Dubai: Storming the desert

Desert trips in 4WDs are a major tourist attraction in Dubai. Photo / 123RF

In the desert beyond Dubai's glittering and manic metropolis, Ewan McDonald unleashes his inner petrolhead ...

Dubai. The biggest. The tallest. The richest. The most expensive. The first. The fastest. The smartest. The newest. The never-been-done-beforest. Amazingest. Building. Marina. Hotel. Grand Prix. Malls. Architecture. Manmade thingies. Whatsits. GDP, ABC and XYZ. Airport, all that most visitors will see of Dubai, passing through the transit hall and duty-free shops on their way to anywhere else.

This is not that country. We are leaving that behind as our Land Cruiser belts along the four-lane blacktop highway laid over red sand, our guide Zahir at the wheel, when he is not pointing out sights and talking with hands that should really be at the wheel, aircon wound up to The Max. It is just after midday, somewhere past 35C, and the day can only get hotter.

We are leaving the city behind, although its most prominent skymark, the 882m architectural sail of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest

building, will bust our rear-view mirrors for some kilometres yet. We pass the dusty, empty stands of the rugby sevens stadium and the camel-racing tracks.

Camel racing is pretty much the only game in this town. Bigger than the Sevens; bigger than the tennis; bigger than the paymasters clicking their fingers and suggesting that, since the soccer teams that wear their advertising logos have a weekend off, they can come to Dubai and play one another in a friendly. Snap! Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid and AC Milan are on the next plane.

We are leaving the stretched Mercedes and Ferraris of the city behind, too. We are now in the sand of Toyotas and Hyundais. Flat-deck utes pulling high-top trailers taking valuable livestock home from the training tracks. Camel floats.

After 60 or thereabouts kilometres Zaheer spins the wheel into a sideroad signposted Margham Desert Conservation Park. I wonder: Yep, this is a desert. There is a heck of a lot of sand punctuated with the occasional scrubby bush. What are they conserving? Where is the park?

But when you come from a land with The Most green bush per square inch and Even More water per something else, you need to shift your preconceptions and appreciate what is about to unfold around you. Just as soon as your vehicle gets through this traffic jam of - no exaggeration - several hundred brand-new Land Cruisers and security guards counting the visitors in each car.

Zaheer parks and shoos us in the direction of a small arena, about the size of a small tennis stadium, with rough wooden benches and canvas sunshades, for the falconry show. These miniature eagle lookalikes, famed for their flying and hunting skills, are the national bird of Dubai, though they're not natives. As we'll find out, they're just passing over.

Time to 'fess up: I'm uncomfortable with capturing, training and making sideshows of wild animals, but it's hard not to feel the exhilaration of an untamed, winged predator zinging millimetres past my left ear and snapping a gobbet from the trainer. Or to score one for the bird when the trainer has to admit that "you can't domesticate them ... the falcon will simply disappear back into the sky when he wants to."

Next we unleash the inner Westie. Zaheer is the leader of the pack of 50 or more brand new Land Cruisers and we're gonna bash around the sand dunes. Rocking and rolling and rollicking up dune and down Dubai.

If you're worried about the planet it could be so very wrong: we are in a Gulf State, its riches built on oil, and we've got the air pumped out of the tyres and we're smashing through a nature reserve in a 4WD, burning fossil fuels like there's no ... Okay, so you never did one naughty thing in your life, just for half an hour?

Unfortunately one of the cars gets stuck in a sand hole. Zaheer has to organise operations.

We three Kiwis walk into the desert. Twenty steps. It would be tempting to say we are surrounded by nothing, but that would be shallow and ignorant.

There is sand. There are bushes. There is a sky, darkening every second for it is approaching 4.30pm and sunset. There is warmth but it is chilling around us. There is silence, except when one of us takes a step and the silica crunches beneath a sneaker. The sun turns gold pink orange red. It lowers itself, gently, a curtsey, behind the dunes. The sky shades blue, indigo, dark.

I know there is life; scorpions, snakes, insects, birds. I just can't see them. That is why they are still here.

Zaheer and his mates pull the stricken car out of the sandhole. Surrounding tourists cheer, clap, eager for the next excitement. We three walk back to our vehicle. We're quiet. We have been somewhere else.

Convoy reconvened, we drive on half-formed roads, planted oases and engineered watering holes, skittery scattery gazelles and, in the half-light, white-coated, long-horned, graceful oryx.

My watch is ticking over to 5pm and it's pitch black when we stop at a replica of a Bedouin campsite, walk past camels and their handlers and into the football-field sized arena, enclosed by tents, where we'll be served dinner, entertained, and pass the next three or four hours until ... the surprise ending.

There are several hundred for dinner tonight, crouching and lying in various degrees of comfort and dis-, at the low tables and ground-level cushions that Middle Eastern diners have found works wonders for their digestion for the past 30 or more centuries. Some visitors, possibly possessed of Northern European table manners, appear unconvinced.

We are in Dubai so there is wine and beer alongside Coke and Sprite. The beer is German and the wine forgettable. But not the sundried tomatoes, harissa, falafel, hummus, lamb chops: the food is appropriate and excellent. Perhaps it's the dark. Perhaps it's the sudden cool change. Perhaps it's just that everything is so perfectly pitched for the setting.

Between the mezze and the grills I wander out of the square to where the camels are parked. It's like an old-fashioned taxi stand: you have to take the next crabby one off the rank breath. He looks me up and down. It is not a long gaze. His handler is listless.

"Merhaba," I greet him. One word of Arabic and we are bros. I am honoured with two rounds of the tourist track.

The camel is not as impressed: at the end of the ride he reverses his double-jointed knees and dumps me on the sand.

Back in the campsite, a belly dancer. Yes, with 21st century sensibilities her performance may feel an anachronism to our table of Kiwi and Aussie women, one middle-aged bloke. It is 9, or so, on a cool night in the Arabian Gulf. Some hundreds of us are in a mock-Bedouin camp near the most 21st century of world cities. The belly dancer leaves the sand. The floodlights are killed.

We turn our faces to the skies. We don't know the names of the stars and the stars don't know our names. It is dark. It is silent. Each individual is lost in their own thoughts, their own imaginings. One star burns. Perhaps it was the one Rumi saw, not far from here, 800 years ago:

Last night,

I saw the realm of joy and pleasure.

There I melted like salt;

no religion, no blasphemy,

no conviction or uncertainty remained.

In the middle of my heart, a star appeared, and the seven heavens were lost in its brilliance.

Switch flicked, floodlights blind. Zaheer appears from the corner where women have been painting quick-dry henna on tourists' hands.

"Ready to go?" he asks. We make for the Land Cruiser, parked near the camels.

We fall asleep on the way back to the city. Just as well. At 6am we are leaving from the biggest and busiest airport in the world.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Emirates flies daily to Dubai from Auckland.

Further information: See arabian-adventures.com and dubaitourism.ae.

Ewan McDonald travelled courtesy of Uniworld Boutique River Cruises and Emirates.