Golden Hours

They had me at “It’s Camelicious!” 

Sweet treats have never needed any arm-twisting. While the purple food stand advertising “Camel Milk for a Better Life” didn’t tempt my travel partner, Jack, who lacked the appetite for afternoon one-hump ice cream, I bellied up and pointed at the pistachio.

On a hot day beside the banks of Dubai Creek, I sampled a rich cup of green custard and marveled at how small the world could feel. A day earlier, I’d been sitting in an airport in New York—or was it two days? The flight was a blur of sleep and food trays and half-watched movies—and now I was browsing kanduras and fluorescent spices in an old marketplace with walls of cracked gypsum and brown coral, where each approaching vendor promised us a deal. I’m just here to golf, I felt like telling them, but that excuse wouldn’t translate here. Some come to Dubai for golf, but most come to shop. And when it came to the country’s national pastime, Jack and I were absolute chops.

Back home in Philadelphia, the woman at the gas station by my house thinks I look like someone from the movies but won’t tell me who. She’s from India, and every time I come in, she smiles and says “So much like him” before selling me my coffee. When I told her about my Dubai adventure, her eyes widened. “Buy the gold! The best in the world! You go to Dubai, you have to get the gold!” I made the mistake of telling my wife about this exchange, and suddenly another golf hat from my travels wasn’t going to suffice. It became clear that this was a very different sort of golf trip: Nobody could tell me much of anything about the courses, but friends immediately knew where to get a custom-made suit or smoke shisha or photograph the desert at sunset. Or buy your wife gold jewelry. The golf was something I would have to discover on my own—a challenge I welcomed. Maybe Ireland and Scotland and Oregon’s secrets had been revealed, but fresh frontiers remained. The flights were just getting a little longer.

My gas-station friend wasn’t wrong. With no golf on our schedule until evening, we headed to the gold souk (the Arabic word for “marketplace,” pronounced SOOK) in the oldest part of the city, where the street was shoulder to shoulder with sunburnt tourists popping from one gold shop to the next. (While the culture surrounding us felt ancient at times, the city itself didn’t exist until the 1830s, and there wasn’t much to Dubai at all until oil was discovered in the 1960s.) We weaved our way through salesmen from Pakistan and Bangladesh and gaped at the windows dripping with dresses made entirely of 22-karat bullion. I was already preparing my apology to Allyson—the options were paralyzing, and I wasn’t going to guess which doorway might allow me to leave with my credit intact. Suddenly I came upon a shop advertising candy, and I decided a few of the famed Dubai chocolate-and-pistachio bars would do.

Every souk has a souker, and on day one of our journey, I was an easy mark. I had yet to decipher the currency or the exchange rate, but 1,000 dirham seemed a square deal. I had only gone in for the bars my kids watched people unwrap on YouTube, but there were a dozen varieties, and my Pakistani friend steered me toward the Cadillac of internet chocolate. Then he started opening vats of herbal mixes, placing each blend under my nose. One tea cured headaches, one fixed blood pressure, one helped you sleep… I opted for the relaxation blend, handed over my Mastercard and walked out $280 poorer with a jar of loose tea that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through customs and four candy bars that, once I Googled the exchange rate, I expected to be stuffed with golden tickets.

The souks have a funny rhythm to them. After dozens of gold merchants comes a string of shops selling Manchester City jerseys, then a row of stores selling lighting, then a long run of them pushing scents (not just perfumes but home fragrances and incense—fine smells are apparently big business in Arab culture, evidenced by the floral crush of our hotel lobby). I was told that the markets here had developed out of a copycat ethos—if your neighbor was selling a lot of chandeliers, you started selling chandeliers—and that Dubai had quickly found itself with an accidentally organized arrangement of shopping districts. Walking them with a shopping bag only made the vendors more aggressive, so Jack and I went hunting for a cab—less abundant during this fasting month of Ramadan. Heads dizzy from commerce and jet lag, we tried to remember what we’d come here for in the first place.

The familiar markings of a golf trip were so far unseen. No packs of men in quarter-zips looking for a pub, no logoed hats, and no Club Gloves piled up at the hotel check-in. We wouldn’t be propping up our feet beside a sunset fire pit on this itinerary; rather, we were waiting for the sun to set so we could finally go play.

