Our last full day in Dubai started off with an 8:15 am pickup from the tour guide to head to Abu Dhabi. We joined another couple already in the car from Faroe Islands (small island just north of the UK). Our guide, Mark from the Philippines, struggled to get out of the pickup lane in front of our Airbnb as two cars were parked in front of him and there wasn’t enough room for his van to go around. He asked the valet for help several times and started to back out of the drive, but another smaller car was parked to the side. One of the workers ended up having the keys to the smaller car this whole time as our guide was struggling back out of the drive. He took it upon himself to grab the keys and move the car forward to give himself. However, once we got out of the one lane, he got stuck behind another two cars. He again took it upon himself (as he wasn’t getting any help from the valet staff) to kindly ask the taxi to move out of the way. The whole scene was quite entertaining to watch. He told us that is the hard part about driving in Dubai is there’s so many different cultures driving here, so you have to get used to 200 different driving styles – he assured us his Filipino style was aggressive.

Once we finally left our place, we picked up the last couple (who was from Austria) and headed the hour and a half to Abu Dhabi. On the way, our guide told us a little history about Dubai and said a lot of the buildings we see today are less than 10 years old and is continuing to grow every year. He said not that long ago there was nothing around the Burj Khalifa which we just couldn’t believe so fact checked on the Internet and were amazed to see the below:

Our guide also said that their oil in Dubai is starting to run out, relatively speaking, so they turned to tourism to diversify their money. We later read more on the internet and turns out that Abu Dhabi has most of the oil reserves for UAE, but the leader of Dubai knew back in the 1970s that they should diversify their investments as the money made from oil was likely to run out for future generations. If you read a little bit about Dubai, you’ll learn that they have a high goal of trying to receive over 40 million annual visitors by 2031. Crazy! But after visiting here, we can see how they could possibly achieve this feat. 

Our first stop was The Grand Mosque. Even from the highway you could tell how massive the mosque was and how ornately decorated it was. They definitely are flashier here in every type of architecture from the skyscrapers to the mosques. Once we parked, we walked through basically a mini mall to get to the entrance of the mosque. Thankfully we had previously visited Hagia Sofia so we knew to bring a headscarf for me to cover my hair. Sharon, the Austrian, had to rent an abaya that looked more like a Harry Potter cloak. I’m not sure if we were running behind on our timetable, but our guide rushed us through the mosque only stopping to allow us time for a few quick photos. Grant and I forgot during our first picture together that it is culturally offensive to show PDA in public (aka touch each other for a photo). It’s just natural for us to wrap an arm around each other. Our guide quickly reminded us not to do that before anyone noticed, and then he took our picture. The mosque was beautiful from top to bottom and the inside of every dome was different. It was hard to truly capture them on camera. Their main room had three beautiful chandeliers and a hand sewn carpet from over 1,200 weavers in Iran that took over a year and a half to make.

Once all the pictures had been taken, we headed off to the Emirates Palace. Turns out it was featured in the Sex and the City movie. The beach (featured below) and The Etihad Towers nearby were also featured in the Fast and Furious 7 movie. It was a nice hotel, but both of us were unsure why the stop was made because we just did a quick walk around the building and left.

Then it was off to the Heritage Village where we got to see an example of the houses they used to live in near the bay. I wish we would have been able to stay for a little longer to read more about their history, but again our guide rushed us through in about 20 minutes so we could end our trip at Ferrari World. 

If you don’t know about Ferrari World (like I did not), it is an amusement park again attached to a mall featuring the fastest rollercoaster in the world. (Like I said they like to own the biggest and best here!) The rollercoaster, Formula Rossa, goes from 0 to 149 mph in just 4.9 seconds. They claim riders feel 1.8 Gs during acceleration and a total of 4.8 throughout the entire ride. I love rollercoasters, but I was a little nervous about this one. And let me tell you by the end of the ride, I was so glad it was over. To me, it felt like 1.5 minutes of my brain rattling in my skull. As you can see in the picture, only one of us truly enjoyed it. My head was pounding afterwards and lasted pretty much throughout the rest of the day. As soon as it would start to wane, we would ride another rollercoaster and it would start the headache all over again. For you migraine sufferers, I’m so sorry if that’s what you go through! But besides the headache from the ride, it was a cool experience. We realized you definitely need more than 3 hours to truly experience all it has to offer, but the tour was easier than going through the hassle of renting a car for just a day. 

As we were heading out of Ferrari World, we made a quick stop by Clymb so Grant could see their indoor skydiving tunnel. I’ve seen a couple iFly spots and this tunnel definitely beats them in size by a lot! This one is (you guessed it) the world’s largest indoor skydiving tunnel. Grant was definitely disappointed he couldn’t hop in the tunnel to experience it, but was glad to see it – see pictures below for a comparison of the tunnel he is used to skydiving in. Leaving the mall with the group, we made a quick pit stop to see the Formula 1 track they have in Abu Dhabi. I don’t know too much about Formula 1 but it was cool to see the track and see some of the cars they let tourists drive around. 

Then it was back to Dubai…in rush hour traffic. Thankfully we’re so used to this in LA that we weren’t bothered by it. Our guide pointed out some license plates and noted that you can tell how rich someone in UAE is by the number of digits on their license plate. The fewer the digits, the more wealthy they are – as buying up really expensive license plates is supposedly a status symbol. We looked up the world’s most expensive license plates later and to no surprise, a heavy percentage are in UAE.

Once back at the Airbnb, we grabbed some food from the market and enjoyed time outside on our deck to enjoy the last nightlight view of the city.