Travel Dubai: We Went on a Sand Dune Safari in Dubai

If you find yourself in Dubai and don’t really fancy spending the day shopping, you should book yourself in for a Sand Dune Safari.

I suffer from chronic back issues. So, I always get a little nervous when getting ready for a big holiday, especially as I live in Australia and it can take you anywhere from eight to fourteen hours to get to a destination, or more than twenty if you’re heading to the United States or Europe.

When my partner and I were planning a trip to the UK, I decided we should break up the flight and booked us in for a two-night stay in Dubai.

Full disclosure here, as much as I like shopping, when I travel I much prefer to the see the sites of where I have travelled to, rather than spending all my time at a shopping centre, or in the shops doing nothing but shop. Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t shopped when I have travelled, it just doesn’t occupy my entire time away is all.

Seeing as Dubai is very well-known for shopping, I was a little worried staying two whole nights there, as I wasn’t sure what else we could really do there. We were already going to be on a tight budget, especially as the bulk of our holiday was going to be spent in the UK. Aussie dollar to Pound is terrible (any time of year), so the idea of spending too much money on sites and shopping in Dubai didn’t appeal to either of us at all.

I mean, if the occasion calls for it, you can go snow skiing indoors or take an exhilarating ride on the Ferrari roller coaster, but none of those activities really appealed to either my partner of myself.

So when the travel agent told us you could go on a safari in the desert in an awesome 4WD, which is then followed by dinner amongst the Sand Dunes in the middle of the desert, eating traditional Middle Eastern food whilst being entertained by Arabian dancers and then some. Suddenly the two-night stay was looking up.

The tour we took was called ‘Arabian Adventures’. They collect you from your hotel and make tracks for the desert at around three pm in the afternoon.

But before the adventure begins, you meet up with a collection of other 4x4s full of tourists and then we follow one by one across the desert road, before making a sharp turn off the road and straight into the desert. Before you know it, you are rocking up and down, drifting fast across incredibly large sand dunes.

The drivers are incredibly skilled and I felt safe the entire time. This goes on for approx thirty-five to forty-five minutes before you stop off at a fairly high point of the sand dunes for photos and to watch the sunset. Once the sun begins to drop, you pile back into the 4x4s and head off to an Arabian Camp, which transports you back in time to a magical and enchanted era of belly dancers and beautiful food.

Part of the tour also includes a small stop off to a mini oasis in the middle of the desert, where a man and a hawk are waiting for you, to give you a demonstration on how they train hawks to hunt food for them, which is a fairly amazing and otherworldy experience in itself, out there in the Arabian desert.

If you are travelling through Dubai and have a few days there, I strongly recommend you book yourself in for this incredible adventure. You won’t regret it. But do stay an extra night so you can spend a day shopping also, as it’s well worth it. I’ll admit, we did manage to snap up some pretty cool bargains without breaking the budget before the main holiday in the UK had started. So well worth it.