London feels bleak at the moment. The lingering effects of Covid, the cold, the dire politics, Tube strikes: it’s like finding yourself trapped in a reality show where each morning the producers invent a new way to make you feel worse.
Which is why I could not believe my luck to be invited to Dubai. Finally, I thought, some sun and an escape from Britain’s present grimness on my first holiday abroad since the pandemic.
I must admit that previously I have had an issue with the idea of Dubai. I like old things: ramshackled French villages, landscapes moulded by time, or food produced to recipes handed through generations.
Dubai did not seem my kind of place at all. It summoned up expectations of skyscrapers, traffic-laden roads, and fabricated beaches populated by people flaunting their wealth and vanity across social media. Yet, to my surprise, I had an amazing time.
The slickness starts at the airport. Landing at Heathrow is nowadays a despondent affair: queues can stretch back for hours as grim-faced officials bark for documentation. Landing at Dubai, helpers steer you through the Covid requirements – including a Covid test administered so efficiently you barely break stride – and into the country in mere minutes.
Then you see the glorious sight of sun as the car picks you up for your accommodation - in my case the gorgeous Mandarin Oriental Jumeira, Dubai. This is a hotel that not only drips tasteful luxury but has the best service I have experienced anywhere in the world.
The big event in Dubai at the moment is the world Expo. Initially scheduled for 2020, it finally opened last October for six months with doubts over whether it could succeed amid a pandemic. The pre-Covid expectation had been 25 million visitors. The question was if they would now get any at all.
Expos, I learned, are a massive deal globally. The idea was actually British, inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Its success encouraged others – with the French in 1889 using theirs to create the Eiffel Tower – and now they occur every five years, with the next in Osaka and then onto St Petersburg.
Dubai has splurged over £5 billion staging their Expo. More than 190 countries have built pavilions to parade the best of their country. Alicia Keys performed just before I arrived. Usain Bolt flew in to see it. Prince William was there last week for his first overseas trip since Covid struck.
Before visiting the Expo, however, there was first a beach and hotel for me to enjoy. Mandarin Oriental Jumeira, Dubai has its own stretch of sand, the swimming pool was warm, and as I lay with my pasty London skin already browning fresh coconuts were handed to me to drink.
That evening, I was invited to the Mandarin’s new dining experience, Sublimotion, which runs until early May. I trembled slightly at the prospect of the self-subscribed “unparalleled multi-sensory journey, offering an unprecedented dining experience through culinary art and technological innovation”, momentarily wishing for just simple pub grub. Again, I could not have been more wrong.
From the moment you walk in it is like being at a theatrical performance. The walls are a blaze of revolving images; virtual reality glasses take you to alien worlds as you eat foods with previously unimagined tastes; and groups of dancers perform between the 10 courses. It was delicious, fuelled by copious alcohol, and felt like being in the future.
The Expo is to the south of the city, built on a stretch of desert. It takes a moment to get your bearings on the sprawling 1,000 acre site and the trick, I soon realised, is not too see too much but to enjoy what you are interested in as walking soon palls in the heat.
Yet it is mind-blowing to see what has been done. While the rest of the world was paralysed by the virus, Dubai got on with creating the first spectacle since the start of Covid. It is a massive statement by a country defining itself as one of the great crossroads of the world. Fears of a flop have proved unfounded. Millions of people have come.
My highlights were the Irish Pavilion with its simple message ‘Ireland Welcomes You’, and proves it by having sprightly folk bands and a fantastic pub, and the New Zealand pavilion with its lamb restaurant. Then there is the Russian pavilion – notable because it is just so weird: being what looks like a giant ball of wool with inside it a vast pulsating brain – and the Thai site with its rotation of traditional dancers.
Then there is the British pavilion. There was a worrying constant from everyone I chatted with that the British pavilion was Expo’s highest-profile disaster. Indeed, a friendly Ugandan warned me, everyone who visited it seemed to come back “angry”.
From the outside, it looks spectacular: a giant cone with LED lights at the end. To get in there is a long winding path up a man-made hill on which I passed people sweating from the exertion in the desert heat. At least, we joked to each other, there would be air conditioning inside. Along with what, I wondered? How would we be telling our present national story to the world?
It was horrific. What awaited me was the worst kind of gimmick-driven, meaningless example of gesture symbolism. Was there anything that actually told me about Britain today? No. A glimpse of what the country could offer an eager tourist or investor? No. There was not even air-conditioning.
Instead there was a solitary iPad-like tablet in the midst of a small amphitheatre. The idea is that visitors type in a word that is then illuminated by the LED lights on the exterior cone and then added to other words typed in by previous visitors. This is meant to form a random “collective message”, which when I was there was inevitably mostly gibberish. Other than that, there was nothing inside at all. Unlike every other site at Expo, the British pavilion literally had nothing of its own to say. This cost the British taxpayer, £44m.
For a moment, I felt the bleakness rise up inside me again. But then I re-entered the rest of Dubai’s Expo extravaganza. The sky above filled with a giant drone show, dancers made their way down the street beside me and, as the sun set, a glorious kaleidoscope of petals lit up the dome above the site’s central Al Wasl plaza. I was so grateful to be there, in a place seizing and defining its own future. It was wonderful to finally be away on holiday once again.
