Gubbi of Arabia: Expat Life in Dubai

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Al Maha (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Hotel Vacations)

This past week marked the Eid Al Adha holiday in Dubai: a time when locals slaughter sheep / goats / camels to celebrate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice Ismael, and expats get the heck out of dodge to enjoy one of the few public holidays universally granted by our labor contracts.

Alex and I had initially booked tickets to go to the Philippines, but as luck would have it the imams in Saudi Arabia saw the moon unexpectedly and “called” the holiday earlier than planned [Ed. Note: Yes, this is actually how holidays work here], so the nearly week-long break we had anticipated got abruptly reduced to a four-day weekend and we decided that a 72-hour jaunt around Manila wasn’t worth 17 hours of flying time.

Enter… Al Maha.

View of the “Bedouin Suite” from our private plunge pool.

It is a universal truth of the expat experience in Dubai that everyone must visit Al Maha, a high-end desert resort located about 45 minutes outside the city, at least once during their UAE tenure. It’s just one of those douchey things you swore you’d never do when you moved here but sooner or later find yourself doing - like buying a gas-guzzling SUV, aggressively seeking out friends of your own nationality, or finding yourself in a conversation about how hard it is to hire good help. With the Philippines scrapped and no other plans in sight, a quick availability check on Expedia revealed that our number was up - we were Maha-bound.

The (off)road through the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, leading to the resort.

We arrived just as night fell, so the next day when we woke up at 6 AM (!!!) for our guided nature walk, we were treated to this spectacular scene.

We spent the morning trekking through the sand learning random desert facts: for instance, did you know that antelopes indigenous to the Arabian Desert are able to go their whole lives without drinking water, and can survive just by consuming moisture from the vegetation they eat? (The ones on the reserve have gotten soft and now drink from the hotel’s plunge pools… sorry, evolution.)

This picture reveals our awkward habit of picking out matching outfits when we don’t watch each other get dressed. We’re like identical twins, but uh — in a romantic, non-creepy way!

We also learned about the super-deadly tree below - Bedouins used to extract poisonous sap from the trunk and use it to kill and remove their rotting teeth. 

THIS TREE SHALL BE MY DENTIST. (Is it just me or have locals, much like the antelopes, gotten a little softer since then?)

Then it was back to our plunge pool for a little lounging and light reading.

Bushie and a brewski: incontrovertible evidence that living abroad can swing your predilections waaaaaay to the right. (No but seriously, Decision Points is an interesting read even if you’re not in the process of morphing into a Republican like I… might be.)

As the sun sank over the desert, we set off on a super-corny-but-nevertheless-obligatory sunset camel ride.

Alex loves riding camels, can’t you tell?

Fortunately, there were amazing views (and complimentary champagne!) to mediate the corniness.

PRO TIP: when packing for a desert weekend, running clothes also double as camel-riding sunset clothes. The more you know!

There was also, oh, you know, pretty much the greatest sunset I’ve ever seen.

Sadly, I still use my DSLR entirely on automatic, so this is the best I could capture it.

Then we got gussied up nice and had fruity cocktails and the “Sri Lankan Feast” menu for dinner. It was dreamy.

PRO TIP: When you’re at a fancy hotel in the Middle East, always go with the South Asian option. Chances are 99% that the chef’s from the subcontinent and hence will do a better job on eggplant curry than, say, foie gras or sole meunière.

The next morning we were up at 6 AM (AGAIN!!!) to go horseback riding in the dunes at sunrise.

My little ponies.

This was insanely cool, mainly because I was obsessed with the Black Stallion books when I was a kid and spent the better part of the years between 1989-1993 pretending I was the young Alec Ramsay, galloping on my Arabian steed through the dunes of the Empty Quarter. Even if you weren’t living out a childhood dream, though, it’d still be pretty awesome - provided you have some riding experience, they let you saddle up proper Arabian ex-racehorses, and feeling my equine Ferrari blast his way up the dunes was the closest I’ve ever come to witnessing an animal doing the exact thing it was meant to do. 

Dune bashing.

Nothing could top our morning gallop, so we headed back to our suite for a little more R&R at the pool and I caught up on the breaking news from Dubai, like the annual plea for local Muslims to please not slaughter their own sheep during the Eid holiday.

KIDS, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

And that, my friends, was our holiday weekend in the desert. Eid Mubarak!

  1. bymomo said: who do you have no teeth in the sri lankan feast picture!?
  2. pinotandthefig said: Sounds dreamy! On another note….did you go to Ole Miss??
  3. jjae said: Sorry about the moon (WTF? haha) but if it’s any consolation, I’m totally jealous of your “plan B” vacation!
  4. gubbiofarabia posted this
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