For a holiday intended to be soothing, Dubai began badly. Not a day passed before we left without our reading about people being imprisoned for arriving with a codeine in their toiletries bag or a poppy seed on the sole of their shoe.
Rather than take chances, we jettisoned all medicines, vacuumed our suitcases and soaked our shoes in disinfectant.
But no matter how clean you know yourself to be, you don’t relax until they let you through. Which, somewhat anticlimactically, they did without anyone raising an eye to look at us. Sad to discover your hell-raising days are behind you.
As arrivals go, this couldn’t have been smoother. Efficient airport, 10-minute drive to hotel, birds welcoming the dawn as we checked in. A moment’s disappointment that the Park Hyatt wasn’t one of Dubai’s palaces of bling, but then we saw the beauty in its chastity – long, cool corridors, Moorish arches, gardens on all sides, terraces, fountains – not monastic in the deprivation sense, for everything was here, but discreetly worldly, a hotel for business and relaxation, but no conglomeration of hungry-eyed men in business suits, and no marauding families either. In short, a haven of the very calm we’d come to find.
Advertisement
That’s the beauty of a place that’s new and getting newer every minute: there is nothing you absolutely must see or do From our balcony on the creek we watched the city skyline change. It happens quickly in Dubai. Blink and that’s another tower gone up. It can be thrilling to observe, this frenetic development, especially from somewhere placid. We did nothing for days but stretch out beside the palm-shaded pool.
Exquisite, the quiet here. It crossed our minds never to leave. We had no touristical obligations. That’s the beauty of a place that’s new and getting newer every minute: there is nothing you absolutely must see or do. You succumb to pampering, drink mint tea, eat scented food, and doze.
Eventually, because the spirit of man is restless, we stirred and called a taxi.
Like Los Angeles, Dubai doesn’t do feet. It’s taxi or it’s nothing. After half an hour (would be less if there were fewer cars) the creek stops being a marina for motor launches on which sheikhs pad about as though they’re floating gentlemen’s clubs, and becomes a boisterous thoroughfare and wharfage.
Rudimentary water taxis ferry busy people from one bank to the other, turning to collect another load before they’ve disgorged the last, while dhows of extraordinarily exciting piratical design, multicoloured, made apparently from any materials to hand, load up televisions and iPods to take to China.
Advertisement
Here, although you only have to look up to see skyscrapers, you feel you are in an older Middle East. Cross the road and you are in the gold and spice souks, linked by alleyways of shops selling watches and pashminas. You do the holiday thing here – you haggle over a square of silk, you let yourself be led away to buy a fake Louis Vuitton wallet, you triumph or turn mean over amounts of money you’d spend at home on an ice cream.
Fun, if you don’t mind the company of fellow tourists, but we quickly find, now we’re out, that there’s more fun still in shopping where the people who live here shop. And that means the malls, which multiply faster than the tower blocks.
Clear your mind of what we call a mall, some of these are fantasy cities, with souks, catacombs, hotels, gourmet shops selling nougat by the sackload and marzipan sculpted to look like porcelain, and best of all – if you can tear yourself away from the Wafi Gourmet in the pyramidal mall of that name and don’t mind sweltering across town to the Mall of the Emirates – a ski slope.
Not a polystyrene ski slope but a whole alpine village, kept a few degrees below freezing, in which Emirati women put ano-raks over their abayas, adjust their veils and fall about in the snow, laughing.
Advertisement
Dubai is a city-state of expats and immigrant workers from the Indian subcontinent and Asia, with Emiratis comprising less than 20% of the population. Mutual resentment simmers beneath the surface, waiting to erupt, but, for now, the Emirati men in their spotless whitedish-dashas, and the black-cloaked women, veiled or not, smoke and saunter about town, or lounge about with their feet up (that’s the men – the women huddle more intimately, like convocations of ravens on mobile phones), as though they are the ones on holiday. We while away hours looking at them, so sumptuously unoccupied are they in appearance – like the lilies of the field – so mysterious is the accommodation their austere faith makes to the indolent luxuriance of their lifestyle.
In a store in a more modest mall I see a T-shirt that says “Someone who loves me very much went to Dubai and got me this shirt”. This is a snapshot of the dilemma Dubai faces – how to marry the vulgarity westerners expect to find on holiday with a culture that abhors coarseness and insult. Result: a jokey T-shirt that has lost its joke. But at least nobody’s rolling around the streets dead drunk with horns on her head and L-plates on her back. Not yet.
