The sort 100 metre walk from ship to cruise terminal was hot, with afternoon sun blazing and temperature over 30 degrees. Once inside the terminal, we briefly connected to free WiFi, then we headed out for our first Dubai adventure.
We had booked the Big Bus (hop-on, hop-off) and tonight we had planned to do their night tour which started at Dubai Mall. We expected to have to find our own way there, using the free mall shuttle which there was a long line for. As it turned out, Big Bus had a shuttle also, so we activated our tickets and jumped on board.
The ride through Port Rashid is interesting. We passed the Queen Elizabeth 2 hotel, which is the old cruise ship now permanently based here and refurbished as a hotel, with the old life boats lined up on land as an interesting feature in the otherwise industrial landscape.
We also saw thousands of new cars lined up, freshly delivered by sea and ready to be sold in UAE.
Certainly here we got a different perspective than arriving in Dubai by plane.
The drive to the Dubai Mall was slow, as traffic was very heavy. We had front row seats upstairs in an air-conditioned section so this was a great start to our evening.
Once at Dubai Mall, we learned how to catch the night bus. We had about 1.5 hours to spare. We used this time to wander through the mall in amazement of its size, and also how busy it was.
We eventually found our way to the food court, our first opportunity to eat land-based food in 5 days. The food court was enormous, featuring every possible name brand you can imagine plus many, many more. There were seats everywhere but very busy. After much wandering around and hovering over people, we nabbed a table and then one at a time went to found something to eat.
The mall WiFi was free to use, and fast. I had my laptop in my backpack with the express purpose of doing some blog updates, so used this opportunity to upload the previous few blogs. This took about an hour after which we meandered back to the night bus.
We intentionally arrived at the night bus 30 minutes early, as seats were strictly limited and first-come, first served. This required sitting out in the heat, although by now it was dark outside. Lucky we arrived when we did, soon the line was long and many missed out.
The bus was very late leaving, around 7:45pm by the time we were moving. The tour book about 2 hours and drove around all the main sites of Dubai. We were sitting upstairs in an open top, again front row, so no air-conditioning but a great view. At night, everything is lit up and sparkles in the night air. We saw many exotic cars such as Bently, Rolls Royce and Ferrari. Friday night traffic was very heavy, especially around the city centre. Here are a few photos from a night time perspective.
Air-conditioned walkways between buildings...
Heavy traffic...
Al Kazim Towers...
Tunnels under The Palm...
Atlantis The Palm hotel...
Monorail station...
Bently car dealership...
The Dubai Frame, which you can go inside and walk along the glass floor 150m up...
We were returned to ship by bus, another bonus as we expected to have to catch a taxi so late at night. We went to bed late to find the air-conditioning in our cabin was not cooling properly. Well actually I had reported it twice that morning to maintenance but nobody had been to fix it. We didn't sleep a wink until 3:00am when I walked down to Guest Services to complain. They got come poor maintenance person out of bed, but he did improve it and we ended up only getting one hour sleep. The joys of a new ship!
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