I went to Dubai for a business meeting, a get together of Sun’s EMEA pre-sales leadership. The business agenda is confidential but I reflect on the experience. Dubai’s airport is only open at night, and for those that don’t know an important hub. While there, I went on a motorised desert safari, and rode a camel, all of 15 yards.

It seems that Dubai’s airports busy time of day is three in the morning. My return home is scheduled to take off at 3:45 this morning. I have just arrived; the traffic jam is horrendous and its heavingly  busy. I have kept to my Rule No 2, and am flying out on Emirates. While I would have loved the miles and tier points with Virgin, they wanted £1000 more. I look around and remember the journey in to the airport and its obvious that today is the start of half-term for many in the UK; a huge number of Brits have been arriving over the last couple of days.

I reflect on the last few days, and its hard to avoid the clichés. It is a building site, the people are fabulously friendly and honest. The number of foreigners (and hence non citizen/subjects) present is huge. I avoided the obvious locations of ostentatious wealth, except for the hotel; we stayed in the Kemipinski. I don’t feel comfortable in those places; very few people in the west should. The oil-rich are just that, rich; you can tell be the number of super cars in the hotel car park.

I went on ‘Safari’ in the desert, dune bashing in 4×4’s and returning in dune buggies. The latter reminded me why I spend money on power steering. Great Fun, when not being scared. Important safety tips included, don’t overtake and avoid the camels. One memorable view, which since I was driving a buggy at the time, I was unable to record was as we ascended a dune, a camel was standing at the top silhouetted on the horizon, against a deepening blue sky. We finished the evening with a meal in the desert.

 

Dune Bashing
 

Obviously, this picture, has no camel. The others are here, on flickr.

ooOOOoo

This is an omnibus of posts originally posted to my sun/oracle blog, reposted here in July 2016.

Midnight in the oasis
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