Dubai airport is emphatically not my favourite. The terminal is cramped, and easily feels crowded. There is a ludicrously insufficient number of toilets. The prices of drinks are predictably high, but the quality is in some cases unexpectedly poor. And -- I hope temporarily but currently very annoyingly -- your plane gets parked a million miles out on the periphery, so on arrival that you have to be bused, endlessly, to the terminal, and on departure, your aircraft trundles miles and miles, it seems, out to the take-off point. On the way to Muscat the taxi route was so long it felt we were going there overland.

When you have roughly three hours to spare, therefore, between finishing your flight from Muscat and boarding your flight to Kuala Lumpur, you want to get OUT. But there is not enough time to do much, and it's early in the morning, so not many things are open.

Our solution? Try out the Dubai metro. The map is incredibly confusing, and we got the wrong tickets first up, but once equipped with an all-day card (22 dirham each), we had the run of the metro and the (very new) tram that loops around the marina area.



Not only do the sleek metro carriages offer excellent people-watching opportunities, but you also get a really good overview of the city, which has certainly changed immensely since I was there 15 years ago. Glitzy modern buildings (including the iconic Burj Khalifa and Burj Al Arab); lower-key but still neat and modern commercial areas; residential quarters, bristling with mosques; and finally (for us, at least), the marina and hotel area where you can transfer onto the little tram, and then get out and photograph a few boats before heading back along the line to the airport.





AND... you get the chance to practise transliterating some Arabic. Fairly easy to pick up is "el mahatal kordimahiya", which means "the next station is" -- although actually this is more accurately rendered, I'm told, as Al Mahata Al Qadema Hiya. But a quick internet search reveals that many of us have struggled with "the doors are closing". I got "El abue butu belach", but others have suggested "Al Abwab Botoghlak", and "Al Abwaabu Tughlaq", or even "elebuebutuplak".

Definitely preferable to three hours cooped up between the gates and the duty-free...

One thing you must leave time for at the airport, however, is a visit to Pinkberry. What you're looking for is a strawberry and pomegranate smoothy. These are not cheap. But, unlike many of their airport competitors, they are very, VERY good. Remember: ignore all other food and beverage outlets, and head for Pinkberry.

Given that we had totally not researched a Dubai dash, I'm very happy with the way it turned out. Interesting, photogenic, and rounded off in pink.