DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 119

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DESERT FANTASIES
We landed at Dubai International Airport shortly after 10 P.M . feeling like zombies after a
fifteen-hour flight from Washington, D.C. Yet once Bill and I entered the airport terminal,
I woke up as if I'd just downed five espressos. The baggage area was frantic with passengers
taking this first opportunity to indulge in the local version of duty-free shopping—Cartier
and Chanel, Russian caviar and French champagne—before heading out into the hot
breath of night. Weary passengers revved up by shopping. We drove into the city and onto
Sheikh Zayed Road, the main drag. The night skyline was a pastiche of vanity skyscrapers
and giant-size shopping malls with no discernible pattern or aesthetic. Not Middle Eastern
or European or Asian or American; not urban or suburban; not tropical or northern. There
was little evidence of quirky neighborhoods or old-fashioned anomalies, at least from the
highway.
Billboards and banners advertising every conceivable international luxury brand added
to the sense that you weren't quite sure where you were, only that you were surrounded
by wealth. New trains—empty at that hour—on the new elevated track hugged the high-
way. Several buildings were entirely dark at night, which locals said meant they were empty.
Driving through that surreal city, I felt as if I had stumbled onto a movie set.
Nothing quite prepares you for Dubai. I had read up on its extravagances and made a
list of Dubai's nicknames: “Singapore on Steroids,” “Manhattan on Speed,” “Oz-Las Ve-
gas,” “Miami in the Gulf” or “Disney in the Desert.” Those sobriquets are inadequate for
the breathtaking scope of this tourist fantasy made from scratch at the mouth of the Arabi-
an Gulf in what used to be forgotten desert scrub brush lit at night by stars and home to
nomadic tribes who gave way to nimble traders.
Now it is a tourist's paradise. Dubai's malls are legendary in the Middle East and South
Asia for selling more brand names outside of any city but London. Its nightlife with free-
flowing drinks and a “united nations of prostitutes” for hire is a stunning rarity in a region
best known for war and strict Islamic social and religious rules. Big-name architects built
fanciful hotels here; one is underwater. Everything in Dubai has to be the biggest, the best,
or the most outrageous: from the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, to an indoor ski
slope in the desert at the Mall of the Emirates. Travel and tourism magazines can't write