Dubai feels a little bit like a wealthy adolescent still coming into his own, deciding who he wants to be as he navigates an unchecked coming of age. It has a little Vegas to it—bright lights and a fortune-seeking spirit—blended with the I’m-from-elsewhere essence of Los Angeles, plus a dollop of Salt Lake City, a baseline religiosity underpinning its prosperity. Islam is a foundational backdrop of the UAE, and at the courses close to the city, echoes of the adhan (the Muslim call to prayer) are a soundtrack to your putts and drives. There are prayer rooms in the clubhouses (an amenity I’d suggest for any golf club—who couldn’t use some pre-round petitions?) and some novel local rules to remember (do not relieve yourself on the golf course; starters were unequivocal about us holding it for a bathroom, and our carts seemed tuned to our bladders, flashing No Public Urination on our screens as we pulled up to clumps of tee-side bushes). Otherwise, religion rarely intersects with the tourist experience, unless you’re looking for a cab during Ramadan or want pork sausage with your breakfast. (Pork licenses in Dubai are tough to come by. At the courses we visited that offered English breakfasts for their British customers, genuine sausages seemed a proud selling point, even if they necessitated a separate kitchen and color-coded cookware.) The food scene in the city is visitor friendly and often exceptional—great curries, good pizza, and the best rib eye of my life at Asado Nights in the Park Hyatt—and people seem to dress as they please. At the hotel pools, you’ll spot Eastern Europeans in bikinis to make even an American blush. (At least this American.)

Yet I could nearly smell the smoke coming off my father’s rosary beads back in Philadelphia as he prayed for safe passage for his son, who had shipped off to the desert armed with nothing but sunblock and a new driver. His concerns were valid: The violent conflicts in the Middle East were just a short flight away. But they felt very far from here. There are three types of people in Dubai, I was told: the native Emirati, who make up just 10% of the population and generally keep to their own stratosphere of indigenous wealth; the visitors and expats, who come for sun and single-digit business taxes; and the working class, who arrive here from all parts of Asia and Africa. The last seemed most populous—at check-in, I counted eight doormen at my mid-tier hotel, each fawningly helpful. Same for the cab drivers.

The plan for most of Dubai’s residents, it seemed, was to work here for 10 or 15 years, save up enough money, then return to their families in Pakistan and the Philippines. Many were provided housing to come and work at the resorts, and good jobs seemed to engender a sense of service-sector gratitude that I’d never experienced outside of a Disney property. The daunting stories about sharia law didn’t seem to hold here, either: Religious freedom is protected, so Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists have places to pray. (In neighboring Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House planted a Catholic church beside a mosque beside a synagogue.) Dubai being a former protectorate of the U.K., the local golf sector was inhabited almost entirely by folks from Britain and its commonwealth—English, South Africans, and Australians crowded the fairways, to the point that Jack and I felt like we had flown straight over Britain to land in a British golf colony.

The rise of the UAE isn’t all a fairy tale. 

A relatively unregulated business environment can inspire innovation; it also can inspire someone to try to sell you bogus bitcoin on Facebook. Human Rights Watch gives the UAE low marks for its policies toward women and freedom of expression, and though reforms have been made, its past treatment of migrant workers and government critics has not been, shall we say, progressive. But as it was explained to me, context matters, and among its Middle Eastern peers, the UAE is a whole new world. “The difference between the UAE and Saudi Arabia,” one of my golf partners would tell me, “is that Saudi desperately wants to be the UAE, but it can’t, because with Saudi Arabia it’s like trying to change the culture of a company that already exists. But here, they basically started with a blank slate. They could create whatever culture they wanted.”

That blank slate was forged in 1971 when seven emirates (Dubai and Abu Dhabi among them) joined together as a sovereign federation, sending home the British troops who had been minding what was previously known as the Trucial States. The discovery of oil in the 1960s put the UAE on the fast track to fortune, and the results are an argument for the upsides of benevolent dictatorship: The Emirati certainly took their share, but money was pushed into schools and hospitals and infrastructure. Today, billboards and signage promoting the ruling sheiks cast an authoritarian energy, but since those sheiks seem to be making popular and forward-glancing decisions, it’s easy to understand why so many people from so many places are finding their way to Dubai. Including golfers.

