 times before boarding our British Airways flight. The terminal itself was at least as crowded as Dubai itself, with dozens of people looking as though they had slept the night on the floor there.

The flight was uneventful, although an hour late departing due to some paperwork hassle at Dubai. Heathrow proved to be not as awful as some reports in the Australian press would have it. The queue at immigration was maybe 15 minutes, with another 15 minutes waiting for our bags to appear.

Weather on arrival was cold, dreary and rainy, and even at 3pm, it was just plain dark outside. Ah! London in winter.

We caught the Heathrow Express to Paddington. This train was positively grubby compared with the Airport Express in Hong Kong, and cost a mere $76 for the two of us. This was modest compared to the $100 we then spent on a taxi to get from Paddo to the Ramada Docklands, but at least the driver was entertaining (and you can't even pay by credit card). We had hoped a new out-of-town hotel would be a better proposition than the preposterous London hotels, but the room is small, the in room facilities are poor, and it's probably lucky that we have forgotten what our prepaid booking cost for here.