Highlights - Essential Info - Hotels
An exotic blend of shimmering contemporary prosperous trading city and timeless treasure trove of ancient Arabian culture, Dubai offers a fascinating window through which visitors can see both the past and the future. Sleek and eye-popping skyscrapers, luxury hotels & shopping centres and wide modern highways are juxtapositioned with beautiful old mosques, sandalwood traders in bustling souks and old wooden dhows plying the waters of Dubai Creek.
What was a small coastal hamlet on the edge of the desert has become a rich and powerful trading hub and a bastion of capitalism in less than a century resulting in an extraordinarily vibrant melting pot of culture, colour and lifestyles.
It is also equally well known for its deliciously warm climate where visitors can relax in the heat of the sun on mile upon mile of soft golden sands with the aquamarine waters of the Arabian Gulf lapping at their toes. Dubai is also synonymous with big and often architecturally dramatic hotels that can be found both in the city itself and along the coast. Service, comfort and style are the names of the game and with the cosmopolitan workforce, the hotels always ensure visitors a thoroughly comfortable stay as well as a hugely diverse array of fabulous cuisine and state of the art watersports and other sporting facilities.
Head inland and you enter a very different world – the desert land of their forbears where Bedouin and their camels still wander nomadically from wadi to oasis. Four wheel drive trips into the desert and into the wadis of the Hajjar Mountains with starlit dinners in the dunes or camping out Bedouin style all offer a refreshing respite from the heat of the coast… this is a beautiful place full of extraordinary contrasts where a whole different world awaits.
