Where This Heart Is: Dubai Part 2: Dune Buggy in the Desert!

Hi!

On Friday, we got up bright and early for our desert dune buggying adventure. We were picked up at 7:30 and we drove about an hour into the desert. There is a lot of sprawl around Dubai, I was surprised that the city didn’t drop off immediately. Even half an hour out into the desert, there were still high rises and the occasional housing development. As we got even further outside the city, there was an area that’s planned to have a number of amusement parks. One of them is done, but there’s an unfinished and currently abandoned Universal Studios that’s still awaiting a restart after the recession stopped the project. The recession is almost over here the way it is in the rest of the world and there is plenty of construction going on, but I guess this project is still stalled.

Desert!

Once we got out into the desert, we deflated our tires a bit (like you do, apparently) and went off-road, where we met up with our buggy! We would get to drive our own buggy—following a lead car because we don’t know anything about how to drive in the desert and where to go—around the desert for an hour! They gave us a quick rundown on how to do it (dear Daddy, thank you for making me drive a manual!) and we were off! I drove first. One thing that’s really important for the buggy and for driving on sand in general is that you can’t stop on an uphill. If you do, you’ll just spin your back wheels (it’s rear wheel drive) and dig them into the ground, making you more stuck. You also have to accelerate a lot more for the same movement, and run the vehicle at pretty high RPMs to make sure you have enough power. It was a 6-speed transmission, but we only used 1^st and 2^nd gears.

Martin and our ride!

I was doing pretty well until the first time they went down a really steep dune—the lead vehicle just goes vertical and disappears—and I slowed down just before I came to the cliff. Unfortunately, the part just before the cliff was a very slight uphill and I got stuck! Our lead car came back and pulled us out, and we were off again. I didn’t get stuck after that, and we got to drive through a herd of camels, up down and around dunes, and all over the desert until it was Martin’s turn.

Me driving!

Getting rescued.

Camels!!

Following the pace car. It looks like the Mars Rover footage.

He did much better than me, and soon we stopped for some sandboarding! That’s exactly what it sounds like: you strap on a snowboard and go down a dune! The trick is that sand is much heavier and has much more friction than snow, so you can’t really turn but you don’t go quite so fast either. Still, it’s a bit scary to just go straight down a steep dune in a way that would kill you on a snowboard! The hardest part was climbing back up—you don’t want to board on a lame dune but getting back up a good steep tall one is rough!

I love this picture so much.

Boarding!

The climb

My turn!

Whee!

Video of my last run.

We hit the sand again, and our guide warned Martin that we were doing the big dunes now and we needed “more power.” I thought some of the dunes we’d done earlier were pretty big! We would ride up one side of the dune and down the same side in a kind of half pipe maneuver that was always an adventure because you need tons of acceleration to avoid getting stuck on the way up, but then it’s almost impossible to turn back down the dune because you were getting pulled to the outside of the curve. Sometimes we could drift a little and make the turn, but Martin and I had already had close calls where we almost rolled ourselves back down the dune (no worries, that happens and it’s not too dangerous, just very sandy).

Lead vehicle and us.

Martin driving!

We took off, headed for the big dunes. Martin did great on the first few, but then we had a really really big one and just as he was about to pull us out of it, we started to lose traction (read: we almost rolled so we only had two wheels on the sand) and we got stuck! We had the engine going so hard at the time that we finally came to rest the back tires threw a huge wave of sand over the top of the vehicle and we got covered! The guide laughed at us and pulled us out, and we were off again. Back through the camels to where we had started, and our dune buggying adventure was over. We both slept in the car the whole way back.