Lilly's Highlights & Recommendations #1

In no particular order of preference, top 5 highlights/tips from countries visited so far (apologies for repetition, duplication and inconsistencies with Paul's contributions). Backpacking Gallafent style!

UAE (Ras Al Khamai & Dubai)

1. Hilton Resort & Spa in Ras Al Khamai - this is an amazing 5* resort. Brand new with excellent facilities (pools, restaurants, bars, spa, sea, sand). We really didn't have to leave for the whole 3 days!

2. Wild Wadi water park - brilliant selection of slide rides, mostly fun and not scary (apart from one which drops you from height!) You need to pick your rubber doughnut carefully though otherwise it can be painful!

3. Dubai Mall - the world's largest (a frequently made claim in Dubai!) mall. It really does have every shop you can think of from across the world plus an ice rink, aquarium, Sega Republic (arcade based theme park - lots of fun) and a 22 screen cinema. It is well designed and landscaped too so it is a nice place to spend time (eating also good with a massive selection). The water fountain show on the man made lake outside is up there with the Bellagio in Vegas in my list of Top 5 fountains.

4. Indian restaurant in Sheraton Hotel in Bur Dubai - live Indian music and dancing, great poppadums and curry. I have forgotten the name though, which goes to show what a good time I had!

5. The bars (Neo's & Kalibar (sp?) in The Address Hotel and Hive) - great views from both the bottom and the top of the Address Hotel. Hive was great just because it made Paul and Roops so grumpy to be there and also because they gave Jag and I a whole bottle of Brut for free to celebrate Ladies Night. No wonder Paris Hilton loves it!

Thank you again to Jag & Roops for their excellent hosting and great company!

India (Mumbai)

1. Cricket - won't repeat the long story associated with getting in, but it was a great way to pass a morning. The atmosphere in the cheap seats (more like a concrete step!) was fantastic (certainly better than in England) and the cricket was top quality (well, the batting was) with a record score being set. India won of course.

2. Dome Bar - the only place to find peace and quiet in the madness of Mumbai. A great place to watch the sunset on the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel on Marine Drive.

3. Pashminas - beautiful cashmere embroidered pashminas at a fraction of the British price. Purchase supports Indian Cottage industry too so I'm guilt free.

4. The food - great curry of course and no problems at all with badly cooked or poor quality meat. Khyber on MG Road (an enormous mad road typical of Mumbai) was particularly good.

5. Elephanta Island - (mostly) impressive temples carved into caves and lots of cute monkeys running around. Pleasant boat journey from Gateway to India to get there too.

Thailand (Bangkok)

1. Temples - known as Wats there are Buddhist temples everywhere! They are mostly modern and very bling indeed (a lot of gold and colours) so naturally I liked them! There is a lot of detail too with hundreds of colourful statues (very large to very small) standing guard plus the obligatory millions of Buddhas. My favourite Wat was Wat Arun on the river but the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho was great and huge! The royal palace has a good Wat and the views of Bangkok from the Golden Mound are worth seeing. There are also some stunning examples of Thai architecture in the Ancient City park which is miles out of town (take a taxi not the 2 buses and 1 train we did!) but is fun to cycle around.

2. Massage - there are clean and legit spas everywhere and the treatments are very cheap indeed. I had a 2 hour Thai massage and a 30min foot reflexology for less than £12. The Thai massage is oil free and involves a lot of pressure and bending and stretching. It hurt quite a lot as I am totally inflexible but I felt great afterwards!

3. Long tailed boat tour along the river - much faster than they look! A bumpy way to see the river but lots of fun, especially when you come across a guy in another boat selling ice cold beer!

4. The prices - not just cheap massages, but food and alcohol is cheap too. We had lunch in the Ancient City for £2 total and a pint is about £1.50 (even on tourist central Kao San (sp?) Rd). Thai silk and jewellery is pretty cheap too.

5. Hotel (Centrepoint Silom) - excellent location near a main skytrain (clean, quick and cheap) and near the main pier for the river boats. Self catering but with hotel facilities too including gym and pool. Decent view from our 19th floor balcony too. Cheap.

