Where Impossible says I Am possible. -Dubai

The city isn’t all fancy cars and glittering skyscrapers (although there’s plenty of both). It’s also home to non-cheesy adventures your kids (and you!) will love, from feeding a three-foot-wide turtle at the Dubai Turtle Rehabilitation Project to catching a free show at Dubai’s massive musical fountains. Once you venture outside the city limits, there are camel rides, sand skiing (think of it as hot-weather sledding!), and dune-bashing (where your Jeep guns it over sand hills, so you feel like you’re on a rollercoaster) through the Arabian desert. Check in at Atlantis The Palm for loads more family-friendly activities: There’s the Middle East’s largest waterpark, an aquarium holding more than 65,000 creatures, and evening programming for kids age 3-12. Also where you live is not an issue there is always a flight to Dubai ready to take you off.

Modern Dubai is frequently seen as a panegyric to consumerist luxury: a self-indulgent haven of magical hotels, superlative restaurants and extravagantly themed shopping malls. Dont forget to try the delicious cuisines that Dubai has to offer right from Indian to Italian to Lebanon to everything you want, to tickle you taste buds.

For the visitor, there’s far more to Dubai than designer boutiques and five-star hotels – although of course if all you’re looking for is a luxurious dose of sun, sand and shopping, the city takes some beating. If you want to step beyond the tourist clichés, however, you’ll find that Dubai has much more to offer than you might think, ranging from the fascinating old city centre, with its higgledy-piggledy labyrinth of bustling souks interspersed with fine old traditional Arabian houses, to the memorably quirky postmodern architectural skylines of the southern parts of the city. Dubai’s human geography is no less memorable, featuring a cosmopolitan assortment of Emiratis, Arabs, Iranians, Indians, Filipinos and Europeans, Pakistanis – a fascinating patchwork of peoples and languages that gives the city its uniquely varied cultural appeal. The credit crunch may have pushed the world’s major economies to their limits, but pronouncements of Dubai’s imminent demise proved wildly premature, and the city remains one of the twenty-first century’s most fascinating and vibrant urban experiments in progress. Visit now to see history, literally, in the making.