Sunday November 15 - Dubai to NZ

[Photo: Dubai from our hotel]

 

The city of Dubai doesn’t look too good from the window of the Millennium Airport Hotel. It was covered in smog, and the buildings have a certain tackiness about them. It’s an odd thing to create a new city from a desert, and to my eyes it shows. I’m sure the shopping in Dubai is good, and perhaps some of the architecture, but it has no appeal to me. Much of the flash architecture is just that – flash. It looks to be designed for effect rather than being good architecture. This really shows in the terminal, which at first glance looks pretty special, but is very messy to get around, and has too much room in some areas, and inadequate circulation in others.

 

Our early start left us with sufficient time to do some duty-free shopping. We checked at the booze counter that we could get duty-free alcohol back to Auckland, and were assured we could – we even double-checked as we bought it.

 

Karen must have been tired. She was asleep in her seat before we started taxiing, and didn’t even wake for takeoff. First she knew of the flight was finding herself in cruise mode above the Arabian Sea! Slept OK on the long 13.5 hour flight, Karen more then me. With the good entertainment system, the time goes pretty fast.

 

Brisbane Airport has an incredibly daft system for transit passengers. Even though we had only 45 minutes on the ground, we had to leave the plane, and go through to a transit lounge. To get there, we had to go through a full security screening process, which meant they stole our bottles of duty-free limoncello and pastis. Completely stupid. How does it magicly become unsafe while travelling on the plane between between Dubai and Brisbane? It was even in an official sealed bag. We were rightly pissed off, not so much at the sales staff in Dubai as at having to go through security at Brisbane when we never officially entered Australia. So be aware – don’t ever buy duty-free liquids over 100ml if you are going to transit anywhere on the way.

 

Back onto the same plane (we should have ignored their requests to take all our baggage and just left it in the lockers – we’d be drinking it now). Service, as on the first leg on this plane, was very good. Overall though I think we’d try to fly Singapore Air or Air New Zealand rather than Emirates. The service was just too patchy, and the planes were showing their age.