Destinations

AYA Universe is what happens when a very well-funded creative studio decides the art museum is dead and replaces it with a video game you can walk inside. No paintings. No velvet ropes. Twelve themed zones, floor-to-ceiling projection mapping, responsive…

I hit the Path of Umbrellas at 4pm on a February Tuesday and stood there counting. Eventually I gave up at around 500 — the umbrellas kept going. The whole ceiling of the walkway is suspended colour, hung at staggered…

I was eating a paratha at the India pavilion when I realised I’d been at Global Village for four hours and hadn’t even crossed to the Africa zone. The park is bigger than it looks — 75 national pavilions, over…

The giraffe leaned down from behind the fence and its tongue — a 45-centimetre, blue-black, prehensile tongue — wrapped around the carrot in my daughter’s hand with the precision of a surgical instrument. She shrieked with delight. The giraffe chewed…

Twenty-two strangers strapped into airline-style seats around a circular table. A crane lifted us 50 metres into the air. A chef in the centre started plating a three-course dinner while we dangled above the Dubai Marina skyline with nothing between…

A sloth reached out and touched my hand. Slowly — because everything a sloth does is slow — its three-toed grip wrapped around my index finger with surprising gentleness. We held hands for about 10 seconds. Then it yawned, revealing…

The lobby doors opened and the first thing I saw was gold. Not gold accents, not gold trim — gold everywhere. Gold columns, gold leaf on the ceiling, gold balustrades on the escalators. The atrium soared 180 metres above me,…

The instructor tapped me twice on the shoulder. That was the signal. I was sitting in the open door of a plane at 13,000 feet, my legs dangling over the Palm Jumeirah, and a man I’d met 30 minutes ago…

My girlfriend grabbed my arm so hard she left fingerprints. We were sitting in a harness 150 metres above the Arabian Gulf, attached to a speedboat by a rope, with the entire Dubai Marina skyline spread out behind us like…

The security guard at the Mall of the Emirates looked at my shorts and t-shirt and shook his head. “You’ll need the jacket,” he said, pointing toward the rental desk. Ten minutes later I was wearing a full ski outfit…

The blue morpho landed on my daughter’s shoulder and opened its wings. The iridescent blue was so intense it looked like someone had photoshopped it onto reality. She froze. “Don’t move,” I whispered. She didn’t move for four full minutes.…

My 10-year-old nephew ranked every theme park he’s ever visited. Dubai’s MOTIONGATE came third, behind Universal Studios and ahead of Disneyland Paris. I asked him why. “Because you can ride a roller coaster inside a Smurfs movie.” He’s not wrong.…

A woman dove from a platform 25 meters above the stage, plunged through a hole in the floor that wasn’t there two seconds ago, and disappeared into a pool of water that had appeared from nowhere. The audience gasped. I…

A shark swam over my head. Not a metaphorical shark — an actual 3-meter sand tiger shark, gliding through 10 million liters of water while I stood in a glass tunnel wondering whether acrylic really is as strong as they…

The Can-Am had 192 horsepower. I know this because the instructor told me right before handing me the keys and pointing at a wall of sand that was definitely too steep to drive up. “Full throttle,” he said. “Don’t brake…

The waiter placed a plate of grilled lamb in front of me while the Burj Khalifa’s light show flickered through the window behind his shoulder. A live oud player was tuning up in the corner. The boat hadn’t even left…

The pilot banked left and the Palm Jumeirah tilted into view below us. The entire man-made island — trunk, fronds, crescent — laid out like a map. Except it wasn’t a map. It was real, and I was 500 meters…

Someone in Dubai’s planning department looked at the skyline and thought: “What if we built a 150-meter-tall picture frame so travelers could photograph both halves of the city at once?” And then they actually did it. The Dubai Frame is…

I looked down through the glass floor and my knees buckled. Two hundred meters below, tiny cars crawled along Sheikh Zayed Road. My brain knew the glass was solid. My legs disagreed. That’s Sky Views Observatory — Dubai’s second-most-terrifying viewing…