Day 2 started with a (very) hearty buffet breakfast. Glen tried basically everything on the menu with much of it being, well, different. Things like spicey rice, beef bacon, chicken sausages, feta along with the usual eggs, toast etc. It followed nicely after my Iranian dinner from the night before which was delicious.
We booked our desert safari for the evening and then taxi’d to Burj Khalifa – the tallest building in the world. For 100 dirham, you can take a tour up to the observation platform some 632m up. The whole presentation was fantastic, very informative with some odd stats, such as the building weighs as much as 100,000 elephants and is 10 soccer pitches in circumference.
The lift takes about 40 seconds to get up to the observation deck traveling at 10metres per second. Our ears popped about 4 times each way but it was the smoothest of rides.
On the observation deck, there you could see almost forever. With Dubai being so flat, the only interruption to the view was the sand haze. You go up to the glass barrier and look through empty sections which made it a touch scary, even though it was only 30cm high. Poking the camera lens through it freaked me out so gave up on that!
The ability to see Dubai from that perspective really helped us to make sense of it. Basically, the city is built like you would in Sim City the game. Housing block, housing block, housing block – build a multi lane road around it. Same for business and throw in a bit of landscaping for good measure. The thing is, it actually works. The highways are very efficient and they’re everywhere (6 lanes in each direction in some spots). It’s not the urban sprawl of most cities and there’s designated areas for each aspect of life – home, work, shopping (huge factor here) and entertainment.
