Dubai is easy to dismiss on a first visit and difficult to forget on a second. The city sells a version of itself — the tallest, the largest, the most — that is entirely accurate and also entirely optional. The travellers who return are almost always the ones who found the other Dubai, the one that runs on the older side of the creek and slows down considerably after ten in the morning.
Start with the accommodation choice, because it sets the pace. Burj Al Arab is a genuinely singular building and, at the risk of stating the obvious, an expensive one. The rooms are all suites, all duplexes, and the smaller ones — the Deluxe Marina on the lower floors — deliver most of the experience without the surcharge for the higher-numbered floors. Ask for a suite on an odd-numbered floor facing the marina rather than the Palm; the sunset light is better and the view holds up after dark. The hotel's private beach and the Skyview Bar on the 27th floor become genuinely quiet between six and eight in the morning, which is when to use them.
Across the creek, Bur Dubai and Deira are the older city — the textile souk, the spice souk, the gold souk, the abras that cross the creek for one dirham. The Al Fahidi historical neighbourhood, restored around a set of wind-tower courtyard houses, contains the Coffee Museum and the Coin Museum, both of which are better than they sound and both of which are usually empty by four in the afternoon. This is the Dubai that existed before 1970, and it is a fifteen-minute taxi ride from Downtown.
For a proper break from the city, drive an hour southeast to the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve. The stays inside the reserve — the small tented camps and the older, quieter properties — deliver a version of the desert that the day-trip camps do not. The reserve holds Arabian oryx, sand gazelle, and, at dusk, the occasional caracal; the noise of the airport and the highways falls away by the time the four-wheel drive leaves the sealed road. One night is enough; two nights begins to feel like a retreat rather than a trip.
For return visitors or a longer stay, Abu Dhabi is ninety minutes down the E11 and holds the Louvre, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, and the quieter half of the Emirates in general. The mosque is best at dusk when the marble takes on the sunset; the Louvre is best on a Wednesday morning when the school groups are elsewhere.
On timing, November through early March is the only sensible window. December and January are cool enough for daytime walking and warm enough for the beach; February is generally the best month, with the humidity of the shoulder season still weeks away. May through September is genuinely difficult — the heat is not the dry heat of a desert but a coastal humidity that makes outdoor activity unpleasant before eight and after five.
One practical detail: Friday remains the weekend day in much of the region, and Friday brunch is a specific Dubai institution rather than a general practice. It is worth doing once, at one of the hotels that does it seriously — the brunch at Bvlgari or the one at Atlantis are the honest points of comparison — but it lasts four hours and is not a substitute for lunch on a working day.
The city is legible with a driver and a loose schedule, and unmanageable on foot. Uber works reliably; the metro is clean but limited to two lines and unhelpful for most tourist geography. Skip the fountain show at the Burj Khalifa in favour of the view from the 148th floor at sunset, which is a different building from the same city.