Day 30 – Friday 12 January 2018

Up early again & bags packed, moving day again, off to Dubai today.  The drive is uneventful, just so much sand with a magnificent highway through the desert.  Dubai is busy & we head straight to our hotel to drop our luggage & check in, our room has a view over the pool & creek (a big one).  The Dubai Creek wharfs are across from our hotel on the waterfront so we head out for a walk down towards the spice & gold souks.  But we are all hungry so we stopped at a seafood restaurant, “Creek View” we choose to sit outside & so have hundreds of flies.  The place is a bit rough & ready with pictures of Italian cities, Marilyn Munroe, Mona Lisa & some musicians from a different era, Arabian music is playing.  Two wishful cats are sitting next to our table (they are lucky Jackson shares his food with them).  The waiter is very nice & offers us a table inside away from the flies but we are Aussies, we can deal with the flies.  The menu has mainly Arabian food & to our delight it is tasty & we enjoy it.  Now we are full of energy & ready for the long walk along the side of the creek.

There are many boats offering food & cruises up the creek.  There are some very old small wooden cargo boats moored picking up or dropping off cargo – new fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, bolts of fabrics & heaven only knows what else or where these boats are coming from or going to.  We are in the old part of Dubai with older style houses but they are still worthy of photographing.  We reach the spice souk, they are in alley ways where they sell spices by the bucket loads.  They also sell scarves, watches & cheap looking souvenirs – we just say no thank you & keep going.  Some ask us where are we from & when we tell them, Australia they all seem to know “Ozi, Ozi oi, oi, oi”.  Ron started to talk to a nice Arabian store keeper who was born in Dubai & owns 25 of the stores in the souk.  He said if the tourists wouldn’t come & buy there would be no souk because the locals don’t come.  We didn’t buy anything from him or anyone else.  We walk along some back streets to get to the gold souk.  Once again it is alley ways but more orderly with little stores displaying some amazing gold & other jewellery.  Ron was holding my hand, not because he is romantic but he didn’t want me to stray into any of the stores.  Once again we left without a little trinket souvenir.

We now hurried back to the ferry wharves where they have some small ferry boats that can carry about 20 people.  We stand in line with lots of other people & catch one boat & go across the other side of the creek for 1 dirham each.  On the other side we repeat the process & returned to where we started from.  What a lovely experience, we really enjoyed it.  Now the long walk back to our hotel for a quick pit stop.  Poor Charles has to drive through heavy traffic, but worst still he has to cruise around the Dubai Mall with a very full parking area before we strike it lucky, someone was leaving, then a rush to get us in line to get up to the Burj Khalifa Tower, the tallest building in the world.  Lucky Charles had already bought our tickets online otherwise we wouldn’t have got up the tower.

There were so many people going up to the tower, Ron & I went up on our own because the others have been up there a few times & they went to the “Apple” store to look for a new computer for Monica.  A very fast lift took us up to level 124, at 452 metres above ground level.  We then walked up many steps to the final/top viewing level 125.  Wow, wow, what a fantastic view!!!  We watched the sun set over Dubai & the dancing fountains, they were good but not as spectacular as the last time when we saw them from below at ground level.  The night lights came on – they certainly put on a fantastic light show, beautiful – after many photos we joined the queue & came down.  There were so many people watching the next dancing fountain show that it took a while for Charles to find us.  Once again everyone is hungry.  Monica & the boys want to go to the Cheese Factory Restaurant but we would have to wait at least 25 minutes to get a table, they bought some cheese cake slices to take away.  We decided to go back to the Hotel & eat there.  Once again Ron & I are so grateful that Charles drove us back safely to the hotel in very heavy traffic.

From our Hotel window we watched a beautiful fireworks display – most probably it was specially put on to farewell us.  We went to a Thai restaurant at the hotel & we only just got a table because about 80+ Asian tourists had the other tables reserved.  The food was good but spicy.  We are all tired & have to go to bed because we are all getting up early to get Ron & me to the Airport.  What an exciting & fantastic day we had, thank you Monica, Charles, Jackson & Austin.