Barely 45 minutes’ drive from the dynamic city of Dubai is a desert experience you don’t want to miss. Off the highway, in the dunes, you pass through security fences with the logo ‘Al Maha’, Arabic for the beautiful white Arabian and scimitar-horned Oryx, desert antelopes, which dot the sands in this 225 sq km area called the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve.
At its core, perched over a huge ground water reserve, is the Al Maha Resort & Spa which has won many international awards since it opened in 1999. Besides its low-key architecture and use of natural materials (wood, palm fronds, pink sandstone), it lives up to its eco-tourism promise by using solar power and recycling its water with an onsite purification plant.
Al Maha offers an Arabian heritage experience, crossed with super-luxury and exclusive getaway. It takes no day-visitors and does everything to promote privacy, including not making children under 12 welcome. Over the sands are spread 30 Bedouin-style tented suites, each with a deck and plunge pool, which look out upon the desert in utter privacy. Emirates, who owns the resort and spent $28 million on it, does nothing by halves—every detail of the antique-furnished rooms is spectacular.
You’ll get excellent food in the restaurant, but also a four-course menu on your deck, because the staff to suite ratio is 3:1.
The resort combines a taste for luxury with a respect for the wild, so there’s also desert safaris, horse-riding, falconry, a visit to the Bedouin camel farms, desert sun-downers and dune dinners under a zillion stars. The resort will shortly complete an expansion programme at the cost of another $10 million, adding 10 suites, a larger spa, an Al Majlis Boardroom, and its own line of spa products.
The information:
Contact: +971-4-303-4222, www.al-maha.com.
Contact Emirates for special stopover offers at www.emirates.com