My wife, Pam, and I take a 9-hour flight from Hong Kong to spend the holidays with friends. We arrive at 11pm in the midst of our friends’ party for the Taiwan Legation. While not exactly in a party mood, we do manage to get into the spirit of things and enjoy ourselves.

We spend our first morning getting organized. Pam finds the compound and the weather fine for walking. Later we drive to the desert for sand dune viewing. We also see a male-only ritual dance but are never able to determine what is being celebrated

On Saturday, we visit the monster Mall of the Emirates. In the afternoon, we visit the Dubai Museum and fort as well as the Creekside area.

Christmas day, we return to Creekside, explore the corniche and the Bur Dubai souk, and have dinner at a surprisingly good Lebanese-Thai restaurant. We also ride an abra across the creek and back. The view at night is spectacular.

Next day we visit Sharjah, the most fundamentalist of the Emirates, We spend a couple hours in the Heritage Area, a mixed bag at best. Details in the Sharjah review.

Tuesday, we hire a car and driver. Our first stop is Hatta, an ancient agricultural town. We then backtrack to Fujairah and our hotel.

The next day we hire a car and driver to take us the length of the east coast from Khar Kolba to Dibba - details in the Fujairah review. That night, we explore on foot - not much to see.

Thursday, we visit the disappointing Fujairah museum and fort. Back in Dubai we celebrate New Year’s Eve early. We do cocktails, dinner, and bar hopping. See the Eating/Drinking review for details.

We spend most of the day Friday at the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club with friends, eating lunch at the Boardwalk restaurant, with its great view, raucous sea gulls, and mediocre food and service.

Saturday, we head for the Bastakia Quarter of old Dubai. After lunch, we stroll the Corniche before hiring an abra for a 45-minute run up and down the creek. We lastly visit the Deira area – see the Creekside Review.

New Year’s Day, we drive around to ensure we haven’t missed anything. We lunch at an authentic Northern Chinese restaurant owned and staffed by Chinese from Shandong Province. We fly home that night.

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

This hotel is part of a group of eight hotels in Abu Dhabi and Fujairah. They are owned by a private corporation with strong government ties.

Pam and I chose this hotel because we couldn’t get into the Meridien Resort Hotel, it being high season. Quite frankly, in light of the recent bombings in Amman, Jordan, we decided to avoid US-managed hotels. In retrospect, this was, most likely, an unnecessary precaution.

It is primarily a business hotel, situated next to the Fujairah Trade Center on Ahmad Bin Abdullah Road. It has an executive floor with the usual amenities and an excellent business center, which we had occasion to use. It offers reasonably priced personal computer and Internet access, about US$3 per hour. Staff members were eager to help but not always as knowledgeable as in most business hotels, I’ve stayed in. The rest of the hotel staff were excellent, particularly at the front desk and in the dining rooms.

The location was not ideal for tourists like us. It is a 30- to 40-minute walk to the waterfront, a 30-minute walk to the Fujairah Museum, and a 10-minute taxi ride to the Fujairah Gardens and Heritage Area. The hotel website plays this down of course.

It does have an excellent Lebanese restaurant, the Al Meshwar, right across the street, along with a KFC and a Pizza Hut. Next door is a shopping mall with fairly nice shops and more restaurants.

The hotel restaurants are quite good. The Diwan serves excellent reasonably priced buffets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can also order from the menu. We ate there twice. The Asmak seafood restaurant did not appeal to us, as they seem to be trying to be all things to all people. We liked the coffee lounge in the lobby and stopped there after a hard day of touring. The Zorba Lounge was a bit of a disappointment. The service was very slow and the ambiance and décor was from the 1950s. There's also an Arabic Shisha Corner that serves Arabic snacks and features water pipes. We skipped that.

The hotel has all the other amenities you would expect in a five-star establishment: a pool and pool bar, a fitness center, a state-of-the-art conference room, etc. One thing I didn’t expect was the six-lane bowling alley.

Overall I was impressed but not overwhelmed. Compared to other five-star hotels in the UAE, its rates were very competitive. Given the low occupancy when we arrived, I suspect we might have done even better if I had bargained on arrival, but we had pre-paid for our stay off the Internet.