Been a week in old, cold, gray London. Massive climate change from where we've been! London is sweet, once you nail the tube, you're pretty set. Been crashing with my cuz, Louise, and it's been awesome. She's been looking after me real well. Off on the Topdeck tour on Sat, so amping for that!
Anyways, this is the Dubai post, so here goes...
Our first day in Dubai was a pretty slow start. VPT had work in the morning, but promised us a mean feed of dirty bird (KFC) on his return to watch the recorded Warriors vs Rabbitohs game. I was pretty excitied. The Warriors game wasn't actually on until the next day, but the epic feed of KFC more than made up for it. As with any feed of KFC, we couldn't move for the rest of the afternoon, but as sun started dropping down over the Gulf, we drove out to check out some sights (the Palm, Atlantis) and have a couple ciders at the beach bar Barasti. That night, vaughan took us to Karachi Darbar, this indian restaurant with dirt cheap, awesome indian food. Seriously, this place is a one in a million joint. I ordered a curry, nan and rice (standard procedure) and battled to get through half of it. Combining all three of our feeds, we barely finished half of the food. Vaughan originally ordered 4 nans for himself, but the waiter told him it was gonna be too much. The bill came to about 70 Dirhams - the equivalent of about $22! and that was for 3 of us!
Day 2 we hit up Wild Wadi, one of the water parks in Dubai. Was pretty sweet. People in Dubai are pretty lazy, so there were no stairs to climb to get to the top of the slides, instead, you get in your tube and get shot up to the start of the slides by a water slide. Water slide to get to the water slides - why didn't anyone think of this sooner?! The biggest slides there we had to climb up to tho, but it was worth it. We spent a good few hours at this water park, before crusing to check out the Burj Al ... somthing. It's the big one that looks like a sail. Couldn't get in, so just took some photos from outside.
Third day in Dubai, me and Alex were on our own. Vaughan had to see patients from 11 - 8pm. We ended up pretty much mall bashing for the most of the day. Dubai has about 60 malls around the place. They don't skimp on the size of malls either. You could easily kill a day in one mall, these are massive. Original plan was to head to Marina mall and catch an abra (water taxi) round the shoreline into Old Dubai. We got to the mall and just missed the 11am ferry, the next one was at 5pm... so that plan went down the drain. Grabbed a feed at TGI Fridays, where every day is Friday. Epic feed for 35 Dirhams. We decided to go the more boring route to Old Dubai, we jumped on the metro. 16 Dirhams for an all day pass wasn't too bad, nice a/c trains. They love buffing the tiled floors here - i spend most of the time trying not to bail in my jandals and the other times i feel like i'm walking in sand cos my feet are slipping out from under me. We got to Old Dubai and checked out the Gold Souk and Spice Souk. Souks are the old school markets. Pretty cool, but nowadays they're just a bunch of small shops under a covered path. The buildings are cool tho. We caught a 1 dirham (30 cent) abra across the river and caught the train to Dubai mall. Dubai Mall is MASSIVE. Supposed to be the biggest mall in the world. it felt like it, with it's ice rink, movie theatre, Sega Republic (indoor theme park), indoor aquarium and underwater zoo... not to mention the shopping and multiple food courts. I asked the information desk how long it would take to walk every floor and every hall, they siad about 24 hours. We gave it a good shot - didn't stop at most the shops, but got round most of it in 4.5 hours. The mall is right next to the Burj Khalifa - the world's tallest building. The Burj is HUGE. I thought the Auckland Sky Tower was tall, but this shits all over it. it's around 828m high, but more on that later.
