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Here’s a first look at the The Royal Island Beach Club that will be opening on The World‘s Lebanon island in Dubai.

The beach club includes a 100-seat restaurant, cabanas, a lounge area and entertainment facilities. Guests will pay a set fee of AED200 to visit the island while Saturday’s will cost around AED700 with an all-inclusive brunch. The Friday nightclub “Stranded” will be priced around AED250 for entrance and transport. Throughout the week, the Royal Island Beach Club will only be accessible via a 25-minute journey on a private yacht or RTA water taxi. For special events, including the weekly Friday club night Stranded, the RTA plans to run a 100-capacity river taxi from Jumeirah Beach Park.

Looks like it’ll be a new hotspot for Dubai, and where else would they open the first beach/night club on the World Islands other than ‘Lebanon’!

More pictures [Here]

Jazeera Airways launched their gift cards last week. They don’t just have them as a standard gift voucher, but instead they went all the way to make them available in various cute little themes for different occasions, and that’s a pretty neat idea for a gift card!

Themes include:

Happy New Year
Happy Birthday
I’m Sorry
I Love You
Happy Anniversary
New Job
Thank You
Thinking Of You

The vouchers are available in the range from KD15 to KD100 with a 12 month validity. Just choose the occasion, fill out the details and even add a personal message. It’s that easy. They will email the Gift Card directly to the recipient who can then redeem it for any of Jazeera’s destinations.

Don’t forget to read the terms and conditions though!

[link]

Jazeera finally launches some sort of a loyalty program for it’s customers. All you have to do it collect 10 boarding passes and get a free one way ticket to any of their destinations. I was hoping that they would have a frequent flyer card since I love collecting loyalty cards.

More on their [Terms & Conditions].

Just read this bit of news online that over 150 passengers were stranded at the Kuwait Airport for about four days because the Kuwait Airways flights to Mumbai got cancelled due to some technical problems. These were transit passengers flying in from different countries who had a connecting flight through Kuwait and on top of it all they had to face racial discrimination and extremely rude behavior by the ground staff.

Technical snags and cancelled flights isn’t anything new for Kuwait Airways. They should either privatize already and completely revamp their services or just close down.

[Link]

Spotted in Atlantis is a new online contest that launched today by Atlantis The Palm Hotel & Resort, Dubai. The contest gives you the chance to cast yourselves and three friends into a video as celebrities who are spotted at different locations around Atlantis and win the adventure of a lifetime!

There are 2 ways of entering the competition:

1. Create video:
Simply upload a picture of yourself and three friends at the contest [Website] and click on “Create your own video”. It is quick, easy and takes less than a minute. You can enter as many times as you like by including different groups of friends and sharing it with them. Each extra video with different friends gives you additional bonus entries.

Grand Prize:
An utterly glamorous five-night stay for four people at the Atlantis including luxurious round-trip airport transfers, breakfast daily in Saffron or Kaleidoscope, dine like celebrities with a complimentary meal for four at uber stylish Nobu restaurant and Ronda Locatelli, four Atlantis Dolphin Encounters at DolphinBay and unlimited complimentary access to Aquaventure – the Middle East’s largest waterpark and discover 65,000 marine animals in the underwater world of The Lost Chambers. Winner will be notified on 5th October 2011 and public announcement on 10th October 2011.

2. Register for weekly draw:
Register for the weekly draw and you could win PayPal or Amazon gift certificates.

Weekly Prizes:
Paypal Money Voucher or Amazon Gift Certificate worth USD 50. The weekly prize draw will be made each Sunday commencing 29th May 2011 for the duration of the contest.

The competition closes on Sept 30, 2011. For more details, check out the contest [Website] or the Atlantis [Website].

According to the annual GlobeShopper Calendar survey, overseas shoppers will boost the takings of London’s retailers by £2bn this year and most of the shoppers will come from China, Russia, UAE, Kuwait and Nigeria.

