Day 4 - The Desert Dune Buggy Adventure!

Our last full day in Dubai dawned (YAWN!!) bright, sunny and hot, just the like the previous three days. Our tour was leaving early, meaning an early breakfast was in order. After a good night’s sleep, we awoke with the sun streaming in our balcony door. Good thing too, since our alarm clock had not worked and we now had about 40 minutes before our tour departed!! Needless to say it was a bit of a scramble, but we made it.


Jason from Shorex told us there would be five of us plus the ship escort, David the Casino Manager. When we got to the bus we discovered the other three had cancelled. Apparently they didn’t realize a tour called the “Desert Dune Buggy Adventure” actually meant riding a dune buggy in the desert!! The result was a “Crystal Private Shore Excursion” without paying the cost of one!

After a 45 minute drive through and around Downtown Dubai, we arrived at the Amrallah Dune Buggy Centre. And wildlife emporium. And local grocery store. And Laundromat. And truck stop. And souvenir stand. In the middle of nowhere. Nothing but desert and dunes in all directions out to the horizon! Although we had been told by a number of people that we would not be allowed to drive, in short order we were “decked out” in helmets (and you thought you had seen the last “helmet” pictures last year!) loaded up in four-wheel drive Yamaha Rhinos and were off through the gate and into the desert following our guide; Larry driving, Monica riding “shotgun” and David hanging on for dear life in the back seat!! The plan called for 45 minutes of driving, switch drivers and then another 45 minutes of driving. The first 45 minutes flew by and included steep climbs, steep drops, sharp turns and scaring the heck out of a half-dozen camels!!! Great fun! After switching drivers, we crossed the highway (probably the scariest part of the day) for some serious “dune climbing” with Monica at the wheel and Larry riding shotgun. For reason unknown, David decided he had seen enough in the first 45 minutes!! At one point we stopped on top of a dune and even though we were no more than a kilometer at most from the highway, we felt like we were again in the middle of nowhere!

Most of the pictures below were shot in the first 45 minutes. The camera battery died shortly after we changed drivers.

Overall it was great fun - there’s a few minutes of video, including the camels, still to come but that will be once we get home. Who knows how long it might take to upload it here.

Day 3 - Transfer to the Ship and a last Sightseeing of Dubai

After transferring to the ship at noon and making the most important stop of the day - at the grill for lunch (any guesses what Larry had???) - we took the shuttle into town to get a close-up view of the Burj Khalifa. Of course, to get there we had to go through the Dubai Mall, which makes the Eaton Centre look like a discount outlet.


We don’t know if this is by design or accident, but the entrance the shuttle took us to had Cartier on one side, Tiffany on the other and Piaget and Patek Phillipe just up the way. This mall also has the largest indoor gold souk in the world. It is a collection of small independent jewelry shops with their own passageways and courts. Now, we had gone into the mall specifically to find a pair of white shorts for Monica, but decided to take a stroll through the Souk, which as you can see from the picture, is very impressive looking. Monica still needs white shorts, but she does have a nice new pair of (gold and diamond) earrings!!!

The entrance area to the Gold Souk

The mall also houses the largest indoor aquarium in the world. It is three floors high and so big that you can take glass-bottom boat tour on top and go scuba-diving with the sharks below. There are also enclosed walkways where you can go under and through the aquarium, but we didn’t have enough time to check this out.  We do have some video through the glass wall, but it might take longer than the cruise to try to upload it here.

It was quite obvious that we’d found the right exit for the Burj Khalifa since everyone who went out ahead of us stopped and looked up…WAY up. We saw more than a few people lie on the ground in order to tak a picture. Monica didn’t go to quite that extreme to get this one. The Khalifa tower is over 200 floors high and looks, as Larry observed, like a stalagmite (on really powerful steroids!). The Dubai Fountain in front is where they present a water show every night, but the shuttle schedule ended so early that we weren’t able to get to see even the first show at 6:00. We’ll just have to depend on Internet postings to see how it looks.

As to the onboard activities, we found many of the pool guys are here - Clark, Ross, Ruel, Nate, Ritchie and most important Andress at the grill (the wizard of the steak sandwich) - most of whom asked us to send greetings to all of you. A couple of the guys specifically asked about Mr Double-Cheeseburger, so Jeff you are still famous on Crystal!!

We found that George and his friends Dick and Peter are still here and having as much fun as usual. George celebrated his 93rd birthday in February - THE social event of the world cruise. We ran into Captain Glenn Edvardsen early in the evening; he gave us a warm welcome back as did Cruise Director Rick Spath later in the Avenue.