Day four, Vaughan had a video conference in the morning, so me and al headed up to the pool area. Jumped in the sauna, man those things are hot. I sweated from places i didn't think it was possible. The temp cranked up to about 52 degrees, got too intense so we bailed and hit up the pool til vaughan finished his conference. That afternoon we'd locked in a desert safari with Arabian nights tours. Our driver, Khalid, picked us up around 3:30pm. We shared our land cruiser with this indian family. I rode shotgun, so was legit. We drove about an hour our into the desert and met up with the rest of the company's 4x4s, then went nuts in the dunes. Was freaking sweet man. Khalid would boost up a dune to near the edge, swing it round and send sand flying over the car and into the air. We'd cruise along the ridgelines and then just drop over the edge and drift the whole way down a dune. there were no sickbags, so I was stoked to be in shotgun. The indian family were right at the back and the younger son was whining by the end. don't think he was feeling so good. After about an hour or so, we stopped off at a camp site, where there was camel riding, sandboarding, quad biking, henna tattooing, free shisha, all sorts. Non-alcoholic drinks were free, food was all free. This is the life man. There was a free buffet BBQ dinner, and dancing shows - a belly dancer and a tandoor (a dude who spins round). We smashed the sandboarding first - was pretty average. you got these old snowboards, which was sweet, but the dunes weren't high or steep enough to have any real fun. Next we hit up the camel riding, that was alright. Tuffy had the lead camel, and VPT and I shared the second one. Our camel mustn't have been happy with the weight it was carrying cos it kept kicking up its legs and me and vaughan. meh, it was only a 2 minute ride, it'll live. We went to get henna - even though i thought it was a girls thing. The only condition for us getting a henna was that she had to draw the warriors logo. she couldn't do it, so we flagged. The dance show was sweet. The belly dancer was a bit average, but the tandoor dude was epic. He basically spun round with this sweet get-up on for 15-20 mins. I thought he would arse-up after it, but when he stopped he was sweet. When he finished, he asked people from the crowd to have a go. This russian dude jumped up and started spinning. He was going all good, but after a while started to lose it then arsed-up. A couple more had a go, then the russian dude's wife jumped up. She went hard, tried to show off, but then absolutely arsed up. did the whole running sideways no balance thing and almost bailed off the stage. That was definitely one of the highlights. The free buffet feed was up there also. Massive feed. The whole tour wrapped up at round 9pm and we eventually got back round 10:30pm. Wicked day.
Slow start to the 5th day in Dubai - we were pretty knackered from the day before. Vaughan had planned to take us to Ferrari world in Abu Dhabi. The world's fastest rollercoaster is there. We were pretty excited, but we rang up to confirm and it was going under it's annual maintenance and closed for the next two weeks. Mad buzz kill that. They'd started maintenance two days before... Instead we hit up the Wadi Adventure park in Al Ain. Epic place, that only opened 2 months ago. There's kayaking, white water rafting, surfing, high ropes course, and a zip line. Took ages to get there tho. We only locked in the rafting, everything else was booked out. I don't know how it was - when we got there we were one of about 20 people in the whole park... The rafting was sweet, all the courses were man-made. They took us on some pretty tame rapids to start off with, just to get us used to the calls, then we hit the proper rapids. They were nothing compared to some of the ones in NZ, but they were continuous, so there was no break between. We did the loop about 5 times. I bailed on the first loop, the water was pretty rough, but not deep. there were some hairy bits that Asty spent a lot of the time on top of vaughan. After the water park, we headed up the mountain there, Jebel Hafite. Vaughan's Nissan Sunny got a decent work out. Awesome views and awesome mountain, but the thunderstorm rolled in and vis went crap. It started hailing, so we headed down the hill. All the locals were going crazy, cars were parked up and everyone was running round checking out the hail. I liken it to the snow in wellington, when everyone stopped working and checked out the snow. Drivers didn't know how to handle it, they were driving like we would in NZ if there was black ice on the roads. Also, none of the roads had any drainage, so there were huge puddles of water around. We got back from Al Ain round 7:30pm. We'd booked to go up the Burj Khalifa at 10pm, so we headed in to Dubai mall, grabbed a feed (yum cha food) and watched the water fountain show, before heading up the Burj. We headed up the Burj, 124 floors up was the observation deck. We felt a little cheated, they said we'd get to the top, but we were no where near the top. oh well, we were still pretty high up. It was open roof observation deck. got a little vertigo getting right near the edge of the vewing platform, but the barriers were pretty high (to stop jumpers) so it was all good.
We perched up for the Thursday, hit up the mall for a bit and then played some tennis in the afternoon. That night Kate and vaughan organised an evening brunch - basically an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink dinner. It was pretty awesome, and only cost 200 dirhams. It was an asian themed night, so sushi, noodles, rice, pork, duck, chicken, curry, tempura, seafood - awesome food. We also had beers, wines, and spirits (vodka, gin, rum, whisky) free-flowing. was mint. After dinner, we checked out this bar called "Rock Bottom," and it was. Quite similar to the ol' KCs in dunedin. We didn't last long there, maybe 2 minutes, before we headed back to Barasti for the rest of the night.
