This week’s travel dream: Dubai’s strange attractions

The “wonderland of weirdness” known as Dubai is well worth experiencing, said Bill Fink in the San Francisco Chronicle. Even if the city’s era of greatest extravagance is winding down, it’s still “an Arabian Disneyland,” an artificial playground erected—like Las Vegas—in the middle of a desert. Unlike America’s Sin City, this sparkling United Arab Emirates metropolis bans gambling and restricts alcohol consumption to hotel restaurants and bars. It’s also losing steam. Two decades after the advent of an oil and building boom that transformed this former fishing village, it’s not clear that the party can long continue.

From the viewing platform of the world’s tallest building, the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa, I was able to survey mile upon mile of new buildings. To one side sat the world’s largest shopping center, “mostly empty of shoppers.” Farther out in the desert lay the world’s biggest amusement park, currently unfinished. Even so, Dubai remains “the sort of place where if you open your hotel curtains to see a 50-foot-tall balloon shaped like a birthday cake floating in the sky, as I did, you’ll think, ‘Why yes, of course.’” In the span of two days, I snowboarded down sand dunes, snowboarded inside “what is essentially a 25-story refrigerator at the mall,” and watched a pro tennis tournament while biplanes flew upside down overhead, dropping parachutists in their wake. At a racetrack, I saw robots riding camels, and at the marina people smoked hookahs as a unicyclist rode by. Yet during all these memorably odd happenings, I didn’t see any crowds. I was repeatedly assured that I’d just missed a rush of people. Still, I began to wonder “if prime time had permanently passed for this destination.”

Some 85 percent of Dubai’s residents are foreigners, many of them well paid and thus able to enjoy the city’s high-end shopping and entertainment. The U.A.E. is one of the most tolerant Muslim countries, “a comfortable introduction to the Middle East” for most Americans. The expats I met weren’t planning an instant exodus, but many talked as if they intended to eventually return to their homelands. “When they do, this oasis of wonder and weirdness may disappear like the mirage it seems to be.”

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At Dubai’s Ritz-Carlton (ritzcarlton.com), doubles start at $233.