Even on a quite reasonable budget, it’s not possible. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

You want me to elaborate?

If you want to get outside the cities, you really need to hire a car. Buses do exist, but will only take you so far. After that you’re either on foot in the punishing heat or at the mercy of flagging down a taxi — which are few and far between. On a positive note, I’ve never been anywhere where petrol is cheaper. We paid about £23/day for the cheapest 2WD car we could find (the Internet brokers offer cheaper deals but weren’t able to come up with the goods after we booked). If you really want to explore the desert, you’ll need a 4×4 a GPS and a copy of the UAE Off-Road guide — we only had the latter, but couldn’t really use get too deep into it without having 4WD.

It’s not cheap, compared with other developing nations competing for your tourist buck. Accommodation in particular comes at a very high price. There are about four Youth Hostels in the UAE that we know of, else you’re left going the hotel route and almost all of these are four- or five-star.

In the short month that we’ve been here, we’ve not really been able to crack the culture either. From what little we saw–mainly Dubai and Abu Dhabi–it appears that much of the nomadic desert culture has been forgotten and the nation has instead embraced some of the questionable traits of the West: shopping malls, eight lane highways and gas-guzzling SUV’s.

A nice place to come for a week’s five-star holiday certainly, but next to impossible to backpack on a budget. We’re just so grateful to our hosts Annie in Dubai and my sister Sarah in Abu Dhabi, without whom we would not have been able to stay in this country for more than a day or two.