Friday was league day. The Kiwis were playing Aussie in the ANZAC test. We boosted to the palms to VPT's mates penthouse appartment to watch the game. Awesome pad, but they were all Aussie supporters. Was a good game, but the kiwis lost, again. I don't think they've one and ANZAC test since 1998... Later that afternoon, we hit up the Dubai mall so Al could pick up his sunnies. The malls are the place to be on a Friday night man. It was pumping. People everywhere. Massive mission to get a park. Afta Al got his glasses, we gapped it ASAP, and tried to find this BBQ buffet place. We eventually got there, but was booked out. Guts. We decided to drive to Bur Dubai (old school part of town) and check out any cheap indian joint. Found this place called "Chaavadi" and got an epic feed.
We flew out of Dubai the next day at 3pm. Pretty much woke up, packed, and left. Asty squeezed in a hair cut at the mall before leaving. The lines at the Airport to check in were massive, so we tried self check-in. I got through sweet and had a seat. Not the same for Al. His screen read "flight full, no more seats". I was left to decide whether I locked in my seat, or risk the massive check-in line. Couldn't leave a man behind, so I gave up the seat and went with Alex to regular check-in. We got to the counter and the lady managed to get us both on the plan. Alex got a seat in row 24, and i got shafted into row 47. no karma there... but it did come back when i went to board. my seat got changed, so got bumped into row 24 - same as Al, but a couple seats down. Legit. Flight was sweet, smashed a couple movies. We landed in London around 7:30pm local time. Cleared immigration no worries - Alex had to see the doctor tho. Caught the train into town and met up with my cuz, Louise, and her boyfriend Liam. Perching at their's in Shepherd's bush for the week before heading off on our topdeck tour on Sat morning.
Anyways, next post will be a while off, but hopefully it'll be worth the wait!
Anyways, this is the Dubai post, so here goes...
Our first day in Dubai was a pretty slow start. VPT had work in the morning, but promised us a mean feed of dirty bird (KFC) on his return to watch the recorded Warriors vs Rabbitohs game. I was pretty excitied. The Warriors game wasn't actually on until the next day, but the epic feed of KFC more than made up for it. As with any feed of KFC, we couldn't move for the rest of the afternoon, but as sun started dropping down over the Gulf, we drove out to check out some sights (the Palm, Atlantis) and have a couple ciders at the beach bar Barasti. That night, vaughan took us to Karachi Darbar, this indian restaurant with dirt cheap, awesome indian food. Seriously, this place is a one in a million joint. I ordered a curry, nan and rice (standard procedure) and battled to get through half of it. Combining all three of our feeds, we barely finished half of the food. Vaughan originally ordered 4 nans for himself, but the waiter told him it was gonna be too much. The bill came to about 70 Dirhams - the equivalent of about $22! and that was for 3 of us!
Day 2 we hit up Wild Wadi, one of the water parks in Dubai. Was pretty sweet. People in Dubai are pretty lazy, so there were no stairs to climb to get to the top of the slides, instead, you get in your tube and get shot up to the start of the slides by a water slide. Water slide to get to the water slides - why didn't anyone think of this sooner?! The biggest slides there we had to climb up to tho, but it was worth it. We spent a good few hours at this water park, before crusing to check out the Burj Al ... somthing. It's the big one that looks like a sail. Couldn't get in, so just took some photos from outside.
