Adam & Eve

I had been in open desert for about three hours, walking from dune crest to dune crest, marvelling at the way the sand on the windward side was hard-packed, while that on the lee was as fine as dust — when the phone rang. It was Crystal, the duty manager at Bab al Shams desert resort: she just wanted to tell me that since it was the Holy Prophet's birthday, there would be no entertainment tonight — or alcohol served — in Al Hadheera, the hotel's Arabian restaurant.

Crystal had a light Lancashire accent — it later transpired that she haled from the Lakeland town of Preston — but I maintained my own English reserve: No, I wasn't bothered at all about the lack of entertainment — or drink, there was just one thing she could help me with, though, was the hotel surrounded by palm trees? It was, Crystal confirmed. In that case, I said, I can see you on the horizon, and should arrive in about an hour.

It took a while for Crystal to realise that I was walking to her hotel — and then a lot longer for her to accept this bizarre proposition. When I told her that I had in fact walked all the way from Dubai the silent incredulity floating through the ether was almost palpable. I understood her reaction: the midday temperature had been in the 100s, there was no shade, it was 30 clicks from Dubai, and half that distance was a massive construction site where thousands of workers — drafted in from points poorer and more easterly — were carving such idiocies as Tiger Woods Golf World out of the fringes of the Empty Quarter.

Dubai has to be one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places on earth — once you leave downtown there's no organic or integrated feel to the various districts, and the only linkages between them are enormous freeways. In order to do the walk I'd had to scamper along the hard shoulder, sprint over overpasses, and dash across six-lane-rivers of tarmac flowing with traffic. Even when I'd left the city behind — a phantasmagoria of post-modern pinnacles, gleaming in the sun like a vast and treacherous reef — there were the barbed-wire fences and gouged-out trenches of the future city to contend with. And then, there was the lack of maps.

I hadn't been able to find a map that showed with any accuracy both my starting point — the Holiday Express in Knowledge City — and my destination. Indeed, Dubai was singularly poorly-mapped overall; in a single lifetime, from 1947 when the explorer Wilfred Thesiger crossed the sands of the Empty Quarter, it had gone from being wholly unmapped, to being post-mapped, a realm of Hummers humming along freeways, with the property dealers piloting them squinting at dash-mounted GPS systems. Not that the property dealers were having such a good time of it — if the world's asset bubble had been popped, many of the pinnacles that had pricked it were right here on Trucial Coast. All along the preposterous concrete fronds of the Palm Jumeirah peninsula apartment prices had tanked by anything up to 30% in the last three months, and at Dubai airport you could see rows of parked Mercedes, keys still in the ignition, that had been abandoned by expats in negative equity, who, anxious lest they fall into debt (an custodial offence hereabouts, along with possessing a micron of hash, or same-sex cuddles) had fled the country.

Still, none of that helped me: I don't do GPS, so I'd had to guestimate an approximate location for this dry oasis back home, using a 1:400,000 road map of the United Arab Emirates and Google Earth. Then I'd selected a point at the fringe of the construction zone and fixed a compass bearing: due south. Now all I had to do was follow the bearing remorselessly, while calculating distance travelled on the basis of my own walking speed. Proceeding like this was tough enough back among the cranes and dump trucks, but out in the open desert my eyes started to fizz with the effort of looking first to one clump of saltbush or straggle of convolvulus, then back to the wavering needle, meanwhile my calves strained, my shoes filled with sand, and the sweat dripped down inside the kaffiyeh I'd improvised from a wicking T-shirt and a cloth cap.

There were enormous compensations though: the Fauvist vermillion of the sands; the etched minimalism of a single dead grey bush, or an white antelope skull against the taut sable canvas — and then the live creatures themselves, six or ten of them charging along a wadi, going so fast they seemed near upright, their front legs punching the hot air. Besides, if my curious trek had its desired effect, I would emerge from the desert a prophet myself, in this case bringing a vital message that had been forgotten by the world during its 30-year consumerist binge: luxury is only experienced as luxury, in contrast to privation.

Of course, I don't tend to do luxury anymore than I do GPS, I like to navigate my way through this life using well-defined economic features, such as necessities, not those mirages of comfort — and the so-called luxury hotel is my particular bête noir. I'd as soon turn up for a turn-down service as I would for an SS Christmas party. But out here in the Arabian desert there was nowhere else besides Bab al Shams to stay, so perhaps my time in the wilderness would make my thousand-buck-a-night room — together with dinner and breakfast in a comprehensive 'Arabian Nights' package — seem worth every cent.

I had to get there first though, and after an hour's more sand-sloshing it became clear that the palm grove I'd had in my sights all afternoon was just that: a palm grove. When I gained the top of the rise it stood on I saw the real Bab al Shams another five clicks on, a vast sprawl of a place, complete with castellated turrets, surrounded not by a handful of trees — but an entire forest; while there were outbuildings including a huge mock-caravanserai, that I later learned was the 'events arena'.

The sun dropped to the horizon, while the vermillion sands turned magenta then empurpled. Night fell like the failure of an interior decorating business: weightily, irrevocably. It was past 7.00 p.m. when I staggered across the car park, between an enfilade of guttering torches, through a massive gateway, and into the lobby to be met by Crystal who called at once for a moist warm face towel and a glass of ice-cold Pepsi; then we sat and chatted as easily and casually as if we'd met at a suburban barbecue. If this is what luxury feels like — I thought to myself, as I sipped and mopped and made small talk — you count me in; although why the hell does it cost so much fucking money?

