After couple of extremely hot days in Abu Dhabi, we decided to go off the beaten track and headed on a road trip to
Al Ain, hoping for a cooler day in the so called “Garden City”. The drive itself was pretty boring, just an empty, but top quality highway straight through the desert, with lots of sand dunes and limited signs of any human life along the way (only some run-down shelters of construction workers probably building the skyscrapers of Dubai in 50+ °C):
As we arrived to Al Ain, we headed straight to the Oasis, known for its underground irrigation system.
Despite the shadow of thousands of date palms, we could not bear the extreme heat for more than 10 minutes, thus we rushed into the Museum. It was not particularly interesting (as you can imagine, the history of UAE is not really comparable to the ancient cultures), but at least we filled our energy- and water supplies so that we were ready to visit the famous
camel-market.
It was dusty and chaotic, with thousands of animals from chickens, cows, goats, etc. to camels everywhere…it didn’t take too long for us to realize that we were just as much an attraction to the traders as they were to us. Just like we were watching the camels, they were obviously watching the wife and appraised my value to 5 camels. What they could not assess was the value of the hidden baby, so luckily enough the offer was not good enough for Zoli to make the deal!
Later we headed towards the
Jebel Hafeet mountain line located at the border with Oman (ca. 1300m):
The three-lane mountain road, with impressive views over the surrounding desert, may easily be called one of the greatest driving roads in the world:
Few days later, we headed for another adventure in the desert, the so called "must do" tourist attraction in UAE, the "overnight desert safari". It sounded like a truly unique experience and we were pretty excited about our desert safari package tour thinking that where else could you experience a life in the desert rather than in a desert country? Unfortunately the experience was not as "unique" as advertised. The camp was only about an hour away from Dubai (the lights could still be seen in the darkness of the night) and crowded with lots of tourists.
Pretty soon after our arrival to the camp, they announced that we could have our BBQ Dinner Buffet, whilst the long-awaited belly dancing show began.
Well, after watching some shows in other countries (Turkey, Bangkok, Brazil, etc), we came to realize that it was one of the poorest shows and has ended disappointingly soon (both the show and the dinner). Some of the tourists have barely started to eat when their driver called them for the return ride. Luckily our desert safari experience with the overnight stay was not as short as for those signing up only for the dinner. Spending the night in the desert was actually quite relaxing and pleasant after the very hot days in Dubai.
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