1st day: A day and a night in Dubai

After getting up early this morning in my hotel at Dubai marina I started the day by driving to the Palm island. This was the first of several artificial islands built in Dubai. It was finished officially in 2006, built out of 94million cubic metres of sand and 7 million tons of rock adding 525km coastline to Dubai. Costs were at the time around 12billion USD. Indeed when driving around on the island you can still see massive construction works going on. By the financial crisis the initially skyhigh prices melted down and today you can get a 300m2 villa on 1 of the leafs for around 500K-900K.

By clicking on the link below you can look at my geotagged pics and my route absolved in 24 hours in Dubai.  You can zoom in the map and/or click on the photos to look at the location of each shoot.


Close to the palm island there is the Hotel Burj Arab, the only 7 star hotel on the world. In brackets I d like to note that officially a hotel can not get more than 5 stars anyway. the smallest "rooms" are 170m2 suites starting around a 1000 EUR a night if you are lucky. I went swimming here on the near public beach. Although it is early winter here already water temperatures were close to 30degre celsius.

It was still only 10am so I went back to the Marina to have a traditional arab breakfast in a fast food place.

You have to know about Dubai marina, that it is of course artificial as everything in Dubai and the 4,5km bay  was carved out of the stone and the sand and there was more than 100 skycrapers built around in a few years, mainly residential towers and hotels.

After my brunch and the small walk around the marina I had to hurry up, because I had a reservation for the elevator in Burj Khalifa, the highest building in the world with its 828metres. Yes you read it correctly, you have to make a reservation weeks in advance if you like to get a place in the elevator. I had my slot at 2.05pm and went up with an other 29 people in less than a minute to the observation deck at 454m height, which is actually approx. the same like the the Shanghai World Financial Center I ve been 2 years ago. The tower also features an Armani hotel, residences and offices. The surface at the observation deck is already limited and the highest constantly occupied floor at 584 metres has only some 50m2. All in all the building is not that tall, only the more than 200m high steel spire -comprising communication systems- brings it to be a record holder.

After that I took the metro to explore the real Dubai, a traditional rather small fishermans village. To be honest I liked the old town much better, because it was real. I have to admit that all the skyscrapers are impressive but almost half them is not finished and I am wondering if they will be ever fully occupied or will just stay there as monuments of oil money frozen in concrete. The real Dubai is full with life, markets selling fishes, spices and gold.

My plain is leaving short after midnight to Johannesburg, where I am going to hire a car and leave the city asap and possibly drive all the way to Swaziland.

As usual you can see all the pics:

https://picasaweb.google.com/szaipandras/SouthAfrica