Our taxi to the course was a sleek electric sedan of a brand I’d never encountered; it was Chinese and fast and swanky, and our driver shared it with a few other Pakistani pals who hustled Ubers when they weren’t working other day jobs. Jack and I sat in the back and surveyed what looked like a vast garden of skyscrapers, each tower trying to outstretch its neighbor in a struggle for sunlight. We noted the Ferraris and Bugattis and the Lamborghini dealership across from our hotel. The legends of Dubai’s wealth seemed to have been undersold.

“It’s like the whole world pointed their wallets at one stretch of coastline and said, ‘Let’s go there,’” Jack said as we passed walls of high glass we could almost reach out and touch from the highway. Though we could see our future first tee from our hotel balcony, walking there would have meant dodging 12 lanes of thruway. Navigating the newer side of Dubai—opposite the old town we’d toured that morning—meant hopping on and off an intersecting system of busy roads, where highways served the role of avenues in New York. Everything tall and everything wide, until you reached the city’s edges, and then, nothing but city lights in your rearview mirror.

It was approaching sunset when we found our playing partners on the back patio of Emirates Golf Club, home of the DP World Tour’s Hero Dubai Desert Classic. The golf course could have been in Sedona, but the clubhouse signaled a strong sense of place—seven concrete hexagonal structures housed the pro shop and locker rooms and restaurants, designed to recall traditional Bedouin tents.

I’d find the golf in the UAE to be surprisingly good—meticulously maintained, playable, handsome and requiring a variety of shots—but the service levels and clubhouse opulence generally upstaged the routings. At Jumeirah Golf Estates, an Italian lunch of interminable courses at Bussola was Michelin-star stuff, and post-golf spa treatments were encouraged (yet not in our budget, alas).

If the architects were limited by acres of flat sand, they were unrestrained when it came to dreaming up clubhouses. At Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club, a favorite for having a tee box planted atop a grass dock in Dubai Creek, the clubhouse was built to resemble the sails of a traditional seafaring vessel called a dhow, a look so iconic that it is the only golf clubhouse in the world depicted on circulating legal tender. (It’s stamped into the 20-dirham note—and yes, the R&A’s home once was printed on a fiver, but that was a commemorative collectible.)

At Emirates, the club had arranged for Jonty and Abdel to show us around our night loop. They were waiting for us at the patio restaurant, where Brits were lounging and watching an EPL game on outdoor televisions and the cool evening ambiance was comfortable enough to forget the golf and recline right there. Jonty had arrived in Dubai recently from South Africa; Abdel was from Morocco by way of London, and he had just ordered soup and a sandwich that would arrive at the stroke of sundown.

He said he wasn’t particularly religious but observed Ramadan as a matter of self-discipline and an opportunity for reflection. I had imagined this sacred Muslim time as a sort of prolonged Lenten punishment meant to atone for one’s sins, but Abdel described it as joyful and a month you looked forward to as a kid, where every night your friends and family came together to break fast. Judging by the size of the party tent beside the golf course, he was right: The club offered sundown socials each evening, and the beautiful people of Dubai were filing in to mingle and dine. It was like an entire month of Thanksgiving, it seemed, if Thanksgiving prep came with prayer and fasting instead of football. (We also were experiencing a gentler Ramadan here in the modern UAE: Not long ago, I was told, restaurant windows had to be covered throughout the month, and all public eating and drinking was banned.)

“Fasting is a reminder to be grateful,” Abdel said. “There’s a satisfaction in having your meal. We might take food and drink for granted, but this month you feel thankful.” And as his phone announced the minute, I witnessed that satisfaction—first a long drink of water, then a thick grilled cheese he chewed slowly, savoring it and gently reacquainting his stomach with food.

The Faldo Course at Emirates was stadium lit from one end to the other, and while I’d played glow-ball at night, this version of dark golf was more than giggles, and it served a practical purpose: Come summertime heat in the desert, the evening tee times would go fast.