Every hotel has portraits of the ruling sheikhs in the reception area, and even in the desert there is no escape Dubai is a paternalistic state. Every hotel has portraits of the ruling sheikhs in the reception area, and even in the desert there is no escape from them. From giant hoardings they look down, benign but missing nothing. “Our Visionary Leaders”, the posters say, leaving no room for disagreement.
As a westerner, one feels ambiguously about this, though I attach no more credence to democracy as a universal cureall than I do to poppy seeds.
Advertisement
And what we see in the desert, on the way to the Arab equivalent of a medieval theme night (belly-dancers, whirling dervishes, Omar Sharif on a camel), requires vision indeed. In readiness for what can only be called a Recreation of the World, the desert has been flattened; roadside stage sets advertise what’s coming – habitable theme parks of all the continents, with Eiffel Towers, Big Bens and Aztec ruins. So who needs Anywhere Else?
It feels ironic, as do the architectural references elsewhere in Dubai to such monuments as the Chrysler Building. Are we being laughed at? Or is Dubai boundless in its admiration for western success? The tower blocks we drive past, as we change hotels and head for the even greater luxury of Jumeirah Beach – the Ritz-Carlton is where we’re going – are owned or sponsored by Boris Becker, Michael Schumacher, Niki Lauda, their faces as ubiquitous as those of the ruling sheikhs. You don’t have time to ask too many questions. It’s all too exhilarating, frankly – the size of the ambition, whatever it’s for, and the speed of its progress.
It should be ugly but isn’t. Put up enough cranes and there’s beauty in the optimism. From the rooftop bar of the One & Only Royal Mirage – another meltingly Moorish hotel – the glimmering towers in the ribbon of lit-up darkness remind me of all that is left of the New York skyline poking up through the apocalyptic sands in the closing scene of Planet of the Apes. The difference being that Dubai is a beginning, not an end... always provided that the sky and roads do not run out. I rock with the giddiness of the view.
This is an effect partly of the aromatic Indian food we’ve just eaten at Nina, a silky, lotus-arched restaurant many floors below.
That’s the way of it here. They hit you with everything. Just try the dining experience – you can’t quite call it eating – at the Al Mahara, in the Burj Al Arab, the seven-star hotel that looks like a sail from the outside but feels like the belly of a giant golden whale within; that’s if you can imagine a whale with moving staircases in its throat and a marble ziggurat of spurting fountains that somehow brings to mind dancing sperm.
Advertisement
The menu at the Al Mahara is in Russian as well as English, the prices astronomical, the food hopeless. But you dine beside the biggest fish tank you’ve ever seen, imagine you’re at the bottom of the ocean, and look to see if Boris Becker’s there.
Things are more sedate at the Ritz-Carlton, which is beginning to show its age but is spectacularly set on enough beach for five Mediterranean resorts, enjoys acres of pool and garden, and pampers you to such a degree you wonder if they’ve mistaken you for someone else. “I’m terribly sorry,” the concierge says when he welcomes us back to the hotel from a bad meal somewhere else. I fear he’s going to weep, so keenly does he feel our disappointment.
Discovering it’s our wedding anniversary, the staff at the Ritz-Carlton strew rose petals on our bed. Who would have expected such sweetness here, on this narrow strip of scorching sand made rich by petrochemicals?
Security officers do, however, finger-search my case as I leave. They find something, too. A small, retractable plastic tape measure that came out of a Christmas cracker years ago and has been hiding in a zip compartment. “Not allowed,” they say, taking it from me. I fancy a fight.
“Why not allowed?” But my wife signals me to let it go. As we depart I see them playing with my measure, opening and retracting it and laughing. Maybe marvelling at the modesty of our measuring ambitions where I come from.
Howard Jacobson was a guest of ITC Classics(01244 355527, www.itcclassics.co.uk ), which can tailor-make trips to Dubai. A five-night package staying at the Park Hyatt costs from £866pp. Five nights at the Ritz-Carlton is from £848pp. Both include B&B accommodation, flights from London and transfers.
Or try Kuoni (01306 747002, www.kuoni.co.uk), Tropic Breeze (01548 831550, www.tropicbreeze.co.uk) or the Private Travel Company (020 7751 0880, www.theprivatetravelcompany.co.uk).