Delights of Abu Dhabi

ABU Dhabi is just a short hop for people living in Bahrain and it is proving to be a tourist destination that regularly leaves visitors marvelling.

One sight after another and people ask themselves whether they are seeing things.
The first stop on the sight-seeing tour is the Emirates Palace Hotel. Decorated with 114 cupolas, it looks enormous from a distance. On closer inspection, a sultan’s palace or one of Louis XIV’s feats comes to mind, if Versailles had been in Arabia. The facades reflect the many hues of desert sand. A total of 92 luxury suites, 302 deluxe rooms, 7,000 doors and 1,000 crystal chandeliers adorn the building. The private beach is 1.3km in length.
A stroll around this seven star hotel, which opened in February 2005, takes half an hour.
The property’s one million sq m includes a surprisingly verdant park. Thousands of light bulbs illuminate the grounds at night.
Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed regularly invites visiting heads of state there for meetings. The hotel is then off limits to visitors. Otherwise, visitors are welcome to explore, enjoy a cup of Arabic coffee or stay the night, as long as they can afford it.
Upon entering, an exhibit of black and white photographs from the 1950s awaits visitors. The pictures show an older Abu Dhabi or more to the point, the city that used to occupy this space.
They depict a lone camel rider, lost in the desert. Poor children hover outside a Bedouin’s tent, like something out of an advertisement beseeching rich Europeans for a few alms. How can this be the same place?
Fifty years ago, Abu Dhabi was a desolate dot on Earth, not much more than a few huts and lots of sand. The photos are part of the “Heritage Village,” a kind of museum where tourists and locals can learn more about local history.
This is how the Gulf looked in 1958 before the discovery of oil. There were no canals, no electricity, no hospitals – not even a doctor. Most locals eked out a living as fishermen or pearl divers.
Today Abu Dhabi is the acclaimed capital of the United Arab Emirates, which only became a nation in 1971. It is a modern and steadily growing metropolis. The richest city in the Gulf region is home to 800,000 people. A skyline full of glass-covered high rises looks more like Chicago than the capital of an Arabian peninsula. A 6km promenade is named the Corniche, just like the one on the Côte d’Azur.
Main roads have at least three lanes each. It seems every citizen has their own sports utility vehicle. Cars are prestigious objects and used for everything, even the shortest trips. Anyone seeking to impress not only needs plenty of horsepower, but a license plate with as few digits as possible. These license plates are routinely auctioned. Plates with only two digits can easily sell for BD50,000 – the price of a racing camel in the UAE.
One license plate fetishist apparently paid $1 million in cash for a license plate with the number eight.
City lights blink and glow at dusk. Minarets on mosques are illuminated. But giant neon billboards glow just as brightly, whether they grace a florist’s, a supermarket or an Internet cafe. To disorient visitors even more, the town has rows and rows of fast food restaurants – everything from McDonald’s to KFC.
Abu Dhabi never ceases to surprise. Visitors can also marvel at its shopping possibilities. The super modern Abu Dhabi Shopping Mall is right beside old souks and traditional market halls. Men in full-length robes, known as a dishdash, stroll leisurely past shop windows accompanied by their wives. Many women do not bother with veils, though the more traditional cover at least part of their faces with a burqa.
Financial problems are next to unknown. Shoppers only want the best – sweets from Leysieffer, jewellery from Swarovski, hi-fi components from Bang & Olufsen and suits from Pierre Cardin. There’s no shortage of brands. More than 200 stores, cinemas and restaurants extend over the mall’s multiple floors.
And this is just the start. The emirate has 10 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, so money is no object. The heyday is far from over. Abu Dhabi has enough supplies for another 120 years. No one expects the economy to weaken soon, but Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed wants to be prepared and is investing heavily in tourism.
Saadiyat Island or the Island of Happiness is being constructed on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi City and is expected to become a major tourist destination. Three yacht harbours are planned along with two golf courses and 29 hotels  including one seven-star facility  with more than 7,000 rooms.
Nature lovers can go on bird watching excursions in the island’s mangrove stands. The emirate has around 200 islands along the coast, many of which are closed to tourists. But that is changing.
Many of the changes were impossible to imagine until recently. Saadiyat will host a gallery of modern and contemporary art operated by the Guggenheim. Indeed, this will be its largest museum, larger than existing galleries in New York, Venice or Bilbao.
Scheduled to open in 2011, the museum is being designed by none other than Frank Gehry. By then, the Guggenheim might be old news, since the island also plans to open a new Louvre, brimful with art from the original in Paris in addition to works from other Parisian museums.
The Al Gurm Resort will extend across several islands. Along with luxury apartments, it will include 161 suites, three restaurants, swimming pools and spa facilities. Another traditional Arabic-style resort with 230 rooms  all with an ocean view  should soon open.
An aquatic park is also in the works. The most conservative estimates predict that visitor numbers should jump to three million a year starting in 2015 while the number of hotel beds jumps from 12,000 to 25,000.
The minarets of the Great Mosque already reach skyward. It should soon accommodate up to 70,000 worshippers, making it one of the biggest mosques in the world. Makrana marble from India is being used, the same material used for the Taj Mahal.
Internet: www.abudhabitourism.ae <https://www.abudhabitourism.ae/> www.exploreabudhabi.ae