Dubai Bus Tour

We took a half day bus tour around Dubai on Monday. The companies that offer the service like this and the desert safari are very good and will collect you from just outside your accomodation. They don't expect anyone to have to spend more than a few minutes at a time out in the heat so all of the cars are of a very high quality with well working air conditioning. Our bus tour guide Malek told us that there is no tax on anything in Dubai so cars are very cheap. He said the lowest end car that we would probably see would be a toyota carolla and a brand new one of those would only cost you about $9,000. Apparently the non existance of tax is one the reason there is very little crime in Dubai. Another thing I was impressed with was the cleanliness, all the malls and public spaces are extremly clean everyone works very hard and there were always alot of staff everywhere you go.

Lee and I back seat badies in the tour bus. Seema likes to ride in the front so she stole the tour guides seat and sat next to the driver.

This spice shop was in the Gold Souk district where there are copious shops you can buy beautiful jewellery at a resonable price. The base price of the gold in non negotiable but you can barter over the labour charges. While Seema bought gold Lee and I looked at fooood. These shops smelled amazing and we would have bought some spices if we where allowed to bring it home. Instead we bought some really yummy sweats, we got chocolate coated almond stuffed dates a few types of nougat...soooooo good. I wished we had bought more now.

Spice art.

One of the few mosque's open for tourists though only on certain days and this was not one of them.

Lee with the Burj Al Arab hotel on his shoulders. This is the most expensive hotel in the world with the penthouse going for $47,000 US per night. Rahul told us that the rooms for this hotel are often booked all year round by wealthy Arabs but spend most of the time empty, they just wish to leave their options open I suppose!

Me as close as I shall ever get to staying in the Burj Al Arab

The water looked beautiful but Lee said it felt like bath water. It was blindinly bright on this beach and the sand was burning our feet so we took our pictures then ran back to the bus and it's glorious air conditioning.

The entrance to another fancy hotel where each room is surrounded by water and they provide you with your own manned boat for coming and going.

The massive Atlantis Hotel and the top of palm tree Island, it looks out to endless Arabian gulf.

Dubai is the fastest growing city in the world, 5 years ago most of these building were not there. It is expanding at a massive rate, this is what lots and lots and lots of money can do!

Showing off my henna tattoo, came out rather well I think.