Is it safe to travel to UAE (Dubai)?

[BlueStar]

My advice is simple: don't you ever step in the Arab World, not even as a 1 hour tourist. Save yourself and stay out of it please, you can't know how much evil lies in there.

[LONDONER]

I wonder why anyone would even want to visit the place. Quite apart from the problems already mentioned by others, apart from skyscrapers and shopping malls, there's nothing there, not even a cedntral sewage system. Incredibly, in building all those stupid skyscrapers, they didn't build a sewage system. Sewage, unbelieveably, is taken away in tankers to a disposal plant. At any time of the day there are hundreds of tankers waiting to offload and some drivers get fed up with waiting and just dump the stuff in the sea thus making the sea one of the most contaminated in the world and highly dangerous. You swim there at your own risk.

[hpsaug]

Hey Guys,

I grew up and lived in Dubai for 15 years not going to disagree with alot of things that you guys mentioned, but it is safe to travel and amazing for holidays! There are loads of gay people in Dubai working and living there you just can't be vocal about it or show affection..

It is a cool place for holidays

[WhatsInAName]

Declaring my bias here: I'm half kuwaiti, half english. More accurately half english, one quarter Arab, one quarter Persian. Yes persian, when my grandfather left Iran for Kuwait it was known as Persia. He married an Arab, my grandmother.

I could not fathom stepping foot in Kuwait as a gay man, nor would I want to contribute to the economy of any gulf state not only because of their overt homophobia, but because of the two tier societies that exist in these nations.

Shifty's links hit home for me. Many of my father's siblings have Philipino staff, indeed my father did for a time. All of them have their passports confiscated upon arrival to the country. And don't even get me started on the Chinese and North Korean slave labour being used to build these places into the shiny baubles of the desert.

There is nothing more than a veneer of respectability in these places, covering a sordid underbelly I want nothing to do with :)