Dubai

Introduction to Dubai

Dubai is like nowhere else on the planet. Often claimed to be the world's fastest-growing city, in the past four decades Dubai has metamorphosed from a small Gulf trading centre to become one of the world's most glamorous, spectacular and futuristic urban destinations, fuelled by a heady cocktail of petrodollars, visionary commercial acumen and naked ambition.

In many ways, modern Dubai is a panegyric to consumerist luxury - a self-indulgent haven of magical hotels, superlative bars and restaurants and extravagantly themed shopping malls. If it were less opulent and prodigal it might be merely tawdry, but the sheer pzazz with which Dubai has carried through its plans to woo the tourist and business dollar lifts it to a hitherto undreamt-of level of contemporary chic, embodied by stunning developments such as the futuristic Sheikh Zayed Road, the extraordinary mock-Arabian Madinat Jumeirah and the unforgettably beautiful Burj Al Arab - not to mention the ongoing mega-developments at Dubai Marina and elsewhere - testament to the ruling sheikhs' determination to make Dubai one of the world's essential destinations in the twenty-first-century.

Perhaps not suprisingly, Dubai is often stereotyped as a vacuous consumerist fleshpot, appealing only to those with more cash than culture, though this one-eyed cliche does absolutely no justice to the city's beguiling contrasts and rich cultural make-up. There's far more to Dubai than designer boutiques and five-star hotels, a fact amply demonstrated by the old city centre, with its string of vibrant commercial districts centred on a higgledy-piggledy labyrinth of old-style souks, interspersed with fine old traditional Arabian houses lined up along the banks of the breezy Creek, whose serene waters provide Dubai with many of its most unforgettable views, as well as a living link with its maritime past.

It's here, too, that you'll get the best sense of Dubai's remarkable ethnic diversity - a cosmopolitan cultural hothouse of races and languages which makes Dubai one of the world's most genuinely multicultural cities, with streets full of Indian and Pakistani traders, West African gold dealers, Filipina maids, Russian bargain-hunters, robed Emiratis and tanned expat Europeans.

In the last analysis, it's this marvellous eclecticism that is the heart of Dubai's appeal. Of course, for many visitors the entire city is simply an excuse to go shopping or lie on the beach and be pampered senseless. But scratch the surface and Dubai reveals a world of fascinating contrasts, from traditional Arabian shisha cafˇs to chic contemporary cocktail bars; or from down-at-heel Indian tea stalls with Bollywood tunes warbling from the radio to cool clubs with leading international DJs manning the decks.

It's this cosmopolitan cultural fabric, just as much as the city's increasingly spectacular tourist attractions, that remains the essence of Dubai's appeal, and which is likely to provide a benchmark for the city's future development as it continues with its plans for 21st-century world supremacy.

The Burj Al Arab

The Burj is home to the world's first so-called "seven-star" hotel, having awarded itself two extra stars to emphasize the unique levels of style and luxury offered within (even though, officially, such a category doesn't actually exist - technically it's a five-star-luxury hotel, but the fact that so few people quibble over the extra stars is a measure of the Burj's distinction). Staying here is a very expensive pleasure, and even visiting it presents certain financial and practical challenges. Fortunately the exterior of the building can be enjoyed for free from numerous vantage points nearby.

Designed to echo the shape of a dhow's sail, the Burj forms a kind of maritime counterpart to the adjacent Jumeirah Beach Hotel's "breaking wave" (see below), offering a contemporary tribute to Dubai's historic seafaring traditions - its sail-like shape (not to mention its very exclusive aura) enhanced by its location on a specially reclaimed island some 300m offshore. The building was constructed between 1993 and 1999 at a still undisclosed (but presumably staggering) cost by UK engineering and architectural firm W.S. Atkins under lead designer Tom Wills-Wright and interior designer Kuan Chew.

The statistics alone are impressive. At 321m, the Burj is the tallest dedicated hotel in the world (and the twenty-first-highest building full stop). The spire-like superstructure alone, incredibly, is taller than the entire Jumeirah Beach Hotel, while the atrium (180m) is also the world's loftiest - and capacious enough to swallow up the entire Statue of Liberty or, for that matter, the 38-storey Dubai World Trade Centre. The sheer scale of the Burj is overwhelming, and only really appreciated in the flesh, since photographs of the building, perhaps inevitably, always seem to diminish it to the size of an expensive toy.

The Burj's scale is tempered by its extraordinary grace and the sinuous simplicity of its basic design, broken only by the celebrated cantilevered helipad and (on the building's seafacing side) the projecting Al Muntaha ("The Highest") restaurant. The hotel's shore-facing side mainly comprises a huge sheet of white Teflon-coated fibreglass cloth - a symbolic sail which is spectacularly illuminated from within by night, turning the entire building into a magically glowing beacon. Less universally admired is the building's rear elevation, in the shape of a huge cross, a feature that caused considerable controversy amongst Muslims at the time of construction, though it's only visible from the sea, and (significantly) is almost never photographed.

Most of the interior is actually hollow, comprising an enormous atrium vibrantly coloured in great swathes of red, blue, green and gold. It's like the bastard architectural lovechild of an Art Deco skyscraper and a James Bond movie set, the chez Blofeld extravagance of it all encapsulated by the enormous fish tanks that flank the entrance staircase and which are so deep that cleaners have to put on diving suits to scrub them out (a performance you can witness daily from 2pm to 4pm). The interior is often dismissed as a classic example of garish opulence gone mad (that's not gold paint on the walls, incidentally, but genuine 22ct gold leaf), but this doesn't really do justice to Burj's unique aura, and the huge expanses of vibrant primary colours, the elegantly curved tiers of balconied floors rising far overhead and the massive bulbous golden piers that support them possess a strange, sculptural beauty, as much a work of visual art as a piece of traditional architectural, and a fittingly original sequel to the remarkable exterior.

Madinat Jumeirah

There's an undeniable whiff of Disneyland about the entire complex, and the whole place, despite its "authentic" Arabian architecture, bears about as much relation to an old-time Dubaian settlement as London's Houses of Parliament do to a medieval English parish church. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of the place, with its relentlessly picturesque array of windtowers, wood-framed souks and palm-fringed waterways, is strangely compelling, and a perfect example of the kind of thing - mixing unbridled extravagance with a significant dose of surreal kitsch and a healthy disregard for all notions of received taste - which Dubai seems to do so well. The Madinat also offers some of the most eye-boggling views in Dubai, with the sinuous, futuristic outlines of the Burj Al Arab surreally framed between medieval-looking wind towers and Moorish arcading. The fact that the fake medieval city is actually newer than the ultra-modern Burj is, by Dubai's standards, exactly what one would expect.