Dubai Update #8 – On Safari?

Our host picked us up in the afternoon of Thursday 10th Jan at about 3pm. The whole family on board excluding the baby (once again the maid doing baby sitting duty).  Heading to the east of Dubai for about 30min, where we had a mandatory stop under the guise of  a last minute toilet stop giving the associated tourist shop the opportunity to extract some money out of us and all the other hundreds of tourists that were headed out on “safari” that afternoon. During the stop I took the opportunity to look over the vehicle that we were travelling in.  The latest model Land Cruiser 200 Series but very, very, tired and battle worn, despite on the surface, from a distance, not looking like it had ever been off road.

After we were relieved of some of our cash  we set off once again, heading further into the desert.  Chris had bought a bottle of water and I lashed out and bought a Ghutra (Head gear a la Yassa Arafat).

It wasn’t long before we headed off the bitumen road into the sand hills that we had been traversing for some time.  Obviously our driver, Mohammed, new where he was headed and we soon come upon a large group of similar cars.  Seventeen Toyotas and one Nissan.  Obviously Land Cruisers are the preferred vehicle for the task ahead. We did notice later a couple of Hummers in a couple of the other groups of cars that we came across later in the afternoon, mainly  I would suggest for the room to carry plenty of passengers. Range Rovers and Landrover Discoveries and all the other hi priced 4WD’s were noticeable by their absolute absence, not a one, out of the probably two hundred 4WDs we saw that afternoon. You do see plenty of them in the streets but not on the sand hills.

However, I digress. We alighted from our  vehicle while preparations were made to the vehicles. We also needed to wait for a couple of cars to arrive to complete our group.  Our driver, as did the seventeen other drivers, let down their tyre pressures to 15psi to prepare for the  sand hill territory that we were about to enter.

Preparations complete, off we set in a continuous line of vehicles and headed into the desert.

Trying to get photos, despite being in the front seat was almost impossible.  But what fun.  Mohammed played some high energy music with the volume up as we slid, swayed, climbed and descended these fabulous sand hills. Often teetering sideways on almost vertical drop off’s, necessitating a quick flick of the steering wheel by Mohammed to rescue us from a possible slide (or even roll over) down the steep face of the sand hill. If only I had been allowed to have a drive.  A gentle enquiry with Mohammed regarding the ability for us ordinary folk to drive in the sand hills met with, “only if you are a resident plus you have to have a special desert license.”  And that is just for ordinary folk, not tour operators.  They have to have an additional license to carry paying passengers.

We continued our trek,  and except for one of our number getting hung with the belly of his car suspended on a sand ridge, we arrived at a very large sand hill that took us a couple of attempts to climb.  The view from this spot was quite remarkable, however, there was so much haze and sand hanging in the air, photography was difficult.

After we were entertained by some quad bikes and a dune buggy for a while we headed across the remaining, but somewhat docile, sand hills to our destination; a “camp” in the middle of the sand hills. This is where we were to be entertained and fed into the evening.

There were possibly as many as 400 people at our camp and there were about 18 similar camps scattered amongst the sand hills. So well over 7000 having done that afternoon exactly the same as us.

The evening consisted of some entertainment from some Arabian and Egyption Dancers and a half reasonable smorgas board.  They even had a bar, so providing for tourists if you can make a buck, I guess, wins over culture occasionally.

Chris, Amanda and I shared a Shisha, just had to find out what it was all about and why it seems so popular.  In reality quite pleasant and relaxing but a little boring. No harshness you experience from tobacco smoke drawn in directly (as best as I can remember from my smoking days).

Leaving the camp at the completion of the nights proceedings we had to make one more stop at a shop that is specifically set up for the drivers to re-inflate their tyres, giving the proprietor an opportunity to gouge some more cash out of our pockets, a completely unsuccessful strategy in our case.  The shop had three large compressors set up with a number of air hoses, each manned with a “tyre inflater”  running around under continuous instructions from their boss, inflating the tyres on around 9 Land Cruisers at a time, with an endless parade of Land Cruisers  still coming along the road. We figure he gets a small payment for each vehicle from the plethora of tour operators.

On the way home Mohammed told us that there had only been one vehicle roll over in the sand hills that evening, which sounded fairly reasonable considering the number of vehicles and the antics that they had been getting up to.  Every car had ROPS (Roll Over Protection Structure, aka roll bars) installed inside their cabins, obviously for good reason, and which I was personally pleased about when I had noticed them when we first got into the vehicle earlier in the afternoon having a little knowledge as to what was in store for us.

We arrived home about 9:15PM after a very enjoyable afternoon.