Third day in Dubai, me and Alex were on our own. Vaughan had to see patients from 11 - 8pm. We ended up pretty much mall bashing for the most of the day. Dubai has about 60 malls around the place. They don't skimp on the size of malls either. You could easily kill a day in one mall, these are massive. Original plan was to head to Marina mall and catch an abra (water taxi) round the shoreline into Old Dubai. We got to the mall and just missed the 11am ferry, the next one was at 5pm... so that plan went down the drain. Grabbed a feed at TGI Fridays, where every day is Friday. Epic feed for 35 Dirhams. We decided to go the more boring route to Old Dubai, we jumped on the metro. 16 Dirhams for an all day pass wasn't too bad, nice a/c trains. They love buffing the tiled floors here - i spend most of the time trying not to bail in my jandals and the other times i feel like i'm walking in sand cos my feet are slipping out from under me. We got to Old Dubai and checked out the Gold Souk and Spice Souk. Souks are the old school markets. Pretty cool, but nowadays they're just a bunch of small shops under a covered path. The buildings are cool tho. We caught a 1 dirham (30 cent) abra across the river and caught the train to Dubai mall. Dubai Mall is MASSIVE. Supposed to be the biggest mall in the world. it felt like it, with it's ice rink, movie theatre, Sega Republic (indoor theme park), indoor aquarium and underwater zoo... not to mention the shopping and multiple food courts. I asked the information desk how long it would take to walk every floor and every hall, they siad about 24 hours. We gave it a good shot - didn't stop at most the shops, but got round most of it in 4.5 hours. The mall is right next to the Burj Khalifa - the world's tallest building. The Burj is HUGE. I thought the Auckland Sky Tower was tall, but this shits all over it. it's around 828m high, but more on that later.
Day four, Vaughan had a video conference in the morning, so me and al headed up to the pool area. Jumped in the sauna, man those things are hot. I sweated from places i didn't think it was possible. The temp cranked up to about 52 degrees, got too intense so we bailed and hit up the pool til vaughan finished his conference. That afternoon we'd locked in a desert safari with Arabian nights tours. Our driver, Khalid, picked us up around 3:30pm. We shared our land cruiser with this indian family. I rode shotgun, so was legit. We drove about an hour our into the desert and met up with the rest of the company's 4x4s, then went nuts in the dunes. Was freaking sweet man. Khalid would boost up a dune to near the edge, swing it round and send sand flying over the car and into the air. We'd cruise along the ridgelines and then just drop over the edge and drift the whole way down a dune. there were no sickbags, so I was stoked to be in shotgun. The indian family were right at the back and the younger son was whining by the end. don't think he was feeling so good. After about an hour or so, we stopped off at a camp site, where there was camel riding, sandboarding, quad biking, henna tattooing, free shisha, all sorts. Non-alcoholic drinks were free, food was all free. This is the life man. There was a free buffet BBQ dinner, and dancing shows - a belly dancer and a tandoor (a dude who spins round). We smashed the sandboarding first - was pretty average. you got these old snowboards, which was sweet, but the dunes weren't high or steep enough to have any real fun. Next we hit up the camel riding, that was alright. Tuffy had the lead camel, and VPT and I shared the second one. Our camel mustn't have been happy with the weight it was carrying cos it kept kicking up its legs and me and vaughan. meh, it was only a 2 minute ride, it'll live. We went to get henna - even though i thought it was a girls thing. The only condition for us getting a henna was that she had to draw the warriors logo. she couldn't do it, so we flagged. The dance show was sweet. The belly dancer was a bit average, but the tandoor dude was epic. He basically spun round with this sweet get-up on for 15-20 mins. I thought he would arse-up after it, but when he stopped he was sweet. When he finished, he asked people from the crowd to have a go. This russian dude jumped up and started spinning. He was going all good, but after a while started to lose it then arsed-up. A couple more had a go, then the russian dude's wife jumped up. She went hard, tried to show off, but then absolutely arsed up. did the whole running sideways no balance thing and almost bailed off the stage. That was definitely one of the highlights. The free buffet feed was up there also. Massive feed. The whole tour wrapped up at round 9pm and we eventually got back round 10:30pm. Wicked day.
