24 hours in Dubai - part two

It doesn't matter anymore

After two o'clock in the afternoon, I began the stage of the journey, which I usually call "it doesn't matter now." When you realize that there's not much time left, and you haven't seen half of the city yet, planning stops making sense. You can either accept it and go to the airport calmly, or start making decisions that will seem completely insane to you in a few hours. I chose the second option. Therefore, instead of calmly continuing to walk around Dubai, I decided to go to the desert.

Desert

The logic was ironclad: if you only have one day in the city, you definitely need to be in a place where the city is not visible at all. Perhaps a normal person in such a situation would have chosen the nearest beach or restaurant, but I left normality somewhere near the airport exit. After all, I only came to Dubai for a day, which meant I had to use those days as illogically as possible.

Where the city ends

The journey took some time. The skyscrapers gradually remained behind, and then disappeared completely. Empty spaces, sand, and sparse trees began to flash by the window. I looked at all this and thought about how strangely Dubai is arranged: until recently, I was standing near the Burj Khalifa among glass towers, shopping malls and thousands of people, and now there is practically nothing around.

Just the desert.

And for some reason it made me feel calm. Something is happening in the city all the time: cars are driving, people are in a hurry, screens are showing something, buildings are competing with each other in height. Nothing was happening here at all. You could just look out the window and not try to get somewhere else.

A desert instead of skyscrapers

On the spot, we were offered a ride through the dunes. Of course, I agreed, because the phrase "I only have 24 hours in Dubai" for some reason automatically turns an ordinary person into a person who is ready for anything.

The car climbed onto a sand dune, stopped for a second at the very top, and then abruptly went down. At that moment, I realized that I had two pieces of news. A good one is really a lot of fun. The bad news is that I just voluntarily paid to be rolled around the desert for a few minutes like laundry in a washing machine.

But when it was over, I was laughing along with the others. Apparently, a person has an amazing ability to quickly forget about fear if everything is beautiful and no one has yet managed to tell you how much it costs to repair a car.

The sunset that I didn't want to photograph

By evening, the heat began to gradually recede, and we stopped among the dunes. For the first time all day, I saw a real sunset – without the skyscrapers, advertising screens, and people who are sure to be in the frame right when you're about to take a photo.

It was just that the sun was slowly sinking behind the sand.

I took out my phone, took a few pictures, and put it away almost immediately. Because sometimes photography only gets in the way. You start thinking about how to set up the camera, where to take it from, and then where to put it all, and you completely forget that you actually came here to watch.

I sat down right on the sand and was just silent for a while. I managed to see more contrasts in one day than I sometimes get to see in a week: skyscrapers in the morning, old neighborhoods and a bay in the afternoon, and now a desert. And there was still the Dubai evening ahead.

The city wakes up in the evening

When we returned to the city, it was already about eight o'clock in the evening, and Dubai seemed to have been turned on again. During the day, I was constantly looking for shade, but now the streets were filled with people, restaurants opened terraces, cars streamed along the roads, and skyscrapers lit up with thousands of windows.

I went to the Dubai Marina and decided to just walk around aimlessly. After such a day, it was pointless to try to complete another item from the list. If I kept running from one landmark to another, after a few hours I wouldn't remember where I was.

Marina turned out to be completely different from the city I saw in the morning. People were walking along the water, someone was sitting in a cafe, yachts were slowly passing along the canal, and high-rise buildings were reflected in the water. For a second, it even seemed to me that I was not looking at the real city, but at the scenery.

But then a guy walked by with a bag of food, the kids ran after him, someone was swearing on the phone, and a woman at the next table was trying to take pictures of dinner. And I thought again that it is precisely such ordinary moments that for some reason make the place real.

Abu Dhabi in the evening

Finally, you can take your time

I sat down to dinner and for the first time all day I looked at my watch without alarm. There were still a few hours left, but I didn't want to rush anywhere else. I realized that it is impossible to "see Dubai" in a day. You can only get to know it a little bit – to see it huge and small, modern and old, noisy and almost empty.

And, probably, this turned out to be the main discovery of this trip. In the morning, I tried to create the perfect route and constantly thought about how many places I hadn't seen yet. By evening, it didn't matter at all how many ticks there were in front of the attractions. It was already interesting for me to just sit, look at the water and watch the people.

Last meeting with Burj Khalifa

With a few hours left before the plane, I decided to take another trip to the Burj Khalifa. This time – without a goal, without a list and without the desire to do something. Just to say goodbye to the city.

In the morning, she seemed huge and a little unreal to me. Now I looked at her in a completely different way. There was already a whole day behind one building, dozens of kilometers of roads, old streets, a drive along the bay, a market, a desert and an evening walk.

I realized that this is why travel cannot be measured by the number of sights seen. You can come to a city for a week and not feel anything, or you can spend one day there and take the whole story with you.

What's left after 24 hours

I came to Dubai with a very simple task – to see as much as possible in one day. As a result, I didn't see everything I had planned, got lost several times, overheated, tired, spent more money than I had intended, and at some point I stopped realizing what time it was.

But perhaps that's why the trip was memorable.

During these 24 hours, Dubai has managed to seem to me like a city of the future, an old trading port, a huge tourist area, a desert and just an ordinary city where people go to work, have dinner, walk and hurry about their business.

And when I finally boarded the plane, I caught myself thinking that now I want to go back.

Just not for 24 hours anymore.

Abu Dhabi from an airplane