Kuwaitis are the second biggest spenders who spend an average of £1,780 per head per visit. The biggest spenders are Saudi Arabian tourists who spend an average of £1,974.

The chart above lists the biggest spenders in the London.

[Link]

Richard Branson is going to put on a sexy red AirAsia female flight attendant uniform on May 1st for a 13-hour London – Kuala Lumpur flight after losing a bet with AirAsia’s owner Tony Fernandes. The two of them had gambled over whose F1 racing team would finish higher at the 2010 Formula 1 Grand Prix – Branson’s Virgin Racing or Fernandes’s Team Lotus and whoever lost would have to serve as a flight attendant on the other’s airline.

Branson’s gonna have to shave his legs since Fernandes’ airline doesn’t allow “hairy stewardesses” but he can keep his beard though. He’ll be serving meals and drinks to Tony Fernandes and 250 other passengers. Besides, this is not the first time that Branson would be dressing as a woman. He wore a white wedding dress for the launch of Virgin Brides in 1996 which doesn’t exist anymore.

Both airlines bosses came up with the idea of a party in the sky with live music and entertainment. A total of 160 seats are being sold for a charity of Branson’s choice at £4500 (about $6300) each and he’s being positive about the stunt since he’ll be able to get some promotion for AirAsia X in which he has a 20% stake.

Anyone interested in joining the party can book one of the three packages being offered on [AirAsiaGo.com].

This is the last part of the series of posts on our trip to Bangladesh. After about a week of exploring the city and indulging in local delicacies, we decided to take a trip to the nearby touristic spots like Chittagong, Cox’s Bazaar and Hemchhari. Before that we took a ride to the outskirts of Dhaka to a nearby suburb called Ashulia. It’s a 2 hour drive and it’s well known for the Ashulia lake, vast rice fields, brick factories and the first theme park of Bangladesh called Fantasy Kingdom.

The next day we booked the Scania bus tickets for an 8 hour ride to Chittagong. It was more like a mini airbus with big and comfortable leather seats and a foot rest and you get water and blankets on the ride. Chittagong has one of the busiest ports of Bangladesh with most of the trade passing through the Chittagong Port. Some of the places to see here are the Hill Tracts, Foy’s Lake, Patenga beach and the Heritage Park. We stayed at the Hotel Tower Inn which was a pretty good place with good service and free WiFi. Later we went to Foy’s Lake which is a man-made lake where they have a resort, an amusement park and a sea world.

Next morning we had our rented car ready with the driver and we were taking a road trip to Cox’s Bazaar, the longest beach in the world measuring 125 km that opens into the Bay of Bengal. It’s not a bazaar or shopping area but that’s just the name of the place. The ride was 4 hours long and we enjoyed every minute of it with the scenic views along the way, colorful mosques and short tea stops. Once we got there it was magnificent! As far as your eyes could see there was just water. The beach was absolutely beautiful with big waves crashing at the shore that looked like a painted texture as you can see in the photos below. It was a sunny day with a cold breeze and we took horse rides and spent a lot of time on the beach till we got hungry. There were a variety of restaurants along the shore with all kinds of cuisines available but we stuck with Chinese as a safe bet. All the restaurants were on stilts because the water level gets really high during the summer season with massive waves.

After lunch we drove a bit further to go to the Hemchhari mountains and national park where you can climb up to the top for a breathtaking view of the beach. There is a small waterfall there but the best time to see it would be in the summer when it rains. The view from the top was just gorgeous. The sun was setting and there was a Burmese Market nearby which is famous for the Burmese cotton fabrics and shawls. We did a little of shopping and ran to the beach across to catch a view of the sunset before we head back.

