The Middle East via The Times

The Times has a couple of good travel stories relating to the Middle East. First, here's an amusing story on new, quite silly, gargantuan themed resort in Dubai, called Atlantis.

Actually, this part sounds pretty cool (if you are rich enough to afford it):

For more drama, you can always go for the Lost Chambers suites: the bedrooms look out through huge underwater picture windows into the resort’s 11m-litre lagoon, stocked with sharks, rays,angel-fish, trevallies and more, in dense, multicoloured shoals.

Fine for romantics, as long as you don’t mind a fishy audience – though the sight of the rays gliding past is so mesmerising, you might not get round to anything energetic.

But the silly part is the imaginary theme:

It takes a certain damn-the-torpedoes guts to spend £750m on a premise this self-evidently daft: the “discovery” of a 10,000-year-old civilisation that never existed, on an island that’s still being finished...

The keynote attraction...is the Lost Chambers. In a dimly lit stone labyrinth full of startled fish are great bits of fallen masonry covered with mysterious runes (though, presumably, they’re not that mysterious to the guy who made them up). You wouldn’t think you’re supposed to take all this stuff seriously, but they do, they really do.

From the top down, Atlantis’s staff treat their newly constructed ruins with po-faced reverence. Their eyes take on a spooky, glazed look when they talk about it, like freshly indoctrinated members of a Californian UFO cult.

“This is the Abyss,” my guide says. “It was here the Atlanteans mined their minerals – they lowered their miners down this well. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“But... it’s not real, is it?” I mumble. My words simply don’t register. “We expect a lot of school parties,” he says. “Education is a big part of our work.”

The funny thing is, I quite like fake environments. I love Disney World, for example. But Dubai 's attempt to create man-made excitement out of a bit of desert by the sea leaves me cold. It just seems to be trying too hard, somehow, and too much of it is designed for decadent tastes.

Which brings us to Emirates, the airline which intends first class to be literally a travelling spa:

Although the launch of the A380 initially prompted wild speculation that the aircraft would feature shopping malls and cinemas, Emirates has come up with a genuine wheeze – showers.

You have to have deep pockets of course – the shower spa room is only for the lucky 14 passengers who will occupy the First Class suites, but the favoured few will be allowed to spend 25 minutes in the spa itself – beauty treatments available – and five minutes in the shower which is regulated by a five-minute timer that glows green, amber and red as the allowance runs down.

And you thought getting out of the toilet to get back to your seat in a hurry during sudden turbulence was a worry.

Actually, the most interesting feature of the story is this: the apparent great fuel economy of the A380:

“Emirates will have the lowest fuel economy of any aircraft in the world,” said chairman and chief executive Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al-Maktoum in Hamburg. “We will use just three litres of fuel per passenger per 100km (60miles) – the A380 unites sensible business with social responsibility.”

If only one of them would fit in my garage.