Day 2 Taxi!!

We were told by one of our servers last night that Dubai is not a city for walking around, never mind that our hotel is far enough outside of the main tourist area to require a cab ride anyway. Now we know why - despite the economic downturn putting the brakes on a lot of construction, it seems that practically every main road has some kind of building going on around it, or another building being put up beside it. Only the skylines of Toronto and Miami can compete with the number of partly-finished high-rise construction projects on the go here.


That same server also called Dubai a giant shopping mall, but that’s another story…

After consulting with the Crystal hospitality representative after breakfast this morning, we revised our plan for the day. Originally we had planned to take the hop-on-hop-off bus and tour Old Dubai and the Souks, but our reservation for Afternoon Tea at the Burj al Arab changed all that. The reservation was for 1:30 and they only hold it for half an hour if you’re late (and charge you a no-show fee if you don’t get there at all) meaning everything had to revolve around that. So we took Taxi #1 from our hotel to the Mall of the Emirates, the second largest mall in Dubai. We think that the Dubai Outlet Mall is the largest - surprise, surprise. And, for perspective, both are apparently larger than the West Edmonton Mall, which is the largest in Canada. The mall certainly is beautifully designed. There were quite a few people wandering around, but it didn’t seem that many were in the stores.

The main attraction at the mall is, of course, Ski Dubai. This is an enclosed ski area that is kept at a constant -4°C and packed with man-made snow. The ski hill is just under 200 feet high. It looks like a nice little run, but not particularly challenging to anyone who’s done a few winter weekends in Canada. They offer lessons at various levels - nothing looks so incongruous as the poster delineating the different levels of experience (I can keep my skis straight; I can turn and stop, etc.) written in Arabic. One lady tried to very hard to sell us a photo of ourselves sitting in a lift chair, but the last thing we needed was another picture of us and snow. Of course, the entrance to Ski Dubai is in amongst the stores that sell - and we’re not kidding - ski boots, ski suits and accessories!!  Here are a couple of photos:

Once we were done gawking around the mall, we took Taxi #2 to Madinat Jumeirah, a two-hotel resort area done up in a Moorish style. There is an indoor souk (market) where the merchants sell everything from carpets to jewelry to antiques, and there are a few outdoor stalls as well. The resort has lagoons and canals running through it, with abras (small boats) that ferry the resort guests around.

One of the inside souks

We took Taxi #3 from here to the entrance gate to the Burj al Arab, one of THE most exclusive hotels (among the hundreds) in Dubai, which is located just outside the entrance to the Wild Wadi Water Park, so it was quite a busy little spot. As Larry said, it would be easier to get into Fort Knox than past security. If you’re not a guest, or don’t have a reservation at one of the restaurants, you are not allowed to set foot on the property. It was only once we showed them the printout of our reservation that they allowed us to start walking across the bridge to the hotel, a distance of about a kilometre. Hotel guests get to ride in a golf cart. It was rather funny to see all these people taking turns standing beside the gate to get their photos with the hotel in the background, because they weren’t allowed on the property.

The hotel lobby area is quite spectacular in itself. The reception area is just inside the doors - two ‘intimate’ reception desks and it looks like registering guests get a personal guided tour of the facility and an escort to their suites. The focal point of the lobby is a fountain/waterfall, and the escalators to the mezzanine level have huge aquariums of tropical fish in the walls beside them. To try to explain more would be impossible, so here are the pictures:

Looking down the fountain.  The orchestration of the water streams changes constantly.  It's almost mesmerizing.

The second fountain on the mezzanine level.  It also shoots a geyser about 100 feet up in the open atrium.

The lobby atrium - dizzy yet?

The mosaic tile floor

We were headed for the Skyview Bar and found, by chance, the glass-enclosed express elevator. It was too bad that there was a layer of haze/fog/smog over the city; otherwise the entire view would have been spectacular. As it was, we could only see the buildings on the Palm Jumeirah in dark, hazy profiles. But the tea service made up for it all. Again, we won’t bore you with words - just take a look:

The 'tower' of tea - sandwiches (cucumber, egg, salmon), tuna profiteroles and shrimp vol au vents, shortbread cookies, fruitcake and creme caramel, and cakes.  All of that for two people!!  Are you hungry yet?  Here's a closeup:

So, after spending two hours over tea (we might actually still be there if we had actually gone for lunch!), we wandered back out to the gate and picked up Taxi #4 to take us back to the hotel.