This is the second part of the post on our trip to Bangladesh. Dhaka is a pretty modern city with proper infrastructure, communication services and public works and according to BBC it is one of the fastest growing cities in the world with major expansion underway for the development of nearby areas making it one of the major business, cultural and educational centers of the Southeast region. On the other hand there are many heritage sites, forts and museums showcasing the cultural and historical artifacts as well as some of the most interesting mosques. The city itself seems so colorful with the thousands of handpainted cycle rickshaws running through the streets, billboard advertisements, lakes and all the greenery around.

Cycle Rickshaws in Dhaka

View of Wonderland from Baton Rouge Restaurant

We spotted a local supermarket chain called Agora which is like the Sultan Center of Dhaka where you can find almost everything. Dhaka has a huge list of local fast food chains and international franchises likes Nando’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, A&W, Moevenpick restaurants and cafes and Anderson’s of Denmark Ice Cream. The city is famous for its Chinese restaurants that you’ll find on mostly every street with the best tasting local versions of the chinese cuisine I’ve ever had! The other one is the family-run Fakhruddin Biryani that takes pride in being the most tastiest and flavorful meat biryani you will ever have which is served with Chicken Roast and a spicy yogurt drink called Burhani. They’re both a must-try!

For shopping we focused mainly on the cultural and traditional items and we found the perfect place for that – Aarong which is arguably the local Mecca for deshi handicrafts. The best part is that its a fair trade organization meaning they employ underprivileged rural artisans and women by reviving and promoting their skills and craft. It’s also listed as the #1 thing to do in Dhaka on lonelyplanet. So you can imagine how many bags I brought home. We went to the biggest mall in Dhaka called Bashudhara City which is almost as big as Marina Mall but 8 floors high with the food court and 3 cinema theaters on the top floor and rooftop gardens. They even have a branch of Gold’s Gym in the mall which is an international fitness center franchise.

The only issue we had was with the traffic on weekdays which could take about an hour or more to get to a place that is normally 15-20 minutes away. And everything closes down at 8pm to conserve electricity. Almost all the vehicles run on compressed natural gas (CNG) which is an environmentally clean and cheaper alternative to petrol and diesel and the car owners fix converters in the trunks to use CNG.

CNG Refuelling Station in Dhaka

Although we spent most of our time taking rickshaw rides across the city exploring all the different areas from the east to the west of Dhaka, trying all the local food and drinking lots of tea, we made a few trips to nearby touristic spots like Chittagong, Cox’s Bazaar and Hemchhari. And all that is coming up in the next post.

I know we should have atleast warned our readers early on but when it comes to going on a vacation you kind of forget everything else. Hash and I took our long due holiday in none other than Dhaka, Bangladesh for 3 weeks of completely different and new experience!

We took off after midnight and it took four and half hours to get there so it was good that we arrived in the morning and were quite surprised to see the airport and services. Apparently the city was hosting some of the 2011 World Cup Cricket matches and there were a lot of foreigners in the Arrivals. The airport terminals had just been renovated since there was a section still being worked on. It was pretty clean and well decorated, there were some good looking local cafes and other facilities. The Duty Free was quite modest with mostly traditional souvenirs and leather bags which is one of their specialties. The only thing that stood out was the variety of alcohol available and since it’s an Islamic country I asked the sales person and he said it’s only available at the airport and a few hotels and you’re not allowed to drink in public. They had the Heineken beer cans for only $1.

When we stepped out of the airport we were even more surprised to see that the whole city had been decorated in beautiful lights for the World Cup. We went out for a night ride later to check out the decorations. They had done each circle in a different cricket theme and chandeliers of lights on the road sides. There was also a huge cricket bat they constructed at one place and people were queueing up to sign their names on it but it was too dark to take a photo. There were a bunch of young guys and girls in trucks cheering and going crazy with vuvuzelas for the first match the next day.

The opening ceremony was actually held in Dhaka couple of days before we got there so were quite lucky to to have visited at this time. Below are some of the photos we took at the airport and a video of the night ride. I will be doing two more posts on our trip, the interestings places and things we saw in the city and our road trip to the longest beach in the world.