I haven’t been to a beach in over a year. On doctor’s orders, after a minor encounter with a skin carcinoma – successfully treated, thankfully – I have been keeping out of the sun.
But this Eid Al Adha I decided that a visit to the seaside was essential. Dubai is a beach city par excellence, after all, and where better to feel the pulse of a city at war than on its beaches?
My first instinct was Le Royal Méridien resort near Marina, or “Fish and Chips Beach”, as my daughter Amira and I always called it, for the simple reason that’s what we always ate there. I have mental albums full of happy memories of long, lazy afternoons there when she was young, before serious exams and business studies revision intervened.
But the hotel resort was fully occupied, and no day passes available. This was slightly surprising, in view of the well-reported absence of tourists this year, but it was Eid after all.
I shifted to a familiar fallback: the Habtoor Grand Resort, an old Dubai favourite, another repository of memories from Amira’s childhood and where day passes were readily available, as I was assured in a phone call.
The place was packed. Fifteen minutes queuing for the valet drop-off was not what I had expected on a Thursday afternoon.
Nor was the construction noise – the resort is in the middle of significant development, with cranes and drills competing with the holiday atmosphere, as if the workers had not been informed that the rest of the city was on a break.
This was also, I should note, the morning after fresh US strikes on Iran and new threats of retaliation from Tehran. Nobody seemed to care.
As I settled into a sunlounger and surveyed the raucous pools – multi-generational water volleyball is a noisy sport – I found myself wondering what would happen if everyone’s phone simultaneously lit up with an emergency alert.
The Jaws scenario: a mass, chaotic evacuation of the swimming pools and beach? It didn’t happen, but the thought crossed my mind.
The clientele told its own story. Arab families – Saudis, Kuwaitis and what sounded to my ear like Levantine Arabic from Syrians and Jordanians perhaps – mixed with Dubai’s large South Asian resident community. Big family groups were everywhere, oblivious to the geopolitics.
Notably absent was the sunburnt European contingent that would normally be thick on the ground at an Eid beach in Dubai. The Western travel advisories, still inexplicably in place, are having a serious impact.
I met an old friend, Mark, unexpectedly. He was there with his five- and three-year-olds, and I spent a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours playing honorary grandpa in the pool. Children, it turns out, are excellent company during a fragile ceasefire in the Gulf.
Further reading:
Further reading:
In the late afternoon we made our way down to the shoreline for an old ritual: standing waist-deep in water that is, by this point in the year, nearing bathtub temperature, watching the sun go down.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected to see looking out across the Gulf in the direction of Iran. Long lines of tankers queuing for a Hormuz transit? A US carrier group on the horizon? Vapour trails of something incoming?
There was none of the above. Just the Gulf: flat and golden in the late light, with fast boats tracing white lines across the bay and families building sandcastles at the water’s edge.
I swam slowly out to the line of buoys that marks the safe swimming boundary – another old habit – and floated there for a while, feeling the accumulated nostalgia of a couple of decades of days just like this one, and grateful to be back.
Rocked by gentle waves looking up at a gold-tinted sky, I reflected that Dubai’s resilience is not merely a talking point for government press releases. It is visible, very audible and entirely real, in a packed hotel pool on an Eid afternoon with the missiles still sporadically flying.
And this too: that the city’s tourism future may look different from its recent past. It is likely to be more family-oriented, value-driven and more rooted in the Global South, and rather less reliant on the ostentatious Western visitor on the hunt for “bling”.
In Dubai the beach will always be there. I’ll be back, cautiously, like everyone else.
Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia