We went up the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – the tallest building in the world at over half a mile high – to celebrate my 70th birthday. It is a fascinating building towering elegantly above the many other Dubai skyscrapers. As this was a special occasion we had booked tickets on-line before leaving England. (The website is www.burjkhalifa.ae and the tickets cost about £23 each.) I think this is advisable anyway as when we visited we noticed that most of the tickets had already been sold for the next few days. You have to enter via the Dubai Mall (which I will review separately) and are not allowed in for the security check etc until 10 mins before your booked time. There were a series of walkways, with illustrations about the building, before you reached the actual queue for entry and then queues again at various stages before you finally entered the lifts (probably 20-30 mins of queuing in all).
The lifts were fantastic – you hardly seemed to be moving but you reached the viewing deck at level 124 (of 160 stories) in a seemingly very short time. Despite the queues to get up there it was not unduly crowded and was easy to get to the huge windows to look out over Dubai. Absolutely amazing although the scenes were of course of modern buildings and roads – perhaps not as interesting to us as towers in older cities with more recognisable buildings to see. Great nevertheless. Another queue of about 15 mins for the lift down to the passageway back to the Dubai Mall and the inevitable gift shop (rather expensive we felt).
All in all a great experience and well worth doing – definitely a memorable thing to do for my birthday.
