Think Dubai is all shopping malls and seven-star hotels? Take time to explore the city's old souks and traditional districts, says Gavin Thomas, and you'll find a city which is much more than it claims to be.
All day, dozens of rickety wooden boats shuttle back and forth across the breezy waters of the Creek, ferrying passengers from one side of the old city centre to the other. Looking out from the boat halfway between Deira and Bur Dubai, one sees the minarets of half a dozen mosques pricking the sky; the clusters of quaint wind towers which top many of the Creekside buildings; the tangled rooflines and rough stone walls of old-fashioned souks; and, moored up beside the waters, line after line of venerable old ocean-going wooden dhows being loaded with cargo before setting off on their long journeys up and down the Gulf to Kuwait, Iran and Pakistan.
The city, of course, is Dubai, though not the Dubai which is typically showcased in tourist brochures and travel supplements. The emirate's astonishing transformation from Arabian backwater to cutting-edge holiday and business destination has been so sudden and so dramatic that it tends obscure the considerable cultural and architectural heritage to be found in the older parts of the city - indeed the fact that there's an "old" Dubai at all comes as something of a surprise to lots of visitors, many of whom arrive with the impression that the whole place consists entirely of mile-long shopping malls and seven-star hotels. And yet, as the world's tallest skyscraper, largest man-made islands and first luxury underwater hotel near completion in the southern part of the city, life in the bazaars of the old centre carries on more or less as it has done for the past 150 years.
The view of Dubai from the middle of the Creek reminds one of how much of the old city and its traditions survives intact. It's true that most of Dubai is largely a creation of the past four decades, but the city's roots run much deeper than many people realize. The area has been inhabited since at least 1095, while by the end of the sixteenth century the fledgling city was already attracting pearl divers from as far away as Venice. During the nineteenth century the emerging city came under British protection, trading off its location on the sea route to India (the Indian rupee remained the city's official currency until as recently as 1966) and attracting numerous Indian traders and entrepreneurs - large parts of the old city still retain a strikingly subcontinental flavour.
Dubai's centuries-old trading traditions live on in the city centre's myriad souks, and much of the old district of Deira, on the northern side of the Creek, remains a fascinating rabbit-warren of bazaars through which it's possible to wander for hours in ever-more disoriented circles. Each souk specializes in a certain type of goods. There are souks for gold, for spices, for perfumes, for food, even a souk for mobile phones, selling every conceivable type of consumer desirable, from diamonds the size of your thumb to freshly snagged baby sharks.
It's a short hop from Deira across the Creek on board one of those engaging little wooden ferry boats, known locally as abras. Forget the tour buses and theme park rollercoasters, this is the best ride in Dubai, and probably the cheapest too, at just over ten cents per trip. Jump on board and claim a place scrunched up amidst a cosmpolitan cross-section of the Dubaian population - anyone from white-robed Emiratis and Pakistani day-labourers through to African gold dealers and Russian bargain-hunters - then watch as the boatman maneouvres the vessel out into the busy waters of the Creek, whilst increasingly expansive panoramas of dhows, souks and skyscrapers come into view on either side.
It's in Bur Dubai that you'll also find the majority of Dubai's surprisingly extensive collection of traditional Arabian buildings, most of them rescued from impending dereliction during the 1970s and 80s and now immaculately restored. Many can be found next to the Textile Souk in the old quarter of Bastakia, first built by Iranians in the 1920s and 1930s, with dozens of austere sandstone buildings grouped around a disorienting little labyrinth of narrow alleyways. Virtually every house here comes topped with one of Dubai's distinctive wind towers, the cunning local solution to dealing with the Gulf's scorching summer temperatures in the days before air-conditioning, catching and amplifying passing breezes and chanelling them into the houses below.
From here it's a short walk east to the engagingly lopsided Al Fahidi Fort (now home to the excellent Dubai Museum) and back through the Textile Souk then out the other side to the heritage area of Shindagha, where Dubai's finest string of heritage houses sits near the mouth of the Creek, including the grand Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum House, former home of the ruling sheikhs. It's also the perfect place for a grandstand view of sunset over the old city, looking down the Creek while the abras plough to and fro and the minarets, domes and wind towers of old Dubai disappear into the dusk.
You may still be just in time to grab a coveted Creekside seat at the adjacent Kanzaman restaurant. Settle down while darkness descends and the tables fill up with groups of Emiratis, Qataris and Saudis in their elegantly flowing white robes, along with Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians and other expats from across the Arab world. The heady aromas of coffee, shisha and roasting kebabs slowly suffuse the air, while someone cranks up the sound system and the plaintive warblings of Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz drift off into the night, down the breezy waters to where the illuminated facades of Creekside buildings glow magically in the darkness.
Shopping malls? Seven-star hotels? Who needs them, anyway...