Dubai is not what you think

There is a moment, just after sunrise on the Deira side of the creek, when the water turns the colour of weak tea and the wooden abras begin their first crossings of the day. The boatman does not announce himself. He simply waits, one hand on the tiller, until the bench fills. The fare is a coin. The crossing takes four minutes. And in those four minutes, the Dubai everyone has told you about, the malls, the fountains, the towers tilting toward the sky, quietly recedes.

This is the Dubai we wanted to find.

For years, the city has been described to Indian travellers as a kind of shopping destination with a desert attached. Our travellers, in their fifties and sixties and seventies, have heard the descriptions and politely set them aside. They are not looking for the tallest, the longest, the most. They are looking for somewhere to sit. Somewhere to walk for twenty minutes and then sit again. Somewhere the coffee is good and the muezzin sounds at the right hour and the hotel is close enough that an afternoon rest is not a logistical event.

Old Dubai, it turns out, is exactly that place.

The lanes of Bastakiya are narrow and shaded. Wind towers rise from coral-stone houses that predate the oil money by a century. We move through these lanes in the morning, before the heat settles in, with a local guide who speaks unhurriedly and stops whenever someone wants to. There is a small museum in a restored merchant’s house. There is an Arabic coffee served in thimble cups, bitter and cardamom-dark. There is shade. We have built the morning around shade.

By late morning we are at the spice souk in Deira, where the saffron is sold by the gram and the dried lemons smell of something between sun and salt. Our travellers tend to linger here. One gentleman last winter spent forty minutes in conversation with a Keralite shopkeeper about the correct grade of cardamom for payasam, and we did not hurry him. This is the slow way. It is what we are here for.

Lunch is taken at an Indian restaurant we have vetted carefully, vegetarian on request, Jain on request, a thali that arrives without drama. The restaurant is within ten minutes of the hotel. The afternoon is yours. Some of our travellers rest. Some swim. One couple last March simply sat on their balcony and watched the light change on the creek.

Evenings in Dubai are when the city remembers it is, in fact, on the water. We take the abra across at dusk. The same wooden boat, the same coin. The light is gentler now. The towers across the water are lit but quiet, the way a city is quiet from a boat. We have dinner at a long table, always Indian, always at a place where the staff understand that some of our travellers eat early and some eat late, and both should feel welcomed.

There is, of course, a desert morning. We do this gently. No dune-bashing, no four-wheel-drives turning the stomach. Instead, a sedate drive into the Al Marmoom reserve at a civilised hour, breakfast under a canopy, a short walk on cool sand if the body wants it, and back before the sun has any opinion. Some of our travellers have called this the morning they remember most. It is also, we suspect, the morning they expected least.

The Sheikh Zayed Mosque day in Abu Dhabi is its own quiet pleasure. We go early but not punishingly so. The marble underfoot is cool. The light through the colonnades is almost embarrassingly beautiful. We bring abayas and scarves for those who want them. Lunch is Indian, naturally. The drive back to Dubai is two hours of soft conversation, which is when our groups, almost without us noticing, begin to leave as friends.

We are often asked whether Dubai is a city for our travellers. The honest answer is that the Dubai of advertisements is not. But the older city, the creek, the souks, the dhows still loading sacks of rice at the wharf, the corniche at six in the morning when the joggers are out and the sky is the colour of an unripe mango, that Dubai is gentle, and well-lit, and easy on the body, and quietly surprising.

You only have to know where to cross.