I will also pick top 5 photos from each place when I have access to a proper Internet connection!

Dubai or not Dubai, that is (Lilly's) question

(Now updated with photos and a pun in the title, which was previously boring)

Right, enough of my musings about Dubai - which are to remind myself of first impressions as much as anything. What did we actually get up to?

Dubai Mall is, if not the world's biggest, as close as I care to get, but has a few good places to eat, an ice rink, the afore-mentioned cinema and best of all an aquarium - starting with one huge tank, rammed with sealife, and featuring the world's biggest (the Dubai theme) single plate of aquarium glass.

And lots of smaller tanks with some good stuff. A definite Top 5 Aquaria contender (but behind Lisbon at least). Atlantis, out on the Palm, has a smaller but much denser aquarium, and is probably too small for its main attraction, a whale shark that "swam in" while they were building it.
Back to Dubai Mall (as we seemed to do every day) for an evening fountain display to rival the Bellagio, and mad rides and games at Sega World. You'll have to ask Lilly how much she enjoyed/was terrified by the spinning game she went on.

We also spent a few hours at Wild Wadi waterpark, which was surprisingly fun - you sit in your rubber ring while water propels you up, down and around, and you try to simultaneously protect your bum, head and feet from getting bruised. More fun than it sounds, and there's also one giant slide sans rubber ring where at one point you seem to take off. "Just keep your arms and legs crossed and your chin tucked in," they say. This is not the easiest thing to concentrate on when you're wondering how long you'll be airborne and how much it will hurt when you land.
Also: a couple of good lunches in nice resort hotel settings (think plenty of clear blue pools); pre-dinner drinks in a 63rd-storey bar; a desert safari, charging up and down dunes in time to watch the sun set (slightly sabotaged by clouds) and traditional desert meal and desert dessert; the 38th National Day parade, which was ill-attended but quite funny(unintentionally); an outlet mall for Lilly to balance her desire to shop against her need to carry everything she bought for the next 6 months; and a bar with the worst business model ever (dragged there by Lilly because Paris Hilton was once spotted there) - free entry, and it's Ladies' Night so 3 free drink vouchers for Lilly and Jag, which they somehow converted to a bottle of champagne for them and a drink for me that was never charged for. We left having paid for one drink between us. I like to think of this as a little microcosm of Dubai. Well, this and the "This is Dubai" float in the National Day parade:

Note the skier on top of the building that houses the indoor ski slope in the Mall of Emirates!

UAE! UAE! UAE!

Here we are, at the start of seven months of roughing it. If it keeps up like this I'm not sure how I'll cope:



Our friends Jag and Roops picked us up in Dubai and drove us off to join in their holiday in Ras Al-Kahmai. There are 7 Emirates and we passed through 5 of the 7 on our way, which I think you'll agree is a reasonable effort at sight-seeing. To be honest, the photo above is Jag and Roops' Hilton Resort - we stayed at a cheaper Hilton up the road and hung out at the more expensive one all day. Pretty good place - it has a ridiculous number of pools, or you can wander down to the imported beach for a swim in a rather pleasant sea.* All brand new and not at all busy until our last day. Excellent buffet too.
* I didn't do this, obviously, but I did manage a few lengths of the longest pool I've been in for at least 20 years without drowning. Hopefully Dubbs will be proud of me.

One of my (fortunately) abandoned ideas was to use my GPS watch to track a 10k run in every country we go to. A quick workout on a treadmill - no a/c but cooler than outside in the sun - convinced me that that was an idiot idea from the start so I'm glad I abandoned it before we set off and left the watch at home.



Lilly and Jag were thrilled to get their photo taken with legendary lounge singer Fadel. What do you mean you've never heard of him? His rendition of It's A Wonderful World is surely in the charts back home by now...

We were rather amused in Ras Al Kaimah to see a lot of official banners everywhere proudly celebrating the 38th birthday of the "United Arab Emirtes" (sic).

All in all a very pleasant and relaxing start to our trip. I suspect we might have to put in a bit more effort in future destinations...