It’s now Sunday evening, and wondering where we even get the nerve to be hungry after “tea”, we are preparing to go to dinner in one of the seafood restaurants in the Atrium. Tomorrow morning we move to the ship.

Day 1 - Flying Air Emirates

O-M-G!!!!!!

One of the nice things about flying Business Class on Emirates is the complimentary limo service to the airport. Even though our flight was not until 9:40PM, being the first day of March Break, and with rain in the forecast, we decided to err on the side of caution and arranged a 5:30PM pick up to allow for traffic on the roads and crowds at the airport. Promptly at 5:20 the limo arrived and by 6:20 we were sitting in the Business Class lounge at the airport! Some two and a half hours before boarding was to commence!! Oh well, it’s not like sitting in the lounge was a hardship!

The reason we had requested Crystal’s Air Department put us on Emirates was to fly the new Airbus A-380-800 super jumbo, which carries 500+ passengers and flies direct, non-stop from Toronto to Dubai. Boarding commenced at 9:00, so at 8:45 we set off for our gate, which was not far from the lounge. Some have likened the appearance of the A-380 to a Beluga whale and from up-close, it really does look like that. The plane itself is not overly long, but it is BIG with, if you haven’t seen it, two cabin levels! First and Business Class are located on the upper deck, with Economy located on the lower, each with its own jet-way access. As it happened, we were the first to board Business Class, which meant time to take pictures. As you can see, it’s big, it’s bright and it is certainly different from ANY plane we have ever flown on before!

The Business Class Cabin

The Business Class In-Flight Bar in the aft of the cabin.  We've been in houses where the kitchen is smaller!!

The in-flight entertainment has so many choices you could fly around the world multiple times before you used them up!  This is one of the more interesting things:  a real-time view from the camera mounted in the tail.  You also had the choice of looking through the 'belly-cam' straight down (that allowed us to watch our landing in Dubai from a very interesting angle) or the pilot's eye view.  Any white-knuckle fliers would certainly NOT be watching these!

We had heard good things about Emirates service and we were not disappointed. The quality and variety of the food (Dinner and Breakfast) is excellent, with multiple entrée choices available for both meals. The individual seat “pods” were comfortable and dropped down to full lie-flat beds, which allowed us both to get a good six hours of sleep, something we don’t normally get on a long-haul flight such as this one.

And to top off the comfortable accommodations and excellent food, Monica was batting a thousand on her two usual comments: 1) her travel agent put her over the wing - again; and 2) her first choice for dinner was gone before they got to her (never mind that it was Larry who got the last one!) Not what you would call complaints, but as we threw some comments back and forth, the flight attendant who did most of our service thought it was kind of funny, and suggested that we start watching ‘Marriage Ref’.

Smoked Duck Breast appetizer

Canadian Waffles for Breakfast

The Crystal representative met us at the luggage carrousel - we were the only Crystal people on the flight - and led us out to where the transfer vehicle was waiting: a nice, shiny new BMW. Too bad the trip only took about ten minutes!

Arrival at the hotel was quite painless, and we were in our room 18 hours after we left our house on Friday. The Grand Hyatt is a beautiful hotel with a tropical forest Atrium just off the lobby. And the outside grounds and pool areas are gorgeous, too. We took a walk around last night before going for dinner (yes, we were actually hungry even though “breakfast” on the plane was at about 5:30 p.m. local time). We ended up eating at the Manhattan Grill, a ‘New York style’ restaurant in the hotel. They have a new Executive Chef and he was presenting a tasting menu to show off his talents. The pictures below are the main course (of a four-course meal) and dessert, and they were every bit as tasty as they look!

Wagyu Beef Tenderloin and all the trimmings.  Yum!!

A dessert trio:  Creme brulee, Chocolate truffle cake with a peanut butter surprise layer, and New York style Cheesecake.  Are you hungry yet??  Forgive the picture of Monica - at this point we'd been up for about 31 hours.

Well, we barely made it through dessert before the day caught up with us, and we dropped into bed at about 11:30….only to wake up at 4:00! So after some tossing and turning, we decided to get up and start working on the blog. The things we do for our family and friends!!

So now, as the sun rises over the horizon at 6:45 a.m., it’s off to breakfast and our first day in Dubai.

Embarking on a New Adventure!

Welcome to the latest instalment of Larry and Monica's world explorations.  This trip will follow a very similar path to the one we took the last time we were in the Middle East, but with an emphasis on the eastern shores of the Red Sea.  Once again we'll be steeped in history, visiting places like Jerusalem, Petra, Alexandria and Athens, but there will be a bit of a modern twist, especially in our starting point - Dubai.

