Around The World Without Flying: Dubai Part 2 - a museum, the gold market and the spice market

It is now 2 pm local time, and I have just returned from a fascinating shore excursion into Muscat, Oman. It was 40 degrees Celsius, so needless to say it was a demanding 4-hour tour, which included walking around for a couple of hours in the heat. At least the bus was gently air-conditioned though. I will talk about this in my next post.

Back to Dubai, though it was interesting that our well-educated Omani tour guide made the comment that the people in Dubai want to be the best in everything, including holding as many world records as they can. This is why they have huge sporting events, incredible buildings, and so forth. . .

I might add Dubai is also planning the first green city, where all energy is from renewable sources, mainly solar of course. It already has set up a huge solar farm. They recognise the limited future of fossil fuels, and want to remain ahead of the race. For a country that has been a leading world oil producer, that is very forward thinking.

Anyhow, yesterday our shore excursion group happened to have the same tour guide as the night before, which was great. He was from Sri Lanka and can speak several languages fluently. We have quite a few German passengers on board and he spoke to them in German.

Our tour guide told us that guest workers do well in Dubai, although of course they are not given real estate and have to rent. The standard of the rental properties and hence their cost varies, as you might expect. They do not have to pay any tax. He has already spent five years there and plans on spending another two. The guest workers seem to come from everywhere - and the majority are in the construction and service industries.

On our tour we visited a mosque, though could not see inside, an excellent museum that has been established in an old fort and is mostly underground where it is cool, a spice market place called the Spice Souk and a gold market called the Gold Souk. Locals shop at these too. To experience what many locals do to reach the two markets, which are next to each other, we travelled on small boats across the canal, ten of us to a boat, which was a bit of fun.

The smell of all the spices was simply wonderful. We were taken into a more up-market shop in the Spice Souk and we were each given a sample of one of their sweets made from dates. In the centre of the date was an almond, and the date was coated with white chocolate made from camel’s milk. I cannot tell you how divine it was. We all lined to to buy a small bag of them! (They were very expensive.) Some of my photos are taken in this shop.

The gold market was incredible, though a bit intimidating with sellers of other things such as scarves pressing on you from all sides in a most persistent way. Some of the gold jewellery was out of this world - what you might expect a Pharaoh’s wife to wear. What intricate, exquisite workmanship!

Enjoy the photos! (I have now taken over 2500 photos!)

A solar-powered WiFi station on the beach

Another amazing hotel close to the one we visited.

A mosque along the road. Dubai has many mosques.

The house in the middle is typical of the kind of house given to the Arab population.

A view of the mosque we saw from the outside only.

Another building seen along the road.

The museum.

Part of a display on the old ways of boat building in the museum. The 'man' is actually a model.

Viewed from our small boat as we crossed the canal. These belong to Iranians who take waste to be recycled back to Iran. The Dubai government pays the Iranian government for the service, as it does not yet have sufficient facilities to process all of its own recyclables.