Recently FreeRideMX traveled to the middle of the Middle East, Dubai/UAE. Freeridemx.com’s own Steven Haughelstine was lucky enough to make the trip and tag along with Red Bulls Ronnie Renner for a 10 day excursion to the Arabian Desert.
-Steven Haughelstine: It was Renners job to ride in some photo shoots for KTM/Red Bull, and do his part at the world famous Red Bull X-fighters freestyle motocross contest.  My goal for the trip was to document and film as much as possible. From the culture, to Camels, to riding dirt bikes in the Arabian Desert. In our free time we rode and filmed at the local sand dunes. This was not very hard considering that the entire country is pretty much all sand. We were lucky enough to have rode with some of the worlds best rally bike racers and met some very nice locals to show us around. One of the locals we met was Sam Sunderland a young gun from the UK that moved to Dubai for race support from KTM. This kid can ride a bike. We were happy to have a local to ride with that could not only hang, but was even finding jumps and knew were he was going. For the first couple days it was super hot, then we got rare rain storms for that region that lasted for 5 days. Rain in the sand dunes is awesome for riding but bad for jumping. Either way we could not complain, we were on motor bikes riding some of the best dunes ever. The culture amazed me. In the city of Dubai it was clear that the city was made for tourism and was very westernized. We saw KFC, Starbucks, McD’s, Subway, Chilli’s, and even a California pizza Kitchen Restaurant. Dubai is also home to many huge man made islands, the worlds tallest building, and Ski Dubai, an indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert. The  local Muslim men showed their status by rolling around in Lambos, Farrarri’s and the most expensive cars I’ve ever seen. Some women were covered, and some not. I learned that not many people in Dubai were actually from there. There were many people from Lebanon, Europe, India, and the Asia’s. There was quite an interesting mix of people here. When I travel I want culture, I want to taste the local food, and see the way the locals live. The further we got away from the city the more this was true. Every time we went out to the dunes, we would stop to get fuel, waters and snacks at these little, and I mean little markets on the side of the road. These little markets are super cheap and we could get snacks for everyone for like 14 Dirham (4 U.S. dollars) Fuel we figured out was about 75 cents a gallon for 98 octane! This alone made me like the country. When riding the sand dunes you can just ride up to camels eating grass as if you were riding up to a cow in a pasture. They don’t seem to mind as long as you just cruise by. Also, the locals were very into riding sand dunes. There were long travel sand rails, Polaris Razrs, quads, and land rover tours everywhere. It was cool to see that even though we were on the other side of the world, people were enjoying the same things we do. In summery, I didn’t know what to expect from the trip, and ended up having a great time and meeting a lot of great people. Dubai seems to be the leader of the new for this part of the world, and I do have a different perspective on the Middle East now and what it could be in time.
Video will be up soon! Till then, heres some photos some by me and some courtesy of Global News Room:
