Upon arriving at our Dubai hotel, the Mecure Gold, I tried to exchange some of my money for the local currency, but I couldn’t interest the next-door Islamic Bank on Al Mina Rd in my AUDs. They directed me to another bank “five minutes” down the street but after walking for more that five minutes in the extreme midday heat and not spotting any banking establishments lurking amongst the sand, I gave up, retreating back to the hotel and decided to wait till later in the day when we made the trip into Downtown Dubai.

Mall & Burj

At the supersize Dubai Mall we found a money exchanger just inside the entrance. The woman inside the glass booth thinking I was trying to change USDs at first offered me AED2.63 to the $ but when I clarified that I had AUDs she offered 2.65 (to my surprise!). I gratefully and swiftly accepted lest she realise her error (a very rare victory over the money changers!). Equipped with my enhanced sum of dirhams I found we could only shop, not eat or drink (alcohol) in public, ie the Mall was public … Ramadan was still going on!

Dubai Mall or “Sandy Malldom” (an apt metaphor for Dubai in its entirety), is a massive place, numerous elongated passageways crisscrossing each other all over. The Mall is a tourist epicentre of course – “The Diver” waterfall fountains, an Airbus simulator, Arab-themed village, etc. The thing that gets most attention though in the Mall (unless you’re a terminal shopaholic) is the Aquarium. Interestingly one side of the Aquarium is fully visible from outside through a huge glass wall facing the passageways on several levels … so you don’t actually need to pay and go inside to see unless you want to experience the special features – eg, tank dive with the sharks, etc.

All manner of piscean life can be viewed from the transparent wall – sharks, hammer-heads, stingrays and multifarious smaller fish. We saw scuba divers swimming among the sea creatures, cleaning the gigantic pool with long blue hoses. The neoprene-clad divers were getting unnerving dead-eye stares from the sharks. Hopefully for their sake the human “Creepy-crawleys” do their work AFTER the members of the lamniade family have been fed!

Whilst we were in Downtown Dubai we plunged into high tourism mode by taking in the obligatory Burj (Tower) Khalifa, at 829m (give or take a half-metre) the world’s highest skyscraper/human-made structure.

We did the standard thing, paid to go up to the Observation Deck, Level 124. If you want a higher view you can go up to the top viewing deck at Level 148 (out of 163 levels all up) – which will cost you about AED350.

View from Level 124But level 124 was high enough for us, the view from there was like looking at a space age city – vast modern buildings and vast intersecting arterial freeways, surrounded by an ocean of sand – made to look all the more Sci-Fi by a constant haze circling around the periphery. The waterworks of the Dubai Fountain was a spectacular hydro-sight from above. Back on ground level the Burj has an interesting info display on the history of the building’s construction, charting it stage-by-stage and metre-by-metre.

D. Museum

This small museum is a former fort (Al Fahidi), which was founded in 1787 and is the oldest surviving building in Dubai. I especially liked the various exhibits, dioramas depicting everyday life in the desert … mannequins of artisans, merchants & vendors at work. The series of black-and-white period pictures from the 1930s onwards, are a good indicator of how Dubai has grown & developed since its days as a modest village settlement.

The fort is square-shaped & towered, in the open courtyard are some aged cannons and a summer hut composed of palm fronds (known as an Arish). On display both outside and inside the walls are dhows (traditional boats). The museum provides a good grab of local history amidst all the newness of Dubai.

The fort-cum-museum is very close to the city’s principal waterway, Dubai Khor (or Dubai Creek). We went on a traditional water taxi (abra) ride on the Creek … more of the old contrasting with the new! From near the fort we churned over to another part of the city (historically the creek has been viewed as splitting Dubai into two section – Deira and Bur).

On a conservation note for Dubai, the end of the creek has a waterbird and wildlife sanctuary. The abra is a pretty basic, old form of watercraft but it got us across the creek reasonably quickly so we could spend plenty of time visiting the network of street and arcade vendors alongside the creek.

PostScript: The City’s back-story:
Sheikhs from the Al Maktoum Dynasty (hailing from the dominant Bani Yas clan), have ruled Dubai since 1833, taking the title of Emir of Dubai. Before 1971 Dubai was part of the Trucial (treaty) States, a group of Arab Gulf states under a British Protectorate (governed via British India). Unlike other parts of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai was late in discovering its oil bonanza (1966), but on the back of it, the city since that time has transformed itself into a economic powerhouse❈ and a model of modernisation, if not exactly liberalism.

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❈ according to Business Insider Australia, UAE is the third richest country in the world (2016) with a GDP per capita of $57,744