Dubai, the land of the mad scientist.

Jet lags are something that often come when you’re doing what we do - traveling a lot. And yet it still never had crossed my mind that it can occur even when you’re flying from Morocco to Dubai. The time-difference is only 4 hours, so it really blew my mind. We arrived in Dubai early in the morning, and boy were we tired.  We didn’t sleep at all during the 10 hour flight, and we even had to change once in Doha, Qatar. But at around 8 o’clock in the morning, we had finally arrived. The good thing was that our friend Ari, who lives in Dubai with his family, had reserved hotel rooms for us so that we didn’t have to do it ourselves. The hotel was located next to the Mall of Emirates, which was actually a really good thing, because Ski Dubai is located in this certain mall. Ski Dubai was something that had been in both mine and Blumi’s mind for a while, and we really wanted to see it. For the rest of the day, Ari drove us around the city and showed us the new side of Dubai, with all of its unfinished huge buildings and he told us all about the unbelievable plan of a mad man to build the three palms and the globe on the sea. I think that they are actually planning on building even more weird stuff to Dubai.

So after breakfast the next day, we packed our camera stuff and headed to the Ski Dubai without the skis. It was time for some snowboard mania. We figured that maybe we should try snowboarding because the Ski Dubai with its 65 meters of vertical doesn’t really give that much thrills for us with skis. Well, I have been snowboarding for years between the ages 9 and 16, and for me it was just something fun to do. For Blumi, it was more thrilling, I guess. It was his fifth time on a snowboard, but he did well. With the balance of a lemur, he easily managed to ride down the hill without falling for even once. The riding in Ski Dubai is actually pretty okay, and I even tried some rails with the board, good times. They have two lifts, one chair and one poma and they say that they have 5 slopes, but in reality there really are only two. After snowboarding, we went to have some after ski-coffee at Starbucks, Ape’s favorite.

A funny thing that happened was that we met Johannes and his father by accident at the cafe. They were having a father-and-son vacation and so of course we wanted to spend some time with them. It really felt great to speak some Finnish to someone else than just the two guys travelling with me, hehe. We went out to check this one area in Dubai where the locals go out to eat and party every Thursday. You can find the different side of Dubai from these small alleys. The food is excellent, and despite the fact that everyone is trying to get you to buy a watch, it is a place that you really should go to when you visit Dubai.

We went to eat in this one Indian/Pakistanian restaurant, and you can really feel the difference between all the real places and the artificial new Dubai. Dubai really is artificial and everything is manmade. The water consumption of Dubai must be enormous with the plants and all set on the dry desert. And even the people seem to be something else. Not snobby, but yet still somehow different, with no smile on their faces. This is probably something that you can find in every big city in the world, so go check out the local stuff where ever you’re traveling.  

We had something else in mind the next day, or actually it was Ari’s idea first to go ride some ATVs in the desert. And in our heads the idea developed into an idea of spending a night at the desert. Ari came to pick us up from the hotel, and we arrived to KTM’s ranch at around noon and met the other guys planning to join us for the ride. There were two older skiers, one snowboarder, one dude I didn’t know, and us. All set to go out in to the desert. The ATVs were 450cc KTM’s and I think they were powerful enough. I actually had a 525cc if it makes any difference, hehe. At first, all the acceleration and everything felt fun and driving was exciting, then the reality hit came. We had to drive tens of miles to our destination. And although the sliding on the dunes is fun, I started to regret that I had signed in to this trip. Well, after a nice and bumpy three hours of driving, we were finally there, in the place that Ari had picked for us to spend the night at. Dude, it was next to a high way. On the way to this ”place” we drove through a nice gully on a pretty big hill, which would have made a perfect place to camp with its view over the desert. Anyway, as the boys weren’t planning on spending the night next to this outstanding road, they started their way back home before the dark and left us standing there with our ATV’s and no shelter. Oh yeah, didn’t I mention that it was raining heavily? The plan was that we’d drive to this destination and the guy from the KTM ranch would bring us the tents and some food. Well, when we called the guy he was somewhere helping some dude with his broken bike. So, luckily Ari’s friend told us the directions to the nearest gas-station and he even gave us a GPS-tracker to guide us there. Driving 15 kilometers 100km/h in pouring rain, and we were soaked. At least we had some warm place to sit in. After some careful planning, we decided to head back to the ranch and to our hotel. There was no point spending the night in a tent next to a highway in heavy rain. The funny part was that it only rains three days a year in Dubai. Once again, what are the odds? After another 15 kilometers in rain, we were back at the ranch and our friend Tupe was waiting for us and he gave us a ride back to our hotel. After this it was pretty much some food and lights out.

On the next day, boys wanted to go ride the ATVs again and if you read the story above, you will propably understand why I didn’t want to join them. Don’t get me wrong, it is fun to drive the dunes in soft sand, but the 80 percent of the driving is shitty in between the rocks and bushes. So, I decided to stay at the hotel and do some writing. The boys came back in the afternoon, and as I suspected, the sand had been great and the girls were topless and whatever. They really seemed to like the ATV-stuff more that I did.  The evening went wondering around Dubai and doing some last shots from the city and its skyline.

The next morning it was once again time to pack our stuff and change the country. And this time we headed to some real snow, to Lebanon.