Seven days in Dubai and Abu Dhabi: two cities ninety minutes apart that could not be less alike

Start on the creek, because it is the only part of Dubai that predates living memory. Al Fahidi, often still called Bastakiya, is a quarter of coral and gypsum courtyard houses put up around the turn of the twentieth century by Persian merchants from Bastak, who were offered land and tax breaks to move their trade across the water. The wind towers are the thing to look at: square open-sided chimneys that catch a breeze and drop it into the rooms below, which is air conditioning that predates electricity and works.

Then take an abra across to Deira. It is a wooden boat with a bench down the middle and a diesel engine, it costs one dirham, and five minutes on the water gives you the whole old skyline with the towers stacked up behind it.

On the far bank, do the two souks in order. The Spice Souk is small, half covered and smells of frankincense, saffron and dried lime, sold by the scoop. The Gold Souk is five minutes on and is several hundred jewellers in one covered lane, best after dark when the shutters are up and the whole street is lit from the windows. Then eat in the streets behind it, where Kerala, Peshawar and Manila are all within a block.

The Museum of the Future opened in 2022 on the Sheikh Zayed Road and is the most interesting new building in the country: a hollow steel ring standing on a green mound, cut through with lines of Arabic calligraphy that double as its windows. The floors inside are themed installations on space, ecology and wellbeing rather than a museum in the ordinary sense, and views on the contents differ sharply. Nobody argues about the building. Book ahead.

In the afternoon, Downtown. The Burj Khalifa is 828 metres, more than 300 metres taller than anything that came before it, and it opened in January 2010 in the middle of a property crash that nearly took Dubai with it. The lift to the observation deck on the 124th floor takes about a minute. Book a timed slot days in advance and choose either the cheap early morning or the expensive half hour before sunset.

Then stay for the fountain in the lake below, which runs on the half hour once it is dark, throws water something like 150 metres, and costs nothing. Watch from the far side of the lake rather than a restaurant terrace, where you are paying for the view by the plate.

Sharjah is twenty minutes up the coast and is the emirate that went the other way: no towers to speak of, no alcohol at all, and a serious investment in museums instead. The Museum of Islamic Civilization occupies a converted covered souq on the creek, a long barrel-vaulted hall under a gold dome whose inner surface is painted with the signs of the zodiac. Inside are manuscripts, astrolabes, coins, ceramics and a floor given over to Islamic science, and it is a calmer and more scholarly place than anything in Dubai. Two hours, and the Blue Souq is next door if you want fabric or carpets.

Back in Dubai, spend the late afternoon at the Dubai Frame. Two towers 150 metres high are joined by a bridge, standing in Zabeel Park, positioned so that from the top you look north over the old creek districts and south over the skyline. It is pure civic showmanship, it opened in 2018, and it makes the point of the whole week in one turn of the head.

Finish at the other end of the city. Dubai Marina is a two kilometre artificial canal cut inland and lined with towers, and it is the most convincingly urban part of new Dubai: a promenade you can walk end to end, boats going out, and restaurants on the water. By daylight it can read as soulless. After dark it does not.

The drive to Abu Dhabi takes about ninety minutes on a wide, flat, dull motorway through desert and industrial estates, and the coach does it for a few pounds. Leave after breakfast, check in, and keep the day for one building.

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque sits at the end of the bridge from Dubai, which makes it the first thing you reach. It was completed in 2007, carries 82 domes and over a thousand columns, and is finished in white Macedonian marble inlaid with flowers in coloured stone. The prayer hall holds a single hand-knotted Iranian carpet that took hundreds of weavers years to make, and chandeliers of gilded brass and crystal that are hard to look at directly. Sheikh Zayed himself, who ruled from the founding of the country in 1971 until 2004, is buried in the courtyard next door.

Entry is free and the dress code is enforced at the door without negotiation: men in long trousers and sleeves, women covered including the hair, in loose clothing. Go in the last two hours of daylight and stay past dusk, when the marble is lit and the courtyard reflects the domes. Then eat on the corniche.

Qasr al-Hosn is the oldest stone building in Abu Dhabi and the reason the city is here. A watchtower went up on this spot in the 1760s to guard a freshwater well found on the island; the fort grew around it, and it was the ruling family's home and the seat of government until 1966. Everything else in this half of the week was built after that. It reopened as a museum in 2018 and the exhibition covers pearl diving, the desert economy and the abruptness of what came next.

Spend the afternoon on foot. Umm Al Emarat Park, a few minutes inland, is the oldest park in the city and the best of them, with a shaded walkway, a botanical garden and an amphitheatre, and a nominal entry fee that keeps it calm. It is also one of very few places in the Gulf where you can see how a public space is actually used.

Then the Corniche for the end of the day. Eight kilometres of promenade, cycle track, beaches and lawn along the north-west shore, with the towers behind and the flagpole at the western breakwater standing 122 metres with a flag the size of a tennis court on it. Walk west into the sunset and you get the whole skyline across the water.

Qasr Al Watan is a working presidential palace that decided in 2019 to open to the public. This is not a former palace or a replica: state visits happen here. You see the ceremonial half, which is unapologetically opulent, with a Great Hall under a dome 37 metres up, a library of rare manuscripts, and cases of state gifts. Take the audio guide, because without it the rooms blur into one another.

The afternoon belongs to Saadiyat Island and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2017 and is the best building in the country. Jean Nouvel roofed a cluster of low white galleries with a dome 180 metres across, built from eight layers of perforated steel, and the effect underneath is a shifting scatter of sunlight he calls a rain of light. The collection is arranged by period rather than by civilisation, so a Chinese bronze, a Levantine idol and a Greek head end up in the same room arguing with each other. It is a small collection, deliberately, and a far better two hours than a large one would be.

Manarat al Saadiyat is five minutes away and usually has a good temporary show on for nothing much. It also holds the model of what the rest of the island is meant to become, which is worth ten minutes if only for the scale of the ambition.

Finish with the oddest thing either city has. The Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital, out on the road towards the airport, is a working veterinary clinic treating several thousand birds a year, and its two hour tour has to be booked in advance. You watch a bird sedated for a feather repair or a talon trim, walk through the free-flight aviary, and sit at the end with a falcon on a gloved arm while somebody explains why a country this modern still arranges a good deal of its social life around them.

It is not a zoo and does not feel like one. Falconry here is a genuine, expensive, continuing obsession, the birds fly on aircraft with their own passports, and an hour in this building explains more about the Emirates than a museum can.

The airport is fifteen minutes further on, so this works before an afternoon flight. If you are going back to Dubai to fly, the coach takes two hours and runs every twenty minutes from the main bus station, so leave four hours clear.