World's coolest

Shopping is what you do in Dubai when you want to escape the heat.  The malls here are massive, with side attractions that might just include a ski slope or a giant aquarium or even the world's tallest building. 

Needless to say designer brands dominate, but just about everything in the mall is not what you would find at home...we simply couldn't afford it!  Not only that, but where would one put a life-sized stone camel, or a chandelier the size of your average house.  However we did enjoy the cafes and some of the smaller shops, and I just can't wait for Pottery Barn to make its way to Australia.

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I was taken also by the 'Lady Counter'. We'd been watching all the white robed men leading their black robed entourages of wives around the malls, and when I saw the 'Lady Counter' sign, I had this fantasy it was some device to count your ladies, to check that not too many of them had gone missing in the Dior or Fendi store. I think it was actually a ladies only checkout at a department store.

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World's hottest

Dubai Beach certainly felt like the world's hottest beach. Here it is with the world's tallest building in the background. We spent several hours here, under a sunshade, with frequent cooling dips in the sea - the temperature of which was that of a perfect warm bath.

In a country where Islamic rules and traditions usually make for extreme modesty in public attire, the beach presents problems for the Dubai authorities. Dubai has its wealthy local Arabs, who own the place; it has an army of mainly single men from the Indian subcontinent, who do all the work; and it has western tourists and expatriates. They want the tourists and expats to be able to indulge in their touristy western pursuits like beachgoing, but they want to avoid offending the devout among the locals, and probably want to avoid encouraging any unsavoury behaviours at the edges where cultures meet.

Hence the men in red and yellow. They look a bit like Australian surf lifesavers, but they seemed to spend a lot of time just blowing whistles at people.

I have only this one photo of the beach. Photography was against the rules. There were lots of rules, including that you had to wear beachwear on the beach, and you couldn't wear it off the beach. The red-and-yellow garbed lifesavers were there to enforce all this. Not sure how ready they'd have been to save lives if needed.

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World's tallest

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 828m, is the world's tallest building. It's actually nearly twice as tall as any of the last few world's tallest buildings - they didn't want to do it half heartedly!

When we were in Dubai five years ago it was still under construction. This time there it was in all its glory, thrusting skywards out of the desert, dwarfing the other skyscrapers around it, and nothing would stop me going up the tallest (and second fastest) lift in the world to have a bit of a look.

The observation deck is actually only about three quarters of the way up. It's on the 124th floor, and when you look up from it there's still a pretty big skyscraper above you! When you look down you see a surrealistic model city of model buildings, model highways, and toy trains beneath you. On one side you see the sea (only just - the air's pretty dusty and smoggy), on the other side it soon becomes sandy desert wasteland.

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