Fourteen hours
Seattle to Dubai is fourteen hours in the air without a stop, and the airline is most of what determines whether that is an ordeal or merely a long day. We flew Emirates. The aircraft was new, the cabin crew were superb, and the service never slipped. I have spent fourteen hours in considerably worse company.
We landed and were taken straight to the hotel.
One&Only Royal Mirage
I would recommend the Royal Mirage to anyone going to Dubai.
The resort occupies a substantial stretch of the Persian Gulf shoreline — white sand, water the temperature and temperament of a bath, and something like half a mile of beach, which is enough that a morning walk becomes an actual walk rather than a lap. The room types run broad, and the connected rooms are the right answer for anyone travelling with children.
The city most visitors never see
Dubai is easy to visit badly. The version in everyone's head — glass, scale, air-conditioning — is real and worth seeing, but it is roughly fifty years old, and it is not the whole account.
Go to the souks. Get down to Dubai Creek. That is where the original city still stands, trading much as it always has, a short distance and a long way from where most visitors spend their entire stay. It is the part of the trip I would protect first if the days ran short.
The Burj Khalifa
Then go and stand at the top of the Burj Khalifa, because you cannot responsibly skip it.
The observation decks sit on the 124th and 125th floors, with a third higher still on the 148th, and from any of them the view runs unobstructed through a full 360 degrees — desert on one side, the Gulf on the other, and the city laid out between them like a drawing of itself. I am generally sceptical of observation decks. This one is unarguable.
The Palm
Take a boat out around the Palm for a half day or a full one. Cruising its fronds, past the condominiums and the private villas and the hotels, is the only way to grasp the scale of what was built here, which a car cannot give you.
We spent one day at the Atlantis on the Palm and its water park, which was among the best maintained and most inventive I have been to anywhere — slides, lazy rivers, the full inventory, and food that was genuinely good, a sentence I do not often write about a water park.
Qasr Al Sarab
From Dubai we drove to Abu Dhabi, and then onward, out past the city to Qasr Al Sarab Desert Resort by Anantara, an hour and a half into the dunes.
It is one of the most unforgettable places I have stayed. The resort is built as a fortress in the sand, and the dunes run to the horizon in every direction from its walls.
We were there over New Year's, and the celebration was extraordinary: steak, traditional Middle Eastern dishes, sushi, pasta, desserts without end, ice sculptures, a live band, games for the children. We also walked out into the dunes one evening and watched the sun go down over them, which was the better of the two experiences and cost nothing.
Emirates Palace
We drove back into Abu Dhabi and stayed at the Emirates Palace, a vast and frankly imposing complex set directly on the water.
A good deal of our time went on simply exploring it and its many restaurants. There are two pools, one in each wing: one geared to families, with a lazy river, and another with a hot tub — one of very few we found anywhere in the region. We were there over the American holidays, when the evenings cool off, and there was nothing better at the end of a day than a hot tub under a chilly desert sky.
Next door, five minutes on foot, stands Qasr Al Watan, the presidential palace. It is a remarkable piece of Islamic architecture — huge, massive, enduring — and worth walking over to even if you only see it from the outside.
Home
From Abu Dhabi we drove back to Dubai and took the fourteen-hour flight home.