We've been looking forward to this trip for almost a year and a half, and we, at least, are thrilled that it is about to begin.  Thomas, on the other hand....

We hope you enjoy following along as much as we enjoy planning and posting our daily updates.

Packing Day

As the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and this trip is no exception.


It is sunny and warm as we cruise off the north-west coast of Cuba and the cruise is drawing to a close. We attended the last lecture of this trip, Dr. Wolff’s discussion of the Titanic, a great thing to talk about on a cruise ship! After the lecture we did our daily two miles on the Promenade Deck and now we are packing. Actually we are already about half done. Unlike some of our cruising friends who wait until the last evening to start, we like to get it out of the way early so we can enjoy the rest of the afternoon and evening. It helps that we have the walk-in closet in this cabin because it lets us get the packed suitcases out of the way.

Yesterday in Grand Cayman was a rather uneventful day. As we have been here several times, and it is a tender-serviced port, we elected to stay onboard and avoid the aggravation. Never mind that this was the busiest stop we had on our whole cruise: joining us in port were the Sea Princess and Carnival Valor, with a combined passenger load of around 5,000 if they were full. Apparently it was quite busy in George Town, so we were glad we hadn’t worried about going ashore.

Traffic Jam in Grand Cayman!

Monica took advantage of the time to go to the spa for a “detox” treatment. Unlike what some might think when they hear the word “detox”, this had nothing to do with alcohol. Heck, Monica’s bar tab up to the end of Day 18 was only $311!!! Instead, this involved having her body wrapped from neck to toes in hot seaweed and various oils and potions. This is apparently good for the body. While all this was going on Larry was hitting the gym and doing the laundry! Not sure who got the best of that deal!

After the last steak sandwich, double caramel ice cream (now known as Dulce de Leche as the ship is headed for a South America circumnavigation) and oatmeal raisin cookies, we’re completing the task at hand. Of course, Larry has already calculated the time he’ll have to spend away from his favourite treats: 110 days including tomorrow until we board Crystal Serenity in Dubai.

While we were sitting at the Starlite Bar for our after-dinner visit with barkeep Natalia, Mark Merchant, the ventriloquist who had been part of the entertainment for this cruise, came by and stopped to chat for what ended up being almost two hours. In exchange for him taking a (promotional) video of us on his iPhone, we got a couple of pictures of us with him. A great way to end the cruise!

We hope you’ve had as much fun following along on this journey as we have reporting on the experience. See you at home!

Food, Food…

And did we mention food? Of course, we have been showing off some of the spectacular food as we’ve been going along, and this being a Wine and Food Festival sailing, there’s even more than usual.  Along with the two guest chefs and Tony Abu-Gamin, there has been a wine expert on board who has been hosting wine tastings on some of the sea days. Some of our tablemates have gone to a couple of them, but Monica hasn’t. There’s only so much you can do during a day, and adding another glass or two of wine mid-afternoon doesn’t always appeal - especially if you're trying to keep some control over your diet.

Some people we met whom we have seen on previous cruises went to a special Vintage Room dinner, where Azmin Ghahreman developed the menu and did the cooking and the guest wine expert provided the accompanying beverages. They say it may just have been the best meal they ever had! Too bad the wine is such a huge part of the total experience, or it would be worth considering in the future.

As promised, here are some photos of yesterday’s Grand Gala Buffet. The menu items don’t change all that much from cruise to cruise - the chefs know by now what the big sellers are - but the presentation can be a little different every time. I don’t remember seeing the dolphin ice carving last time…

The march of the Penguins!

One of the spectacular ice carvings.  Wonder what they do with them when they melt!

Everyone's favourite Chocolate Fountain

Just a little bit of the dessert buffet:  Cream swans and cannoli - and look at that chocolate centrepiece!

Seafood & Sushi presentation

We also have pictures of pictures from events we talked about in our last posting:

Our table - the lady beside Larry is Yvonne.  Must have been a run on black formal wear that day!!

The Rum Punch (or Fruit Punch) sailaway

At the Captain's Quarters get-together

Today we’ll be in Grand Cayman for the afternoon. After we do our laps on the Promenade Deck, Monica has booked herself into the spa for a couple of hours - detoxing (and we don’t mean that in the way that first comes to mind). Larry, on the other hand, is going to spend part of that time in the gym.

This evening, Tony is going to be serving at the Starlite Bar before dinner again, and even if you don’t drink, it’s fun to watch him work and get some tidbits of information from him for making up your own combinations - with or without alcohol. We’ll update again later.