I think that probably as near as I’ll ever get to heaven was recently staying for a couple of nights in a 62nd floor luxury room of the tallest hotel in the world….and one of the newest …in, of course, Dubai.
Travel with Dusty Miller
To graphically illustrate how Dubai rapidly grows outwards and upwards: when I visited at Christmas on route to Adelaide, South Australia, there were 432 luxury hotels living cheek-by-jowl in the world’s fastest growing city, most of them skyscrapers, apparently reaching for the fierce Persian Gulf sun, like flowers in a tropical garden.
Nine months later there were 454 major international class hotels and several hundred hotel apartments catering for the millions of visitors who visit the United Arab Emirates weekly on business, pleasure or, like me, for a bit of both.
JW Marriot is an international chain of hotels of high repute but not known well in this part of Africa.
My only previous dealings with them was a hurried buffet lunch at a Marriott just outside Petra, the once lost ancient rose-red city in the Jordanian Desert midway between the Red Sea and Dead Sea.
I recall the concierge whispering in my shell-like that two coaches of Russian tourists were not far behind us on the dusty road from Aqaba and it would be a good idea to fill our plates quickly before the starving (or, rather, gluttonous) Slavonic hordes descended on the groaning carvery like a plague of locusts.
It was excellent advice, for the former Comrades indeed lustily attacked every food station within sight as if they were sacking Berlin in 1945 all over again! At that stage the Russians were very prominently seen all over the Middle East, but I’m told they disappeared like snow on the May Steppes, after the Arab Spring.
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My huge, wonderfully proportioned, room at the JW Marriot Marquis Dubai was efficiently and effectively air-conditioned to a steady 20,4C which was a blessing when Dubai sweated in 36C temperatures on landing from London Heathrow before 6:30am.
By mid-morning that was 42C-44C according to the thermometer in the luxury Lexus air-conditioned cab I took from the hotel to one of the many Aladdin’s Cave-like Malls around the city. On the return trip it was 46C and — according to my Nepalese taxi driver — there was 49% humidity.
And that is damned, uncomfortably hot anywhere in the world. Thank goodness for the hotel’s seventh floor swimming pool, a wee bit of shade and the odd chilled refreshing article of a moderately intoxicating nature from the adjoining bar.
One assignment I’d given myself was to visit and take photographs at some thick coastal mangrove swamps which are home to a spectacular range of birdlife much of the year round, but especially when birds are migrating north to south or vice-versa.
My Arabian Adventures guide on a previous expedition, Mervyn, a cricket-mad Sri Lankan Moslem who’s worked in the Gulf for 35 years offered to act as “gillie” next time I was passing through.
I couldn’t contact his cellphone in neighbouring Oman from the UK, where I first began to have serious doubts about this project, because British migratory birds were still very resident and evident there; if I could see lots of swallows, swifts and martins in the Cotswolds, Scotland and Wales when (I thought) they should be on their way to this part of southern Africa, why would Eastern European and western Asian birds be migrating through the Persian Gulf to winter in East Africa and India at the same time of year? Well they weren’t! I was probably at least a month early in these days of global warming, I was told by an ardent twitcher in the UAE.
More than 400 species of birds are seen in Dubai, many of them unusual, rare or simply spectacular. These include a wide range of seabirds, sand-grouse, western reef herons, spotted eagles, red-wattled lapwings, Pacific golden plovers, pin-tailed snipe and Isabelline shrikes.
But the solidly dense and muggy weather in Dubai was not conducive to any avian flight, let alone dangerous twice-yearly journeys of thousands of kilometres to escape the cold and find food. All I saw were a few lethargic gulls around the Dubai Creek and ubiquitous myna birds (now a threat here in Zimbabwe), which seemed less cheeky than usual.
Had the world’s most colourful birds been arriving in myriads, it would have been difficult to successfully photograph them, as lenses and viewfinders on my cameras steamed up totally within a few seconds of exposure from insulated camera bag. I’m talking about thousands of dollars’ worth of Canon kit and candidly I worried that steam might condense inside the DSLRs, causing possibly expensive damage to the cameras’ electronics.
That didn’t happen, but my gear has never been as extensively and thoroughly field-stripped and cleaned anywhere else on global travels. I wonder if an underwater camera might be the answer to Dubai’s humidity?
This was the Gulf in September. How the soccer World Cup will ever be played in the Gulf, in Qatar, in June (which is even hotter) defeats me!
More about Dubai next week. [email protected]
(Dusty Miller travelled to the UK, via Dubai, on Emirates at his own expense but was upgraded to Business Class and entertained at the 5-star JW Marriott Marquis Hotel, Dubai, by the airline.)