Against a blackened sky, our balls appeared to move slowly off our clubfaces, leaving a flickering trail of light, a shot-tracer ribbon with each swing. The course was a solid resort offering that would rate well against those in Florida or Arizona, but playing it at 10 p.m. made every hole feel uncommon. A small Arabian fox found us on the second hole and followed us all the way around—like our backyard foxes from home, but skinnier and with long ears. I felt attached to the little guy and regretted not having any food in the cart to share. I wondered how an animal like this survived out here, where the course was encased by buildings that shot up out of the desert and where we picked illuminated skyscrapers as target lines. The blend of city and sand and golf and night—it was a heady mixture, and maybe a small fox thriving here made sense. He’d stopped by to see the action, but if he ran in the opposite direction of those lights, he could slip back into the dark, sandy quiet.

We are a long way from checking in at the pro shop. The UAE golf scene is known nearly as much for its boundary-pushing clubhouse designs, like Emirates Golf Club, as the courses.

Too many golfers and not enough hotel guests taking long showers—every golf scene has its challenges, but Dubai’s aren’t the sort they talk about in PGA classes.

Golf in the UAE is a relatively new game, and golf upon the grass is even newer. Abu Dhabi had a sand course first, then the Dubai Country Club opened its nine “browns” in 1971. It would last until 2007, when a preference for golf upon green finally won out and the course (and club) was closed. That preference in Dubai dated to 1986, when Lars Waldenström, the Swedish cofounder of an interior-design firm responsible for royal-family projects, convinced Sheik Mohammed that golf was central to Dubai’s future.

Expats from Hong Kong would be flocking here after the territory was turned over to China, Waldenström explained, and those British companies and their executives would want a new home that included golf. According to Emirates GC’s club history, the sheik’s response to the word “golf” was, “So what is it, and why?” Waldenström dug up some film of the PGA Tour’s erstwhile Skins Game in Phoenix, and seeing golf played in the desert made it all make sense for the sheik. It would take more time to win his approval for the clubhouse, which developers finally did with their Bedouin-tent concept, and Emirates Golf Club in Dubai was born. They called it “the Desert Miracle.”

In locker rooms around the UAE, we spotted the names of sheiks on lockers, listed as honorary members. We sprinkled bogeys around the home of the DP World Tour Championship at Jumeirah (its dual prizes of a heavy silver staff and towering Vardon trophy on display in an open-air lobby), where the Tommy Fleetwood Academy proved that not only was Dubai courting tour pros (it offered practice greens with American-, Asian- and European-style grasses, and three different types of bunker sand), but the crowds lining up for lessons showed that it had itself a golf issue. More than one director of golf explained that the demand in the UAE was far outpacing supply, and one manager confessed that part of his job was unique in the golf-marketing business: finding ways to reduce play. Raising prices to cool the market was an obvious strategy, but soaring rates would do little to quiet the tee sheets; they would just raise customer expectations for Augusta-like conditions in an arid climate with grass that was seeing 12 hours of cart traffic every day. (If your course had lights, bump that to 16 hours or more.)

“Everything green you see here requires constant watering,” one superintendent told me, and I was seeing a whole lot of green. Yet sustainability seemed a UAE priority, and irrigation water came from either desalinized or reclaimed-effluent sources. As another superintendent explained, “We struggle a bit for water with fewer tourists in the summer. When hotel traffic is down, that’s less water going down the pipes and less water for us.” It is a delicate dance in Dubai of high demand and high standards in a natural environment designed for neither, and that none of this was noticeable to Jack or me was testament to how well the golf staffs here are two-stepping.

Day and night, the golf rush is on. All 96 hitting bays at Topgolf Dubai are regularly packed.

From Jumeirah, we shot down to Abu Dhabi on a drive that had both of us stuck to the backs of our seats in another Chinese EV (in a country full of sports cars, the speed limits, or lack thereof, were friendly to their potential) and got in line for the nine holes at Yas Acres. Its shorter distances and wall-to-wall fairways were a well-executed Dubai take on fun community golf, with quirky banks and backstops recalling a day at Sweetens Cove, if Sweetens were ringed by freshly constructed white homes in a modern desert style that, for their immaculate uniformity and sheer quantity, smacked of a sci-fi golf community.

