Dubai so far...

I've been here for over a week now (time flies!) and feel as though I've done very little in the way of sight-seeing or big activities.

Car 551 before we set off

Last weekend - Friday/Saturday - I went into the desert with my dad and a colleague of his and her husband for the Gulf News Overnighter Fun Drive. It was a lot of fun, I was allowed to drive for a section of it and only got us stuck twice! For anyone who has been dune bashing, they'll know that this is quite an achievement for my first time driving. I highly recommend the Fun Drive to anyone who is in Dubai; it was well organised, for the most part well marshalled, and well catered (we all know this is important to me). There were some not-so good things about the event, although this could just be me being picky. There was a stage of the drive that more difficult than the rest due to the density and grain size of the sand (both are very important in dune bashing). I would have expected this section to be crawling with Marshals, however I believe they were caught up helping the novices in the earlier bits of the course. In this section we got stuck 2 times and they were both pretty serious - I wasn't driving, otherwise we'd have been stuck a lot more than twice! - but there were no Marshals to be seen. Also, a lot of people arrived after dark at the camp, which makes me think that they weren't guided properly or told to go straight to the camp when they arrived at the appropriate check-point. If I had been the driver of a car and it was my first time out, I can imagine potentially doing serious damage to the car if I had to drive in the dark. Aside from a few minor things like that I felt it was well worth 375AED (125AUD, 102USD) each.

"That was days ago! What else have you been doing?" you ask.
"Well..." I answer.
Coming back to Dubai was never meant to be a sight-seeing holiday, it's been like a second home to me over the years so in a way I'm coming home to Dubai instead of going on a holiday. I've been treating it as a holiday in some ways, eg. planning tourist-y activities; not minding about spending a bit more than anticipated; relaxing and taking the time to read a new book. However, I also am not too worried about losing a day to bumming around the house or catching up on new TV episodes.

Belongs to tripadvisor, here

I haven't been completely idle. Yesterday, Monday, I went to Challenge Chambers, again with my dad and some colleagues to complete their Escape Challenge,"The 13th Victim". Challenge Chambers is similar to HintHunt which is an international brand name for a live version of the old escape room games. They're great fun as they require (cheesy as it sounds) teamwork, patience, and some mental stamina. The basic premise is: you and your team have a time limit - normally an hour, although there is some variation - to escape from said room by solving a series of puzzles that are found via decoding and discovering clues hidden around the room. The clues can be anything! This is partly what makes these sorts of activities so interesting. Also, the clues can be hidden anywhere: behind pictures, under chairs, via invisible ink, in code, the possibilities are endless. Again, this is an activity that I highly recommend to anyone, anyone at all, that's one of the great things about it. HintHunt is a global phenomenon now, so there is likely to be one in a city near you.

Until my next post.
Laura :-)