We started with a 5 night stopover in Dubai. Here we stayed at Al Barsha Hotel Apartments. It was hot, luckily you can catch the train to everywhere which is air conditioned. When you get off the train to the shopping malls it is all undercover but you have to walk for miles. We did a sand dune tour into the desert. We got picked up at 4.30pm and it was still very hot, on our way out of town towards Oman it started to rain and became very windy. It was amazing how quickly the temperature dropped it was like a huge sand storm that hit us and we thought the tour may get cancelled. The storm stopped as quick as it started and we continued on. The 4 wheel driving in the dunes was brilliant and once finished we set off for dinner where we were entertained by belly dancers, camel rides and henna hand painting. The temperature had again got very hot and humid and the drinks were warm, we still had a great time. We went out to the gold Souk which was just shop after shop of gold. Bryan and I both bought gold here. Then we went to the silver Souk and Vicki bought some silver jewellery. We went up to the 124th Floor of the Burj Khalifa building and saw amazing views. We visited the Mall of Emirates with its Ski Slopes and Dubai Mall with its Olympic size ice rink and an Aquarium. Outside of the Dubai Mall we got to see a spectacular fountain show. Another day we did a half day tour that took us to the Marina and Palm Island . On what we thought was our last day we got ready to be picked up at 4am in the morning, however, no one turned up. On checking our itinerary, we realised we were a day too early so we went back to bed for a while then took the train out as far as it went.