Trip Reflections from the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates creates quite an impression. The country is anchored in a rich and long history that stretches from pre-history to ancient desert trade routes to coastal pearl-diving villages, yet it’s moving at a pace that makes western ambition seem tired. It feels decades ahead of the United States. Dubai’s kinetic and surreal skyline is a striking contrast with the historic old town. Abu Dhabi has a kind of cultural gravity and an incredible mosque. The quiet vastness of the Sharjah desert…I love the desert. The visuals were literally awesome and the people were warm, welcoming, and high-integrity.

I was there last July and I’ve been meaning to write about it. It was in the 90s F and humid. I still managed a 3-4 mile jog every morning. It was the equivalent of a Florida Summer, but it was unusually cool for that time of year.

As always, some brief history—because I love it. Human settlement on the Arabian Peninsula dates back over 100,000 years, with archaeological sites in the UAE showing early stone-tool industries, Bronze Age metallurgy, and extensive pre-Islamic trade networks linking Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus Valley. Coastal communities relied on fishing and pearl diving for centuries, while inland tribes moved with the seasons across desert oases. By the 16th century, European and regional powers competed for influence along the Gulf’s strategic maritime corridor, but the interior remained defined by tribal alliances, trade, and pilgrimage routes that shaped the region’s cultural continuity well into the modern era.

Some more interesting facts :

1. The UAE hosts one of the world’s oldest known pearling cultures; divers once descended 20-30 meters on a single breath, and many coastal towns still map to historic pearling fleets.
2. The traditional wind tower (barjeel) is an indigenous form of natural air-conditioning; entire neighborhoods in old Dubai were engineered around passive cooling centuries before electricity.
3. The Arabian oryx—once extinct in the wild—was reintroduced through UAE-led conservation and is now one of the world’s most successful large-mammal recovery efforts.
4. Sharjah’s Mleiha archaeological zone contains a 130,000-year human migration trail, one of the oldest documented routes of Homo sapiens out of Africa.
5. The date palm, a cultural and agricultural backbone of the Emirates, has supported food security for over 7,000 years; today the UAE maintains global gene banks to preserve lineage diversity.
6. Dubai Creek is a natural inlet that enabled centuries of Indian Ocean trade; its shape and depth dictated the city’s earliest merchant settlements long before oil or skyscrapers.
7. The Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali), which covers part of the UAE, contains dune systems that migrate up to 30 meters a year—an environment that shaped Bedouin navigation, camel-breeding, and oral poetry traditions.
8. The falconry heritage is so integral that UAE falcons carry their own passports for international travel; it reflects a conservation tradition that brought the once-endangered saker falcon population back from collapse.

I was thrilled to experience this place firsthand. Awesome is the best word to describe it. I look forward to returning to explore more.