Slow start to the 5th day in Dubai - we were pretty knackered from the day before. Vaughan had planned to take us to Ferrari world in Abu Dhabi. The world's fastest rollercoaster is there. We were pretty excited, but we rang up to confirm and it was going under it's annual maintenance and closed for the next two weeks. Mad buzz kill that. They'd started maintenance two days before... Instead we hit up the Wadi Adventure park in Al Ain. Epic place, that only opened 2 months ago. There's kayaking, white water rafting, surfing, high ropes course, and a zip line. Took ages to get there tho. We only locked in the rafting, everything else was booked out. I don't know how it was - when we got there we were one of about 20 people in the whole park... The rafting was sweet, all the courses were man-made. They took us on some pretty tame rapids to start off with, just to get us used to the calls, then we hit the proper rapids. They were nothing compared to some of the ones in NZ, but they were continuous, so there was no break between. We did the loop about 5 times. I bailed on the first loop, the water was pretty rough, but not deep. there were some hairy bits that Asty spent a lot of the time on top of vaughan. After the water park, we headed up the mountain there, Jebel Hafite. Vaughan's Nissan Sunny got a decent work out. Awesome views and awesome mountain, but the thunderstorm rolled in and vis went crap. It started hailing, so we headed down the hill. All the locals were going crazy, cars were parked up and everyone was running round checking out the hail. I liken it to the snow in wellington, when everyone stopped working and checked out the snow. Drivers didn't know how to handle it, they were driving like we would in NZ if there was black ice on the roads. Also, none of the roads had any drainage, so there were huge puddles of water around. We got back from Al Ain round 7:30pm. We'd booked to go up the Burj Khalifa at 10pm, so we headed in to Dubai mall, grabbed a feed (yum cha food) and watched the water fountain show, before heading up the Burj. We headed up the Burj, 124 floors up was the observation deck. We felt a little cheated, they said we'd get to the top, but we were no where near the top. oh well, we were still pretty high up. It was open roof observation deck. got a little vertigo getting right near the edge of the vewing platform, but the barriers were pretty high (to stop jumpers) so it was all good.
We perched up for the Thursday, hit up the mall for a bit and then played some tennis in the afternoon. That night Kate and vaughan organised an evening brunch - basically an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink dinner. It was pretty awesome, and only cost 200 dirhams. It was an asian themed night, so sushi, noodles, rice, pork, duck, chicken, curry, tempura, seafood - awesome food. We also had beers, wines, and spirits (vodka, gin, rum, whisky) free-flowing. was mint. After dinner, we checked out this bar called "Rock Bottom," and it was. Quite similar to the ol' KCs in dunedin. We didn't last long there, maybe 2 minutes, before we headed back to Barasti for the rest of the night.
Friday was league day. The Kiwis were playing Aussie in the ANZAC test. We boosted to the palms to VPT's mates penthouse appartment to watch the game. Awesome pad, but they were all Aussie supporters. Was a good game, but the kiwis lost, again. I don't think they've one and ANZAC test since 1998... Later that afternoon, we hit up the Dubai mall so Al could pick up his sunnies. The malls are the place to be on a Friday night man. It was pumping. People everywhere. Massive mission to get a park. Afta Al got his glasses, we gapped it ASAP, and tried to find this BBQ buffet place. We eventually got there, but was booked out. Guts. We decided to drive to Bur Dubai (old school part of town) and check out any cheap indian joint. Found this place called "Chaavadi" and got an epic feed.
We flew out of Dubai the next day at 3pm. Pretty much woke up, packed, and left. Asty squeezed in a hair cut at the mall before leaving. The lines at the Airport to check in were massive, so we tried self check-in. I got through sweet and had a seat. Not the same for Al. His screen read "flight full, no more seats". I was left to decide whether I locked in my seat, or risk the massive check-in line. Couldn't leave a man behind, so I gave up the seat and went with Alex to regular check-in. We got to the counter and the lady managed to get us both on the plan. Alex got a seat in row 24, and i got shafted into row 47. no karma there... but it did come back when i went to board. my seat got changed, so got bumped into row 24 - same as Al, but a couple seats down. Legit. Flight was sweet, smashed a couple movies. We landed in London around 7:30pm local time. Cleared immigration no worries - Alex had to see the doctor tho. Caught the train into town and met up with my cuz, Louise, and her boyfriend Liam. Perching at their's in Shepherd's bush for the week before heading off on our topdeck tour on Sat morning.
Anyways, next post will be a while off, but hopefully it'll be worth the wait!
Critty!
ReplyDeleteSounds like fun over there bud, we're all mighty jealous. You'll be pleased to know that Sean has slotted in and taken your desk pretty seamlessly, you're hardly missed..... Heh.
Best,
Hugh, Alex, Sean, and everyone else.
Cirrty, have you head @peace's album?
ReplyDelete