A country which is a city alone and also part of union of emirates. This city has changed the world map and shines bright with its power of Liquid Gold and the attraction to tourists.

It is the dream city of Dubai which is admired by many people to just visit once and enjoy the cityscape beauty created by engineers and workers. The story of Dubai is not centuries old but matter of few decades.

I happened to be one of the lucky folks to stay in the dream city for about 4 weeks and live life king size. Every day of those 4 weeks were joyous and exciting to find something new and marvelous.

The photos exemplify my feeling ans the grandeur of the city. Once a desert city now boasts of world’s tallest tower, only 7 star hotel and some of the most expensive places to stay in the world. Enjoy the photo by following the link below.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE GALLERY

The blog post of Dubai gives a description of how to go from Sharjah to Dubai, specifically Gold souk and the surrounding heritage places.

A gallery has been uploaded with a larger set of images to get a visual feel of how the area looks like and its neighboring heritage places which have been kept intact in the midst of city with all the lavish lifestyle and skyscrapers.

This gallery is also an experiment to see how the new gallery which has been integrated looks like and has the user experience for browsing the photos.

Feedback is welcome on that.

Click on the image below to visit the gallery link.

My second week in UAE was nearing end and it was our second visit to the city of Dubai. This time it was just me and my mother exploring the local transport service.

The local transport is extremely comfortable with Mercedes branded buses. This was my first visit to Dubai in the inter emirate local transport buses accompanied by my mother. We planned of visiting the world famous Gold Souk and the heritage places around it.

The local bus route can be found out at http://www.rta.ae/wpsv5/wps/portal/bus_time_table?SwitchToLatestLocale=true . The gold souk is a very popular and major bus station from where you can reach at any destination. We started our journey with the bus station in Sharjah near Rola. The link mentioned above is also the government website which gives correct and reliable data. The buses are on time and follow a schedule which is very good and helps in finer planning of the journey.

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I had settled down in Sharjah at home and it were a few days past my arrival in the city. Friday is the weekend and people work on Saturday and Sunday. Dec 26, 2008 being a Friday, we planned to head out and explore the region called as Hatta.

Hatta is famous for the heritage village which is preserved in that region. Apart from the heritage value, the region probably once boasted of wide flowing river and its remains can be seen in the terrain. The landscape also reveals it with scales on water shaved rock.

It was a conducted tour from Arabian Desert Safari where my parents and me were driven around 130 km from our home taking about an hour to reach starting at 8 am. The Land Cruiser from Toyota is a powerful 4 wheel drive vehicle which is apt for maneuvering in such a rugged terrain.

The road is beautiful and driving is a pleasure. Once off road to the Hatta heritage region, the up and down landscape calls for a heavy duty vehicle with good shock absorbing technique. There were only 2 more co-passengers from Holland.

I had forgotten all my memory cards in India and hence had to look at the first stop market to buy some memory for my thirsty camera. Luckily there was a small local market which seemed to be meant for tourists like me and I was able to buy SD cards at quite high price.

Once we started back to stop only in the region where once river More about Hatta

I am a traveler and cannot resist the temptation to go explore and place and add it to my list of visited places. I also like to drain my camera batteries which is also evident from the site where I have highlighted my portfolio photos, album photos and theme based photos.

I have been lazy in not writing much about the past trips I have taken. It is probably because I get tired after sitting in front of the computer so long that I don’t feel like doing much work on it as home. But this is no excuse for not sharing the wonderful experiences I have had in my past travel journeys.

I try to make my travelogues as a guide to someone else reading them. They might seem like a trip report but I just enjoy writing them. My past journeys have taken me from India to UAE. In India the direction of places has been limited to Jammu & Kashmir to southern most tip of India, Kanyakumari. There has been no trip to eastern location and the western side has been purely professional.

The trip to UAE, mainly dubai and the other 4 emirates are worth sharing with the folks who would like to visit that country. I will be sharing that soon. I must admit with the kind of diversity that is present in India that I sometimes feel that is just impossible for a human to explore this beautiful country in entirety in one’s lifetime.

That being said I will highlight some of the places in my subsequent posts like Pondicherry, Ooty, Kodaikanal, Shimla, Hampi, Mysore, Karnataka heritage sites, Jammu and other places.