I was all square with Jack in our weeklong match as we made a short drive to the beefier Yas Links, home of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. (We weren’t chasing DP World Tour venues; it just seemed every course in the UAE hosted one.) Jack is a brilliant British photographer and an upbeat travel mate who, when asked how much he weighed at registration for our helicopter tour of Dubai, replied, “A hundred and ten kilograms of Yorkshire steel.” He’d done well juggling golf and cameras, even after his lenses and chargers earned him a side trip to an office in the airport, where he was relieved of his drone. They were kind enough about it; he was given a receipt to collect his flying camera on his way back out of Dubai, after he finished cataloging every battery and charger, make and model, that he was carrying into the country. Better to play by the rules than suffer the fate of the drone operator we hired later that week, who was met by officers before his flyer reached 50 feet. While we headed to the first tee, he was off to the police station. (He didn’t seem too worried—probably wasn’t his first time running afoul of UAE drone regulations.)

Superintendents mentioned the challenge of getting new circuit boards for their machinery, and forget robot mowers—that technology would never make it through customs. Golf partners told tales of having their range finders confiscated on a trip to Bahrain (not currently featured on the Broken Tee Society Tour, perhaps for this reason), since Bushnells could view and measure distance for potentially subversive purposes. Anything that could be repurposed into something dangerous, plot something explosive, or peer in on the royals was thoroughly regulated, a reminder that we were still in a contentious corner of the world, and a good reason for golf purists to visit Bahrain.

Desert golf holes can run together—bright green, brown borders—but the Yas Links, by Kyle Phillips of Kingsbarns fame, was a standout design that crept around the edges of Yas Island in the Persian Gulf. We played with another pair of Englishmen—a retired golf pro, who played in a fedora and wielded a wicked short game, visiting his son, who was over here working in fintech. (It was safe to assume that if they weren’t working in golf, every British accent here was attached to financial technology.) The treeless property and Scottish-themed mounding evoked the links vibe in its name, even if the roller-coaster screams coming from nearby Ferrari World made it feel less like North Berwick and more like a man-made entertainment district. Yas Island was precisely that, but no matter—the Yas Links par 3s shrouded by dunes and perched above the water were stunners, and while Jumeirah, Emirates and Dubai Creek each left us wanting a return visit, Yas Links is likely the one both Jack and I would play again first.

Jack departed for the airport, and I returned to Dubai for a quiet waterside dinner with sunset views of the towering Burj Khalifa, whose elevators I had avoided that week (playing more golf or risking acrophobic panic was an easy decision). When the light finally dropped, the tables filled up with food, and then the shisha man made his rounds, asking if I would like to smoke and assuring me he was serving only flavored tobacco. (Along with procuring a chocolate bar and sampling a souk, trying shisha was high on my when-in-Dubai list.) He asked my taste preferences and we landed on something fruity, and after 10 minutes he returned with hot coals and a knee-high apparatus that looked like a ventilator fashioned from a genie’s lamp.

I sucked on the end of a tube and bubbles bubbled and my mouth filled with smoke that was sweet and light. My shoulders loosened and head softened as I leaned back and exhaled small clouds—not nearly as impressive as my neighbors, whose puffs I envied, their smoky veils conjuring the caterpillar in Alice’s wonderland.

The true test of any golf destination is whether it stands up to the travel, the time and the distance, and whether you’d run it all back. In a heartbeat, I thought as I watched the lights of the world’s tallest building and felt so entirely at peace in a place where I’d expected to feel otherwise. I’d felt welcome, and I’d felt safe, and I believed the locals who had told me that they left their homes unlocked, and that when they were at work, they told the FedEx driver to open the door and leave their packages inside.

I’d taken my longest flight yet to a place that was far away yet familiar, exotic yet traditional, unknowable yet reminiscent of worlds I’d inhabited before and wanted to inhabit again. Even if I still wasn’t sure where I had landed, I was sure I was here, a good somewhere, and I watched it all through clouds of strawberry smoke, the lights and the horizon so beautifully unclear.