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55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
Doesn't do Dubai justice, 27 Nov 2003
For such a popular tourist destination and stopover point Dubai is poorly served by travel books. The main stay is the Lonely Planet Dubai which draws heavily on the larger Lonely Planet UAE and Oman book.Having just been there the Lonely Planet just doesn't do the place justice. Part of the problem is the tendency of Lonely Planets to be obsessed with the so-called authentic experience to the point of including Urdu and Hindi phrases in the back on the premise that a large part of the population comes from the Indian sub-continent. The authentic experience? The shopping mall, the high rise and the constant drone of cranes is the authentic experience in Dubai! As is a surprisingly vibrant clubbing and bar scene, something you find out from reading Time Out once you are over there, but you don't really get a sense of that from the Lonely Planet. Speaking Urdu or Hindi? At risk of sounding like a narrow minded cultural imperialist, every sign, and I mean every sign (including street billboards) is in English. And the guest workers themselves talk to each other in the English language. It's a language that someone from Bangladesh and someone from Sri Lanka has in common. The other problem is that things in Dubai move very, very fast. The Madinat Jumeirah hotel complex which the Lonely Planet lists under construction is already partially open. And though the Jumeirah Beach Hotel may well have been hotel of the year in 1999, for Dubai that's old news, and the place is now crammed full of package tourists. Unfortunately having been published in Sept 2002, this book is already partially out of date. If you are going to Dubai, buy Time Out when you are there and check out web-sites beforehand. And who knows, by the time you get there Footprint or Rough Guides might have brought out their own guide book which does the place justice.
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