Day 1 - Dubai -

Sitting in Heathrow, eating nachos and beer with Nina and her uni-mate Tom. Have never met Tom before, but he seems a sold enough bloke, smiley and bespectacled, endlessly bouncy. Think Tigger in a poloshirt; the very image of the young orthopaedic surgeion.

Nina fed Tom and I anti-histamines “Just the thing, knock you right out for the flight.” Certainly knocked her out, she was asleep in minutes. I only discovered that my headrest was adjustable six and a half hours into a seven hour journey, so spent the entire flight with my head lolling back wards and groggy as hell. On the few minutes when I did doze, I slumped left onto Nina’s shoulder and was woken by her comatose elbows in my ribs.

We landed at 7am and grabbed a taxi out to our hotel, the driver insisting on loading our bags for us.

“Holiday Inn”.

The taxi driver was insistent - “Just Holiday Inn?”
“Yes.”
“Holiday Inn and nothing else?”

Bizarre - sure, just our destination, we’re not going anywhere else.

He drove us down Sheik Zayed road to the wrong version of the two Holiday Inns in Dubai. Turns out we’re staying at the Holiday Inn Express, near Safa Park.

Over the next few days I will become exceptionally good at saying “Holiday Inn Express, Safa Park, near Gulf News, NOT Al Bharsha.” This is handy, as several of the taxi drivers speak almost as much english as I do arabic.

At first viewing, Dubai is a baffling city; I’m not used to settlements that don’t have hills or sea around them. The place has no horizon, everything just fades out into a layer of smog and sky scrapers. It feels like being in a video game, where the details are only rendered once you get close enough. The size and opulence of the buildings around us doesn’t help my disbelief. It’s difficult to get an objective head around the concept of a building that’s nearly a kilometre tall. The town has money, that’s clear, but it’s like a high class zombie movie. The only people we’ve seen so far are service staff or construction workers. Where are the people who live and work in all this luxury? They’re not on the street, because there ARE no streets that we’ve seen. You can’t walk anywhere, because the highways have no pavements.

What are you meant to do here if you can’t afford a Bentley to drive around in?

Blacked out cars cruise along the five lanes of baffling highways, changing lanes on the bends, taking the racing line through traffic. The drivers gesture angrily at each other, thumb to four fingers, shaking their hands through the windscreen. I learn later on that what I’d taken to be a middle eastern version of the middle finger in fact translates to “Have patience”.

According to British friends here, flipping people the bird is enough to get you deported.

We toured the Dubai Mall, stared with wide eyes at diamonds and gold, silks, Porsches and an aquarium that was comfortably bigger than my flat.

Tired and hungry, we wound up sitting on a restaurant’s terrace in the baking sunshine , it was slightly too hot for al fresco dining, but the novelty of searing heat was enough to keep us out there. Linguine chicken al fredo; an unusual breakfast, I’ll grant you, but just the job for a jetlagged stomach.

Come the afternoon, Nina had friends to visit and Tom and I were plotting an afternoon’s sight seeing. Secretly, I was feeling a little too knackered for marching around town, or even riding a tour bus. The thought of lying in an air conditioned hotel room and sleeping for hours seemed very attractive. Tom sent some texts to an old friend and then sat upright.

“Right - Darryl’s invited us over to his place, he lives on the Palm. How’s about we go and say hello, have a snooze on his beach and then get dinner?”

HIS beach? Yeah, alright.

We rode a taxi out to Darryl’s place, an apartment building on the Palm Jumeirah, a huge reclaimed arc of sand running out into the sea . The concierge let us through the back door onto the beach where Darryl, a friend of Tom and Nina’s, but a stranger to me, was entertaining. He broke away from the group to welcome us:

“Make yourselves at home, I’ve got some friends over, so you’ll maybe excuse me for a few hours?”

“We were thinking of sleeping off our flight.”

“No problem, there’s loungers over there - take some water. See you in a bit.”

I slept for a couple of hours, drifting in and out, listening to Darryl’s friends and their kids playing loud cricket and rugby on the beach, fretting over whether I’d wake up red, peeling and carcinogenic.

I was woken at one point by my bank phoning me, alarmed at the sudden relocation of my card. Could I confirm who I was, where I was and for how long? A short conversation later and I was good to use any ATM I pleased, handy, since I’d been faced with an alarming “Your request has been denied” at every attempt to draw cash up until this point.

On waking, a crowd of us were heading back to Darryl’s for beers when one of the kids in the party rolled over on his foot, scraping the skin off a five pence piece sized circle on his ankle. Ten minutes later he was still howling, so I took a look.

Wet abrasions full of beach sand must sting like hell, no wonder the kid wasn’t calming down. Half a bottle of mineral water and a bit of a rub with a thumb (perhaps not the gold class of wound irrigation, but it did in a pinch) and he was right as rain. He even managed a sniffley “Thankyou” before leaving. If only all my patients were so grateful and appreciative. I hadn’t anticipated treating anybody until we hit the desert; this guy’s sandy wound was a fitting aperitif.

We spent the evening with beer, tapas and good company, Darryl’s ex-pat friends entertaining us with the UAE’s foibles. Telling us tales of camel racing just outside the city, since labour laws came in, they can’t employ child jockeys anymore. The camels are apparently ridden by little robots; you’re not even allowed to gamble on them. I ask you, what’s the point of a day at the races if you can’t have a flutter?

The night ran all too fast and Tom and I found ourselves nodding sitting up at the dinner table. A taxi back to the hotel and we turned in, Tom on a fold-away sofa-bed and Nina and I sharing the double as a result of an earlier conversation.

“Right boys, I’m not sleeping on the sofa, so we’ll have to work this out…I don’t care who I share with, but I expect you to keep your hands to yourself.”

“Safest with the gay one, then?”

“Probably.”

Really, when Nina phoned me back in February to ask me along to this, I didn’t realise it was just an elaborate proposition to get me into bed!