A woman in the back of the airplane screamed, which only served to put everyone else more on edge.

It’s just a little turbulence, I thought, I mean if every time it–

The plane rocked violently, and she screamed again. Alright, that’s a lot of turbulence. Still, though!

It was a rough approach to Dubai International. On top of that, you couldn’t see anything: sand, smog, both, I don’t know. I was watching the screen where you could see the flight statistics–air speed, temperature, altitude, etc.–and the altitude was in the low 100s, in feet.

I looked out the window. That can’t be right, I thought, it must be messed up. Maybe it means meters.

Suddenly the ground was visible, when we were basically at the start of the runway. Nope, those numbers seem to have been right. We landed with no problem.

To The Hotel

For Dubai, we basically did the same thing we’d just done in Addis Ababa: extended a layover to give us a “free” trip to Dubai. In this case, we only extended it for one night, so it was going to be a quick whirlwind tour of the city.

To help make it a little easier for us, we looked to get a hotel close to the airport. It was also, therefore, close to the metro, so we’d be able to get in and out of the center city easily. We found a good price on a hotel right across the street from the terminal, which seemed like it should be walkable. Brilliant on all counts.

This was our first in a continuing series of lessons titled:

Dubai Is Far, Far Bigger Than It Looks

There was a major road in between the terminal and our hotel, and it also wasn’t as close as it looked on a map, so there’s almost no way it would have been reasonably walkable. But this wasn’t even the major problem we faced.

There are three terminals at Dubai International. Our hotel was “across the street” from terminal 3. We landed at terminal 2. No biggie, you think, there’s obviously transit between the terminals. Hahahaha! Wrong! Terminal 2 is only connected to the others via air-side transit–that is, a shuttle for transiting passengers. Instead, we had to take a damn taxi cab, and it’s astonishingly a 15-minute drive from terminal 2 to our hotel. Again, across the street from terminal 3.

Repeat along with me: Dubai is far, far bigger than it looks.

First Impressions

Landing at the airport, the first thing you notice about the city, as I mentioned, is that you can’t see it, what with all the dust. On leaving the airport, the second thing you notice about the city is OH MY CHRIST THE HEAT I’M MELTING OHHHHH GAAWWWWDDD.

Ahem, it’s warm outside. To be fair, we didn’t exactly visit at the best time, being the end of July and all. But the day we landed, Dubai saw a high of 117. One hundred and seventeen degrees. The low was only 100. You know, nice cool evenings.

The good news, as it were, is Dubai is, you know, used to unlivable heat. So you don’t have to go outside much. They’ve built astonishing amounts of indoor, air conditioned walkways and passage ways, saving you from the boiling temperatures just outside. This was great for when we went to visit the Burj Khalifa that evening.

Ah okay, so we gotta get down there first. The Khalifa is a stop on our metro line. But, Dubai being far, far bigger than it looks, it was 45-50 minutes from our hotel. The metro stop is called ‘Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall,’ but both of those features are still a good 10-15 minutes walking from the metro. Fortunately, all in covered passageways, but still… it’s a long way away.

Dubai Mall

We went down there and walked through the mall… which, like most of Dubai, is insane. It’s the second-largest mall in the world, apparently. There is an aquarium, a VR theme park, a haunted house, even a diplodocus dinosaur skeleton. If you want to, say, go skiing though, you’re shit out of luck… unless you go across town to the Mall of the Emirates, which has an indoor ski slope. Dubai loves their otherworldly malls.

Dubai Mall is modern, gorgeous, enormous, and packed. So many people! We wound our way through, stunned at the scope of the place, looking for the way out to what we were really interested in seeing.

Burj Khalifa

I can practically see Tom Cruise hanging off the side of the building up there, like he did in Ghost Protocol, and I get vertigo all over again.

The Burj Khalifa is ridiculous. It’s a stunning, gorgeous building that looks as tall as it is. Standing at the bottom of it, it looks like a spire straight to outer space.

The Khalifa, and the Dubai Mall, are built around a man-made lake with other impressive sky scrapers encircling it as well. It’s a beautiful area, that also serves as the grand stage for the nightly light and fountain shows at the Khalifa, which we’d come to see.

During the show, they light up the building with astonishing, colorful patterns, while music plays and the fountains engage in a choreographed dance in the lake. It’s like the Bellagio fountains in Vegas, except with, you know, the tallest building in the world as a backdrop.

Even at night, the heat was unbearable and we couldn’t take it anymore, so we headed back inside the mall and started making the long journey back to our hotel.

Burj Al Arab

There was one more structure we wanted to see in Dubai, the absurd hotel that is the Burj Al Arab. You know this building, it’s the one that looks like a giant sail. It’s huge, it’s gorgeous. Apparently it’s the world’s only 7-star hotel? Sounds pretty fake, but at any rate, it’s not a cheap stay.

Looking at Google maps, before we had a decent handle on how enormous Dubai is (and experienced how hot it is), we originally had this cute idea of going somewhere over to the sea-side area after we saw the Khalifa, and walking along the gulf toward the Al Arab. Obviously not the whole way, but some part of it should be doable, and that sounded lovely.

The size of the city quickly disabused us of that idea and we had to come up with a new plan. What if we take the metro down as close as we can get, then walk from there? Glancing at the map, it doesn’t seem too bad.

THAT’S A 46-MINUTE WALK?!

Good god! Well that’s obviously not going to work after visiting the Khalifa, we’re going to need a Plan C.

Plan C

Alright, the next morning, before our flight, here’s what we’ll do: we’ll check out of the hotel, go over to the airport and check in our bags, then we’ll take the metro down as close as we can get to the Burj Al Arab, then we’ll take an Uber from there over to the beach, we’ll see the building, we’ll Uber back to the train, train back to the airport, then catch our flight.

This plan sucks.

But, it’s what we did. Almost 1.5 hours each way for this silly trip! It felt like an epic accomplishment to get to the beach and get to lay eyes on the Burj Al Arab.

We also got to go stand in the Persian Gulf! Which was… basically hot tub water in light of the 110+ degree temperatures. Not refreshing. We also got to ABSOLUTELY MELT OUR FACES OFF IN THE HEAT AGHHHHH GAWWWDDDD.

We weren’t outside long, but man was it hot! I think all told we were there on the beach for… 15 minutes? Maybe? But we saw it!

What’s Next?

This journey back and forth across the whole of Dubai was how Phase 2 of our trip ended. We made it back to the airport with plenty of time to catch our flight to the beginnings of Phase 3.

Next time on the blog, we’ll have a short wrap-up of Phase 2, before we dive into Phase 3: Europe! We’ll see you soon and thanks for reading!