Desert air 🏜️

When you think of Dubai, you probably only think of the city itself. Of skyscrapers, malls and the well-known luxury lifestyle 🏙️

But there is also much to discover around Dubai - the desert for example. Some might think: Why would I go there? There is only sand!

Yes. There really is only sand. And it's amazing!

In Dubai, you will find various tours through the desert. You can choose a Jeep tour, quads or dune buggies. As you can see in the picture, we chose the buggies.

The quad tour would have been the cheapest option, but Jannik was blown away by the buggies. And besides, we both liked the buggies better than the quads. We wouldn't have been allowed to drive the Jeep ourselves... Well, at least we didn't want to pay the price they asked for it.

After a drive of about 1 hour, we arrived at a completely empty "desert camp" at that time.

In the evening, it's more lively there, because the desert tours are usually offered in combination with a barbecue in the evening, accompanied by belly dancers and music.

Since we suspected another mass tourist event behind it, we weren't really interested in that and booked the dune buggy tour separately. Nevertheless, we were allowed to take a look around the camp in peace and enjoy the sun a little ☀️

At this point, we are only speaking for ourselves and don't mean to discourage anyone from the complete packages. 😊

The further we drove into the desert, the higher the reddish-yellow sand dunes piled up in front of us. We also saw fewer and fewer of the little trees that we encountered at the beginning. The only downside was that we couldn't drive as fast as we (especially Jannik) wanted. Our tour guide (unfortunately) paid extra attention to our distances and driving behavior.

Nevertheless, it was really fun and we had a great time. 😎

At some point, we stopped. Everyone got out of their buggies, turned off the ignition and explored the huge sand dunes.

Our short break started to drag on a bit conspicuously. Only after a while did we understand that one of the buggies didn't want to start anymore. Eventually, our tour guide informed us that a mechanic was on his way and that we should just be patient and enjoy the sun. The poor guy seemed a little nervous. We didn't really mind the break. I lay in the warm sand and played with it like a little child, while we waited a little longer than announced (20 minutes turned into about 50) for our "rescue". The others seemed a bit tense towards the end. However, it got much funnier when the rescue finally came - a young man on a quad came racing over the dunes elegantly. He got off his vehicle, confidently approached the problem buggy, inspected it for a few seconds, turned the ignition key and off he went.

You should have seen all the faces.

Our tour guide looked helplessly around. "It didn't work! I swear!" He called that a few times to each of us in disbelief, while the mechanic looked at him as if he were crazy. So we had waited 50 minutes for someone to turn the ignition key for us and then drove back to the camp.

I really felt sorry for our guide and I believed his version of the whole thing. Sometimes you just have bad luck - keyword self-fulfilling prophecy...

The others seemed slightly annoyed. Fortunately, they only expressed their own mood. We had a great day! And Jannik got a little sunburn, but it was worth it!

(You can find all the pictures again in the gallery ☀️)