Dubai Jan 2016 Start: Wednesday 20th January

Dubai is 3,400 miles from Heathrow, about the same as flying to New York. It’s a night flight, and we’re descending into Dubai as the day dawns over Iran. It’s a beautiful sunrise.

 The final run into the airport is pure desert- and then suddenly it’s urban development. The main road from the airport soon runs from suburbia into the modern high-rise city that Dubai’s image projects: mile after mile of it, on the way to our hotel. Our driver says these huge buildings are occupied by a mixture of residential, business and hotels.

Our hotel is in the thick of it, but we have to say that the skyscrapers are top designer quality and in our locality, the Marina, we have water sculpted into the cityscape. It’s very attractive, in a futuristic way.

Rob’s apartment is a mile from our hotel and also near the Marina. It’s the tower building on the left. Nothing futuristic about the guy in the pink shorts though (it’s not Rob!).

Strolling around the Marina with Rob, we take a closer look at some of these gigantic monuments to modern architecture. Could this architect have had a twisted sense of humour?

These are our first impressions of Dubai: a modern super-Manhattan. There is more to it than that, which we’ll see later.