Mīnā’ Rāshid

Tour of Dubai and board our ship, Navigator at 6:00pm

For our first tour, we drove approximately 45 minutes to the Palm Island Resort. Along the way, we saw the Museum of the Future, a landmark devoted to innovative and futuristic ideologies. Located in the financial district of Dubai, the museum is a torus-shaped building (torus is a donut shape rotated in a certain way, on a certain axis) with windows in the form of a poem about the future, written by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai. The Museum takes you on a journey to the year 2071. With seven floors in total, the museum dedicates five of its floors to exhibits based on different themes. The tree-shaped Palm Jumeirah Island is known for glitzy hotels, posh apartment towers and upmarket global restaurants. Food trucks offering snacks like shawarma dot the Palm Jumeirah Boardwalk, popular for its views of the Dubai coastline and the iconic, ship and sail shaped Burj Al Arab hotel. From the air, this man-made commercial and residential complex looks like the trunk of a palm tree with branches reaching out on either side. The trunk is 1 kilometer long and there are 17 branches. There are 11 km of walking trails and two enormous hotels one of which is a virtual model of Atlantis in the Bahamas. It has 1530 rooms but no casino. During the drive-through, the symmetry was not at all noticeable and turned out to be not very exciting, However as pictured from above, it is remarkably creative.

The next part of the tour was really exciting. We visited the tallest building in the world called the Burj Khalifa that is 2,722 ft high (compared to the CN Tower at 1,815 feet. It is also three times the height of the Eiffel Tower.) with a 360° observation deck at 1,921 ft on the 124th floor. On March 28th, 2011 a French man, Alain Robert, nicknamed Spiderman, climbed up the outside of the Burj using a safety harness.
It’s a multi-use building that has restaurants, a hotel, residential apartments, office space and obviously is a tourist attraction with its observation decks.
Aside from holding the world record for being the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa holds six other world records. The Burj Khalifa is also the tallest freestanding structure in the world, has the highest number of stories in the world, has the highest occupied floor in the world, has the highest outdoor observation deck in the world, has the elevator with longest travel distance in the world, and has the tallest service elevator in the world. The elevator was particularly smooth and at 32 feet per second, it only took one minute to get to the top.

The view from the observation deck was spectacular. It is so high, you’re looking down on virtually every building and can see for miles, beyond which is just desert. We had the usual overpriced tourist pictures taken, but we’ve come this far, so we thought we deserved it. And to finish up the description of the Burj, here is a bit of useless trivia. If you weighed the total amount of concrete used in the construction, it would equal the weight of 100,000 elephants!

The access to the tower involved a lot of walking through the Dubai Mall which has 1200 of the most modern high end name brand stores in the world. It was bright and sparkling clean. We did not get a chance to see the other famous mall in Dubai, with the ski hill in it, but it is also spectacular, so to give an additional flavour of Dubai, a description of it follows. Called the Ski Dubai Mall, it features an indoor ski resort featuring an 85-metre-high indoor mountain (equivalent to a 25-story building) with 5 slopes of varying steepness and difficulty, including a 400-metre-long run, the world's first indoor black diamond run. A chairlift and a tow lift carry skiers and snowboarders up the mountain. And it is all inside!

After the Burj Khalifa, the tour continued back to board the ship, but Lee and I felt we had enough time to add two more attractions before we headed back. We ate our deluxe sandwich (that we made at the breakfast buffet from our hotel) and caught the 2:00pm performance of the Dubai Fountain, which is just outside the Dubai Mall. The fountain is contained within a 30-acre lake which is 900 feet long. There are over 1000 different “water expressions” and at any moment there can be up to 22,000 gallons of water in the air rising as high as 500 feet, all programmed to some very entertaining music. In the daytime it was exciting to watch but at night, with 6,600 lights, it would be fantastic.
Following that we took a taxi to the Magical Gardens, about a 1/2 hour drive that surprisingly cost only about $10:00. This was something that Lee had heard about and really wanted to see and it paid off in spades. Once again, remembering you were in Dubai, what else would you expect but the world’s largest garden, featuring over 150 million flowers covering 18 acres of land. There is even a life-size Air Emarites A380 double-decker airplane( yup, worlds largest passenger plane) covered in 500,000 flowers and living plants. There were lush, colourful, and imaginative garden areas, multiple levels, huge flower-covered elephants, teddy bears, horses, and quaint village houses. At the centre of it all was a Smurf Village, with blue-coloured Smurfs, in every imaginable gesture and position. The flowers were intensely colourful and covered imaginitive arches, hearts and circles. Sadly, we had to go back to the ship which cut our time short at the garden. After our taxi back to the port , I think we were the only people at the check in counter in the terminal as they were just about to close up shop so our check in, once they found a customs official, was very quick. Once on board, we had about an hour to unpack and get ourselves semi organized before going to the welcome cocktail party on the pool deck and catch up with Peter and Heather. Our afternoon was far more enjoyable than theirs because, in part, their bus was late leaving the Burj and they were stuck in traffic for over an hour.
It was an excellent welcoming party following which we went to the Compass Rose restaurant for a lovely first dinner on-board. The entertainment that night was by an Adele tribute artist, and it was lively and most enjoyable.Read more