Well we made it over 48hrs later than planned and very late on. It’s been 9 hr flight, a 1.5 mile road trip but we are here!

We’ve arrived in a spectacular and perhaps a little scary thunderstorm with huge bangs in the sky and bright lightening but this is the view from the restaurant as we grab a late night dinner

We are so late in dining that we have the place to ourselves and a front row seat on the storm. Now this is already better than Dubai.

Oh and if you are wondering about the luggage…..well we wasted a further 2 hours in Bali airport looking through hundreds of bags deposited at the arrivals halls. While some were celebrating finding their cases (I’ve never seen grown men and women hugging and kissing their suitcases before!), we sadly had to fill in yet more pieces of paper to claim them now officially lost!!

Cocktail anyone??

Here’s the second attempt to get to Bali, still no-one can advise if the luggage will join or not, but now the stance is “you need to arrive at Bali, wait for the entire carousel to empty and if it’s not there, queue with everyone else to report it lost”. Roughly translated as, you’re out of Dubai and no longer our problem, bye.

So here we are in Dubai airport sat in the worlds largest Business Class lounge, with the worlds only Moet & Chandon bar inside it. Put it this way I’m drinking my suitcase cost tonight.

Today should in theory (fingers and toes crossed!) be our last in Dubai. We’ve visited at least 5 or 6 shopping malls since being here, made friends in a local clothes store since we spent so much time in there sorting the basics out, and walked literally miles and miles.

Dubai is a shoppers city so it’s not really for us. Today we decided to visit the Dubai Marina as there is a marina walk and a load of luxury yachts for the oober rich. Boy it was hot!

We even managed to visit a Souk which is a traditional market. This one was pretty posh as it’s near Burj Al Arab.

Let’s see what happens at the airport….

And today we will mostly be taking a trip to the airport to see if our luggage has had a nice break and come back to join us.

Divide and conquer, Mrs Fogg went up to the information desk while I joined another Emirates queue to see if the luggage fairies had returned our bits. Clearly not!

The stance from the stressed luggage team is, if your final destination was Dubai, come over here and we will help you, if you were travelling onwards, good luck, not our problem, queue for 2 hours and be told “your luggage is not lost, it’s in a container along with over 100,000 other little scared cases”. But you cannot claim it is lost since we know where it is, so there. Then the stressed lovelies walked off unable to cope with irate customers who have been stranded for up to a week with no information. All this while the Emirate PR Puppies push out the good vibe that all is good in the world and everyone has been reunited with their luggage and the team are mega awesome (put it this way looks like Geppetto has been working overtime whittling in an effort to keep up).

The Mrs got us checked into the next flight to Bali (good luck if that one happens).

On then to the Palm hotel that stretches into the sea, however, no you ain’t cos due to flooding all trains are cancelled at a certain station and you have 2 options, walk or taxi.

Given we only have 1 additional set of clothes and might be making it to Bali (all appendages crossed) we took the decision to taxi to the Mall of the Emirates to find new clothes and believe me drivers on these roads close their eyes and just gun it. All you need to drive here is 1) can drive in a straight line 2) know where the car horn is 3) never look left or right and just slice in front of everyone with a thousandths of an inch to spare.

So the Mall, is still under at least 1 foot of water as they continue 247 to pump it out after a week. Clearly using foot pump then

This Mall is actually much smaller with next to no guidance to find food, so we headed back in a taxi again to buy a second round of clothes from Mr Thrifty (I look cool in a cravat, polka dot socks, sock braces and a frilly shirt now).

And tomorrow, will the airport be open, will our luggage join us, will it yak it down again and close the airport (yes apparent forecast is for more heavy rain)? personally I can’t wait to join another queue of passengers.

To supplement our income in Dubai, we are now opening a laundry washing service in the room (well given we have a washing machine in the hotel room, yes a washing machine!). Although drying times are a bit slow (my grundies are still wet). We also just bought yet another case to transport the hideous clothes we just bought (the case glows in the dark, let’s see Emirates lose this bad boy!).

Standing at 828m in height, just over half a mile high, it’s awesome and stood on the 154th floor with champagne at 585m is an awesome view. We have been up the tallest building in the world.