Where Wild West meets the Wild Middle East
DUBAI
Apattern once played out in countless locales across the Old West: within months of the discovery of gold or silver, some sleepy one-horse town suddenly attracted every starry-eyed prospector and speculator within reach of a newspaper.
Hotels and saloons sprouted from dry prairie dirt. Cities evolved from thin air. Some of those boomtowns — San Francisco, say — had staying power. Many others shrivelled when the mother lode ran out.
Dubai is at the beginning of a similar wave today, which began when oil was discovered here in the mid-1960s. A village that until that point had made its living from fishing and pearl diving began drawing everyone from Bangladeshi labourers to Texas oilmen.
Now, with a population of 1.4 million, Dubai has quickly become one of the biggest cities in the United Arab Emirates. Yet this desert oasis is determined to not become a ghost town when its oil stores begin to run dry, an event experts predict will happen sometime in the next decade.
The solution? Diversify its economy, including a big push on tourism, which Dubai has been avidly pursuing for well over two decades. Dubai’s ambition is no less than to become one of the world’s leading vacation destinations, doubling the current number of visitors to 15 million by 2015. It plans to do so by chasing after every superlative developers can think of, from tallest building to most expensive hotel.
Tiger Woods is designing his first golf course for a Dubai resort. Western celebrities are flocking to buy holiday properties at The Palms and The World, complexes of manmade islands sprouting just offshore.
And Donald Trump has deemed Dubai worthy of one of his namesake hotels. Clearly, the place has the smell of money.
A drive along the main drag, Sheikh Zayed Road, serves up a mind-boggling variety of futuristic skyscrapers.
It’s like a skyline designed by the Mad Hatter, if he’d spent too much time watching “The Jetsons.” To fully appreciate this modern spectacle, it must be witnessed firsthand. The current jewel in Dubai’s architectural crown is the “seven-star” Burj Al Arab hotel, which looms ver Dubai’s white-sand beaches like a glowing sail. But, in typical Dubai fashion, it’s soon to be outdone. The nearby Burj Dubai, a building hat has already superseded the CN Tower as the world’s tallest man-made structure, is still growing.
Like Las Vegas — a city with which it’s often compared — there’s a high degree of manufactured fantasy about Dubai. Part of the thrill of visiting is being able to come home and say, “You won’t believe what I saw!” And chief among those “who’d’ve thunk it” attractions, for example, is Ski Dubai.
The highest indoor ski hill in the world, Ski Dubai won’t give Whistler anything to worry about — the longest run is 400 metres with a vertical drop of just over 60. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive engineering feat and a surreal example of cross-cultural pollination. Women wearing hijab and men in long white dishdasha robes look both awkward and delighted as they slice through the snow past a mural depicting an alpine village.
By comparison, Dubai’s Wild Wadi outdoor waterpark seems positively natural. When the mercury soars, the longest waterslide outside North America is a completely reasonable 21st-century alternative to the traditional oasis.
If all that sounds a bit overwhelming, just wait: a development currently under construction is set to dwarf everything built in Dubai so far. Set to open in stages over the next two decades, Dubailand will eventually include four giant stadiums, multiple theme parks, more than 50 hotels and the world’s largest mall.
Foresight is rarely 20/20, but it seems likely that Dubai will avoid the fate of an Old West ghost town. Don't expect to see tumbleweeds blowing down Sheikh Zayed Road anytime soon.
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Discover history in the city of the future
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