Flying back from our Christmas holiday in the UK, we had a 6 hour stopover in Dubai, time enough we thought to have a quick excursion out of the airport to visit the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. On the previous journey, we’d only had a two-hour layover and had been shepherded straight through to our connection; this time, we veered away from the connections and headed out through immigration without any problems into the Dubai evening.
The metro took 25 minutes or so direct from the airport to the Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall station and cost 8AED each. From the station, it took another ten minute walk to get to the mall and it seemed to take forever to actually find an exit to get outside again! The exit was confusingly on the B1 floor, but finally we found a way out, and figured that wherever we were we should be able to locate ourselves just by looking up!
We arrived at about 10.30pm, and the tower was lit up with sparkling ‘stars’. Every so often there was a light display which lit it up in many different colours. Despite being night during the first week of January, it was still over 15 degrees, perfect night weather. Directly opposite was the hotel which on New Year’s Eve had had a big fire, and was still looking char-grilled. We snapped a few selfies and tried to get the whole building in, which led the the pictures being quite unflattering as they were taken from pretty low down! As we had a tight deadline, we were constantly checking the time, but it was a trip which was easily completed with plenty of time to get back to the airport in for our onward flight back to Toyko.
chrisneedham 