Desert Safari

Day one of my quick little Easter weekend getaway to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Despite Jordan being a mostly Muslim country, Eater is considered a National Holiday and since in Jordan the weeks start on Sunday....I get Sunday off from school and work. So I decided about 2 weeks so ago to take advantage of the time off and I left on Thursday afternoon after class for Dubai.

Today, I went to Dubai Mall and walked around. I spent about 3 hours walking around and covered maybe half of the mall. Its HUGE. Dubai is known for everything being grand and bigger than ever....there are many malls and they are no exception. There is one mall here that is 1.5km long. I'm not even going to touch that one...I'll never get out alive.

Dubai Mall has a huge aquarium in it and part of it can be seen from just talking by as you shop. Kinda fun to see sharks swimming past as you head over to look at purses. Super extravagant.

I ten went back to the hotel and waited for the Desert Safari tour guy to pick me up. I was in a group of a German couple, who spoke german most of the time and probably said about 4 words to me all night and a brother and sister from Nigeria, that now live in the states. They were really fun and we talked a lot.

We were all picked up from our hotels and then drove about 45 minutes out of Dubai towards the desert. When we arrived at the desert we switched cars to a more "off roading" one and we took a crazy up and down, side to side fast drive through the Dunes for about 30 minutes. The drivers clearly love their jobs. They had way too much fun trying to "out Dune" one another and be as crazy as they could.

I was a little nervous that it was gonna be really fast and creepy but it was a lot of fun. You go up these huge dunes and then just drop straight down. The drives would take us down these huge dune hills by sliding sideways in the car. Its hard to explain but I'm glad I did it.

After the drive they took us to this camp site area where we hung out for evening. They had all sorts of different entertainment like Henna painting, pictures with falcons, camel rides, etc. After a few hours of hanging out, we ate dinner and then more entertainment of the belly dancer and the guy that spun like crazy in lights and with different moving objects, which was really impressive.

Finally after a long evening/night, we were all taken back to our hotels at around 10pm....it was a great first day in Dubai!

More Photos!!
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