Full credit to the Indian embassy here; they processed our visa in just three days, instead of their usual seven and everything went without a hitch. No queuing either to drop-off or pick-up our passports. I’m impressed and just hope that the rest of India lives up to this standard; although I fear that it […]

Yesterday, a foot-long spanner was thrown into the works of our roadtrip: our passports are at the Indian embassy awaiting visa processing. The snag is, here in the UAE tourists must–by law–present their passports upon check-in to a hotel or hostel. Obviously this stopped the show for us yesterday, so we returned to the safe […]

My family have now left Abu Dhabi (sniff, sniff) and so the Squifter and I hired a car for a week to tour around the United Arab Emirates to see a bit more of this land, outside of the high-rise lifestyle. Before we left the city, we dropped our passports in at the Indian embassy […]

Sometimes, whilst Dave is computing in Sarah’s air-conditioned flat, I like to go out exploring by myself. At the moment it’s too hot to walk more than a block, so I generally take a taxi. Whilst cabs here are cheap, when it comes to the standard of driver and driving, it’s definitely a case of […]

You can tell when my parents come to town. They’re past the dirty hotel, smelly backpacker stage (actually, I’m not even sure that they ever went there) so they hired us kids a driver for the day to take us around Dubai. We started at the Dubai Museum: the short film chronicalling the development of […]

Not everything’s been Westernised into the mainstream over here, you know. We found ourselves in an Iranium bakery just up the road from where we’re staying the other day. I had the chicken sharwarma and the falafels, obviously. Oh, and just make sure you’re reading right-to-left to work out the correct price

My generous father treated us all to a delicious meal in one of the city’s premier restaurants, which sits on the 28th floor atop a hotel. Oh and being in the la-la land of the UAE, it revolves. Naturally. As usual, Squiffy ordered the chocolate desert thingo. As it happens, so did I. The desert […]

I recently wrote published two posts (below) and forgot to include the associated photo galleries. I’ve now added the pictures, click the links below to see them: Dubai: Hot, wet, can’t see a thing, can’t eat a thing either. Dubai: The haves and the have-nots Sorry for missing them out first time around!

My glorious family have descended upon Abu Dhabi to celebrate my father’s 60th birthday. We ate, we drank, we chatted, we shopped and then we ate some more. And then we stepped into a seven-seater 4×4 and were whisked-off into the Arabian desert to give my dear Dad a birthday to remember. My poor Mum […]

This is a guest post from Sarah, David’s older and wiser sibling, who he and Claire have been scrounging a comfy bed and hot water off for a month (…only kidding, you two…) Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, is best known for being the time when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. The times of […]