Getting there is easy. Turn off the Sheikh Zayed highway at junction 39 and head for the Mall of the Emirates: over the concrete flyover, past a forest of cranes and in through the main entrance, between the branches of Debenhams and Harvey Nicks. Once you’re inside, turn right and look for the Virgin Megastore.
And there it is, jammed into the side of the mall like a crashed spaceship — a vast indoor snow slope, 280ft high and the size of three football pitches: Ski Dubai.
As of last Friday, you can go skiing year-round in a country where the summer temperatures nudge 50C. Just rock up at the registration desk and hand over 115 dirhams (£18), and they’ll kit you out with a warm jacket and trousers, boots, poles and skis — or a snowboard. Then, for two hours, you can ski or board to your heart’s content.
From a distance — from, say, the UK on a frosty December morning — it seems an absurd notion. But as soon as you step off the plane at Dubai airport, it starts to make sense. No matter how many stories you’ve read about its seven-star hotels, glittering malls and man-made islands, no matter how prepared you think you are for this wonder of our overheated age, Dubai will leave you temporarily speechless with the sheer breadth and power of the ambition at work here. This is the desert, one of the most inhospitable places known to man. Yet everywhere you look there is urgent and breathtaking human endeavour: clusters of nearly finished office blocks racing each other into the sky, new roads being rolled out like carpets, dense forests of palms sprouting behind hotel walls.
FORTY YEARS ago, this was a port and regional trading centre with a population of less than 60,000. Now, more than 1m people live here, with 5m more coming to visit each year. It makes Las Vegas look like Chipping Norton.
In the end, nothing seems extraordinary, because everything is. Take the conversation I had in the taxi to my hotel on the evening I arrived. I shared the ride with an American who’d just flown in from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He asked me why I was in Dubai, and roared with laughter when I showed him my ski boots. Then I asked the same question of him. He looked sheepish. “I’m a naval architect,” he told me, “and I’ve been hired to help design a 70ft luxury yacht.” I asked him what kind of yacht. “The kind of yacht,” he said, “that, if you press the right button, turns into a submarine.” Pretty soon, in a place like this, the idea of an indoor ski slope in the desert seems almost natural.
Needless to say, it’s one of the biggest of its kind in the world. There are two that are slightly longer — one in Holland, the other in Germany — but none can match its surface area. The technology is pretty impressive too. According to Phil Taylor, Ski Dubai’s CEO (who hails from the West Country), the cost of generating all the snow and keeping it there is about the same as heating an office block in the UK. “The energy we consume accounts for about 10% of our total operating budget,” he told me on the preview night I skied there. “The snow we remove each night is used to cool the air conditioning in the shopping mall, via a heat exchanger, and the meltwater goes to irrigate the gardens.”
Apparently, the insulation is so good that you could turn the power off for three days and still find the snow pretty much as you left it when you flicked the switch back on.
The effect Ski Dubai has had on the locals is almost instantaneous. Not surprisingly, most of the people there on the preview night were European expats — part of the mushrooming community of foreigners that stokes the roaring fires of the emirate’s industry, construction and commerce. And as soon as they walked into the main hall and clicked into their ski bindings, their faces lit up like children’s. Even though more than half the slope was closed (thanks to a teething problem with one of the three lifts), most of them stayed there for hours.
The question is, should you be planning to join them? Well, if Dubai’s sparkle has already caught your eye, and you’ve booked a trip, then yes, of course. Very soon, it’s going to become an established part of this thoroughly man-made landscape, providing welcome relief from the heat and a bizarre, and amusing, contrast to the glitter and polish of the malls and the luxury hotels. The slopes are long enough for you to build a rhythm and, in one section, steep enough to make even experienced intermediates think about their technique. A quick burn will leave you with a smile a mile wide.
If you’re a committed skier, however, you might want to think twice about a visit. After all, you can fly to the Alps from almost any UK airport, large or small, for the price of a West End theatre ticket and find hundreds of resorts that make Ski Dubai look like a potting shed. It would be like travelling to Reykjavik for your summer holiday and spending seven days on a sun bed.
But there’s more to it than that. If you’re anything like me, you ski for all sorts of reasons: for the speed, for the thrill of it, for the laughter. But a large part of the pleasure comes from being outside, in one of the great natural landscapes of the world. Dubai, and the heavily air-conditioned environment it offers, is pretty much the opposite of that. The winter-sports industry is already more guilty of suspect ecological practice than most. We don’t need to be schlepping across four time zones to go skiing in the desert.
Let me put it this way: Dubai is a stunning place — impressive and appalling in equal measure, and never less than memorable.