The reason became apparent as Crystal led me into the bowels of the hotel. 'The layout,' she remarked, 'can be a little confusing.' A near-criminal understatement, for, with its niches, ramps, blind corners and staircases, and with its walkways worming around courtyards full of effulgent blooms, Bab al Shams was an Escher engraving of an establishment. Later that evening, when, with aching predictability, my swipe-card key failed to open the baronial wooden door to my room — not once, but twice — I had to find my way back and forth and back and forth to reception, getting seriously lost on both occasions. I wished that just as out in the desert, I could've simply ploughed my way through the umber walls following a compass bearing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because before this disorientation there was the bamboozling of luxury itself. The room was charming — if you like that sort of thing: an aged wooden chest was shackled to the desk, in it reposed a hairdryer. Niches in the wall held earthenware platters and brass whatnots; a camel saddlebag did service for a shoe repository; the shower-cum-bath was like a rock-cut tomb, and everything was in shades of earth, umber, burnt sienna and terracotta. It made me recall hashy times in Morocco, when the entire country had seemed as friable and brown as the stuff I was smoking. There was, of course, the obligatory 4,000-inch flat-screen digital television concealed in a giant wooden armoire, but that's another thing I don't do. All I wanted was to read, but sadly the brass-and-glass lanterns that served as lampshades seemed purpose-designed to frustrate this.

I showered, dressed in my former-headdress and my dusty trousers and shoes, and repaired to Al Forsan, the so-called 'international' restaurant (there are four at the resort, the aforementioned Arabian one, an Italian bistro, and the Indian one, Masala, which was closed for renovation). I'd asked Crystal whether I should eat in my room, given that my Desert Rat appearance might freak out the rest of the clientele (Emiratis are sticklers for a good turnout); but she assured me that the hotel was 'very relaxed'. There were a few sleek-looking natives standing about the place in their spotless white thobe robes and non-improvisatory headdresses, but they paid me no more mind than they did the silent servitors, the sweepers and cleaners and fetch-and-carriers, from Baluchistan and Pakistan and Ethiopia, who, just as back in Dubai City, were the Invisible.

Relaxed! The gaff was empty — true, it was a Sunday night, but I still found it hard to credit Crystal's assertion that despite the global downturn business was holding up. My dinner at Al Forsan closely resembled that of the geriatric astronaut in 2001, dining alone on Ganymede, while observed by his younger self. My cutlery rang against the plates and echoed through the spotless tiled room. On the walls were oil paintings of horses and fearsome Arab horsemen (Al Forsan means 'the horseman'), while ugly bronzes of horses and camels were hobbled on shelves. My napkin was folded into the shape of a dune. I eschewed the international dishes in favour of local fare: lentil soup, fatoush (the Lebanese salad that resembles a hayrick), and a mixed grill of formidable meatiness: lamb cut, mashed, pressed and shaped into a variety of frighteningly phallic kebabs.

While I worked my way through this flock of food I was periodically set-upon by attentive servitors in gold-embroidered uniforms: 'Is everything all right, sir?' They asked, and, 'Are you enjoying your meal, sir?' Again and again and again. It was all I could do to prevent myself screaming, 'Will you just fuck off and leave me alone!' But then, that's luxury for you, essentially a kind of infantilisation, whereby the rich maintain themselves as eternal and pampered two-year-olds. I finished off this repast with a great chunk of chocolate fudge cake slathered with cream and ice cream, then spent the next forty minutes — as described above — rolling about the tan runnels of the hotel trying to get to bed.

There were enormous swimming pools lapping against the hotel's terraces in the fierce sunlight, when I emerged the following morning from my dark, rock-cut tomb; swimming pools with loggias actually standing in them, and curtained with pearlescent spray. Viridian lawns swept away to the wire fences, and beyond them was the desert, a sea of asceticism lapping the shores of this oasis of indulgence. But not for long; the maps hereabouts may've been crap, but one thing they showed quite clearly: a massive new international airport was slated to be built, and its south-eastern corner would more or less abut Bab al Shams. Then there would be all the attendant development bollocks, the car parks and highways, and no doubt Jonah-bloody-Lomu Rugby World to boot. The previous evening I'd suggested to Crystal that soon they'd have to advertise Bab al Shams as a luxury resort in a desert of cranes — curiously, she didn't seem to find this amusing.

Breakfast was as madly expansive as dinner, entire rooms full of cereals and fruits, jolly cooks custom-frying eggs, enough steel salvers full of hot provender to provision TE Lawrence and his Arab Legion. Insanely, in this country where pork is emphatically haram (forbidden by the Koran), I opted for a replica fry-up, a brace of eggs sunny side up, together with veal bacon and a chicken sausage. Then I sat chewing this cud and drinking camel milk (surprisingly refreshing), while feeling as if I were trapped in a Star Trek episode, wherein deranged aliens had attempted — imperfectly — to terraform their planet.

I mooned about my room all morning. A man more comfortable with luxury might've frolicked in the pool — but me and frolicking? Not a pretty sight. To be fair to Crystal and her staff, they did absolutely all that could be asked to make my stay pleasant, and when the cab arrived to drive me the 40 clicks back to town (unlike well-shod feet, car tyres demand circuitous asphalt to get around the desert), it was with a certain regret that I departed. If only I could spare the thousand bucks a day to stay on at Bab al Shams I'm sure the experience would make a better man of me, a tougher man, a man impervious to the hardships — of others.