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.

We boarded the double deck bus at Jubil bus station and got 2 seats on upper deck right above the driver for maximum view. This was a first time experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The journey took about 45 minutes for us to reach the Gold Souk. The word ’souk’ in Arabic means ‘market’. It is a very old trading place which has become a shopper’s paradise and also a heritage place. We went inside and I was just amazed to see the amount of gold which was on display in the shops. My mum had been here earlier and she was used to so much yellow metal around.

The good thing is that the souk has benches where people can sit as well. Apart from this being a market, it was also a tourist place and people were enjoying that. Photographers were indulging in street photography and I also got some good shots. My mother ended up buying some jewelry for herself as well.

Then we thought of visiting the heritage places before returning home. This was such a place where one could easily spend the entire day. The gold souk is on famous Dubai Creek and we had to cross it to reach the heritage sites. The underwater pedestrian subway is present which I think was quite innovative and we used it to cross the creek.
After exiting the tunnel and few meters away was the Diving Village. This place showed the village where diving people used to stay and how they indulged in diving for finding pearls. The part of the village has been kept intact surrounded by lavish and luxurious skyscrapers.

The other location is heritage village which showed the way a village looked like with places for community activities, their individual huts and other daily routine activities related places. Also beautiful to see was the architecture of houses and huts which ensured that even in cases of extreme heat and storms, the houses remained cool without the modern day facilities of ACs and desert coolers. The technique used to cool the house was Wind tunnels at particular angle and geometry of window opening which allowed the cold air to enter house.

After the visit to heritage village we went ahead to Sheikh Saeed’s house who was the then ruler of Dubai. It has now been converted into a museum cum exhibition structure. All these heritage sites are on the creek side and offer a good view of the city. Once we had visited all these places, we planned to return back before father arrives. We caught the bus back to Sharjah and we back home in just over an hour.

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 flow was existent. We had to walk in that region and see some really deep holes surrounded by rocks where water was still present. It seemed like river bed with rounded gravel stones and other natural items familiar around river bed.

We spent an hour admiring the beauty of the place and assimilating the fact that a river once existed in the hot desert area.

Nearby is a preserved heritage village of Hatta which we could not visit due to limited timings on Friday days. On other weekdays, the timings are long for tourists to visit them.

The last part of the tour was a lunch at Hatta heritage hotel. It was a five star luxuriously made hotel in the midst of desert. Once we entered the hotel compound, the green surroundings and the landscape maintained was very nice. I am sure it would take a lot of effort and cost huge to maintain such a property in desert climate.

We sat by the poolside for lunch had a gala time enjoying food and surroundings. It seemed like a good tourist attraction as we could see people from multiple countries enjoying themselves. It is situated right on the highway and adds to the visibility of hotel. We saw many super bikes like CBR, Harley, Hondas parked in the parking bay which seemed to belong to road trip bikers.

This was the end of our tour to Hatta and we zoomed back 100 km reaching home in no time. On our way back we could see the sun setting down and people setting up desert camps for a family outing.

Click on the above image to see them in larger perspective. This is the beauty of lightbox affect in action.

Ratings and Recommendations: People with following interests will have a good time at heritage Hatta.

• Landscape
• Terrain
• Heritage

Rating: 4/10

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.