Category: Europe 2010

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.

We made it to Dubai safe and sound, albeit weary. Newborn babies on an 11hr flight? Yeah, they don’t like it!

Anyway, we’ve had about 5hrs sleep in the past 56 and it’s only 1pm on Monday, so we’ll tough it out. Not hard to do in Dubai!

We’re currently having a coffee at the Dubai Mall, home to 300 stores, an enormous aquarium, an ice rink and a huuuge Sega games world. The place is incredible as is the heat outside. Only 39 today so a bit cooler according to our taxi driver. You’d never know it though being inside, they know air conditioning do the Emirates!

So far we’re both big fans of Dubai. Every nationality known to man is here and we’re having fun playing “what the hell is that accent”.

Battery is almost dead and no free internet at hotel, so we’ll update when we can.

Pretty damn happy with day 1 of the holiday. Spent most of the day in Fremantle in absolute sunshine. We intended to do a lot of walking, just in case the 3hrs sleep from last night wasn’t enough to make us tired for our flight tonight.

We caught a taxi to Fremantle, checked out the Dockers training ground then went hunting for the Little Creatures brewery. After about a 15min walk we found it and what is one of the coolest casual dining venues I’ve been in. it’s massive old boat shed which they’ve emptied and put in a huge kitchen, a bar, dining outside at the front and overlooking the water out the back plus heaps more indoors. A few huge brewing silos complete the authentic feel. The food was great, we sampled what they’re known for (beers and cider) and enjoyed the atmosphere.

From there, we walked around Fremantle doing nothing in particular. We found an information booth and grabbed a brewery tour of Fremantle. So we found a very cool pub, The Munk, which overlooks the trendy coffee/restaurant area of Freo. An hour or so of enjoying the local brew and people watching, we headed off. We eventually made our way to the train station, stopped off in Perth CBF for an hour and then ended up here at the international airport.

We’ve scored emergency row seats on a brand new Boeing 777 with 1200 channels, sms/email in the backrest and until we board, we’re now watching the Grand Prix in the bar on a massive projection screen.

Life’s pretty good about now!

Pretty uneventful start to the trip. hour delay in Adelaide, but a pretty good place to spend some extra time especially with friends and family come to see us off!

We’ve arrived safely in Perth and about to head to Fremantle for some of this beautiful weather and might give Little Creatures brewery a crack for lunch.

One of our “challenges” (it’s hardly a big one) is how we’ll access the internet whilst in our various destinations. At the moment, we’re planning on visiting at least a dozen different countries in the 2 months we’re away. I’m keen to use the internet to:

• update this blog
• share & backup photos
• plan the next part of our trip as we go
• book anything we need to
• research what’s on offer
• plan any meet-ups with people

Being that Deb & I will most likely want to do this at the same time, it’d be great to share an internet connection. There’s a couple of ways I’ve thought we could manage this:

• jailbreak one of our iPhones and buy a SIM with a data allowance and use the MyWi app. This app turns your iPhone into a Wi-Fi hotspot. That way, our 2 phones + iPad can all share the one connection
• take my Airport Express with me and use at hotels where they provide a wired ethernet connection. I found in our last trip to New Zealand and Hawaii that the hotels we stayed at offered an ethernet connection but not Wifi – which is useless to our iPhones + iPad. With the Airport Express, it takes the ethernet connection and then shares it via Wi-Fi which we can then use – very handy. I’ve already bought Apple’s multi-country power adaptor kit, so it makes sense to take advantage of it
• buy a micro-sim for the iPad and use that and that alone for internet use, as that’s by far the most useful for internet “stuff”

I dare say though, there’s a good chance we’ll make use of internet cafes, free wi-fi spots and other establishments that promote Wi-Fi availability with purchase (ala McDonalds here, but hopefully not actually @ McDonalds). The idea being after we’re tired, need a brea or a meal, we’ll try and do both where possible.

I came across this very handy website for finding out SIM with data information for various countries. Prices aren’t too bad – 14euros for 2GB for 30 days in Romania is pretty good!