Old Dubai

Luckily it's winter in Dubai, because it's sure hot here. Sometimes when you get close to the water, a sea breeze blows in to cool you down, but mostly, it's uncomfortably warm and dry, and you look for places to hide from the sun. It explains why most activity seems to occur in the morning, late afternoon and the evening.

Our mode of travelling is to generally avoid organised tours, but instead we do our research in advance, decide where we want to go, and then do whatever is necessary to get there. In Dubai, this is a challenge. The fantastic public transport system of Hong Kong is almost entirely absent here. There does seem to be a bus system, but the routes are not apparent to strangers, and tourists are obviously not expected to use buses. Instead, there is an excellent and cheap taxi system. The reputable taxis are sandy coloured, and clearly metered. The trouble is getting one! The best method seems to be to just find a spot where you think a taxi is likely to be able to pull up and drop off a customer, and just wait there. Such spots are not easy to find - the traffic in Dubai is unbelievably heavy, there are few places for any vehicles to pull over, and the whole city seems to be a contruction zone.

Even our hotel, the Holiday Inn Downtown Dubai, has trouble getting taxis. We waited maybe 15 minutes for one to arrive after it had been called by the concierge. And we waited 55 minutes in a huge queue at the extremely modern and ultra-popular Deira City Centre shopping complex for a taxi back to the hotel at 9:00 at night. The experience in this queue of hundreds of patient shoppers will probably prove to be one of the most memorable of our Dubai stay. Firstly, the taxi rank at the Centre was designed in the expectation of long waits. There is a fixed queue layout about 100m long, just like at airports, but it's not long enough. The queue extended another 100m into the shopping mall itself. The queue is startlingly well mannered and patient, although two people pushed through it while we were there, without a murmur of complaint from anyone. Of all the locals, it fell to Clare (trained in queues at Perisher Valley) to accost the second person, a young lady, who then said that she was ill, and indeed she seemed to be.

Trouble is, you need taxis to get anywhere. Everywhere we wanted to go seems to be 5-10km from the hotel. We would walk some of these trips except it's hot and we don't know the way, and the maps are poor, and those footpaths which are not dug up are covered in parked cars. It's easier, but dangerous, to walk on the road!

This all sounds like a lot of grumbling, but the truth is, we have enjoyed the experience, but the stress of waiting for a taxi, then getting stuck in taxi, is a big worry if you have to be at a particular place at a particular time. We also discovered (by looking at signs on construction sites) that an underground railway ("metro") is being built in Dubai. This will revolutionise the city, we're sure, and will go a long way to overcoming the problems we encountered.

That Deira Central shopping complex is an experience too. We ate at the Cafe Havana. We had read that in the evening the Havana would be crowded with Arab men in their "dish dashas" whiling the time away with their friends, and indeed that proved to be the case. Men wearing this traditional dress are very common here. The dish dashas are almost always a pure white, although there are some in pale pastel colours, beige etc. These guys look very proud of their appearance, and their clothing is always impeccably clean. In contrast the ladies are dressed mostly in black, so called "abayas". The veils are called "shaylas". The extent to which the ladies cover their faces seems quite variable, ranging from not at all, to a shawl covering the hair, to the lower half of the face, to everything but a narrow eye slit, to not even an eye slit.

Then, proving the tolerance of this society, there are women, not always tourists, dressed in modern western gear, sometimes very short and skimpy, despite cautions to the contrary in guidebooks and elsewhere. By all accounts, this tolerance does not extend to other parts of the middle east. Male tourists seem to be able to get away with cargo pants, but no locals wear such stuff. We have been very careful to fully cover arms and legs, despite the warm weather.

We have explored the souqs in older parts of the city: they are generally narrow lanes of shops jammed between old buildings and usually focusing on a particular type of merchandise. For example, there are souqs called spice, gold, perfume, electronics (hardly traditional!), money changing etc. Amongst these were myriads of tiny shops selling textiles for traditional Arab dress. The souqs are crowded, and the shopkeepers, almost all males, enthusiastically invite you in to view their wares. Structurally, the souqs don't look original, but their alleyways have been widened, straightened and beautified a lot. The spice souq was the most charming, crammed in an extremely narrow alley, and filled with the most delicious of smells.

Another highlight, if not the highlight of the old city, was the Dubai Museum. This is in an old fort, but in an excavated area underneath the fort is a particularly modern presentation capturing in full size models much of the ancient ant recent history of Dubai. This museum is not very big, but it is really one of the best we have seen anywhere in the world. A must for any visit here! And it has the only toilet we were able to find in the city outside of hotels and restaurants. The cost to visit this superb museum is 3 dirhams, less than a dollar.

To cover the old part of Dubai, you need to cross the river in vessels they call abras. These are the most basic of boats, nowadays diesel powered, with a wooden plank for a seat. The cost is 1 dirham, and each one holds about 20 people. It leaves only when all seats are full, a wait of less than a minute, and the next abra pulls into the dock as soon as the previous one leaves. A fantastic public transport system!