By CHARLES RUNNETTE
Published: March 25, 2007
Dubai Travel Guide

It’s 2:30 a.m. at Club Africana, a dim room in the back of the seedy
Rush Inn Hotel in the old town of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and a
15-member Congolese band called Bilenge Musica is rocking the house.
Six vocalists sway in sync, while the nine-piece band lays down a blend
of hip-hop and African dance-hall rhythms for a crowd of 150. Dancing
near the stage are a sweaty clutch of African construction workers,
fresh from their 12-hour shifts. Sitting at the tables behind them are
men from the Arab merchant class and their bejeweled girlfriends. At
the back of the room, I spot a few American and English expatriates
timidly checking out the scene. “All these people have come to Dubai to
work and make some money,” says Bilenge Musica’s manager, Lesasa Joker,
surveying the crowd. “And on their day off, if they have one, they come
here.”

If making money is what brings together Dubai’s disparate working
community — some 80 percent are foreign nationals representing 160
countries — then the social lubricant of night life is what keeps it
all running smoothly. Pick up Time Out Dubai and you’ll see page after
page of listings for bars and clubs catering to every nationality,
social layer, musical taste and sexual preference. Dubai after hours
has become a kind of fun-house-mirror reflection of the city at large,
entwining the land baron, office drone and construction laborer. And in
a land of manufactured islands and indoor ski slopes, going out just
may be the closest thing to an authentic cultural experience this town
has to offer.

“Dubai is all about status,” says Jessica Glunz, a manager of Dubai’s
biggest dance club, Trilogy, in the Madinat Jumeirah Resort. Wearing
Mavi capri jeans, heels and a jaunty cap, Glunz stands outside the
front door with a clipboard, smiling as another Maybach — the second in
15 minutes — pulls around. “We’re like the Miami of the Middle East,”
she says, eyes trained on the Maybach’s back door. “It’s all about
showing up in the best car, getting the best table and sharing the
biggest bottle of Cristal with the best-looking group of girls.”

Two stunning young Lebanese women in tight cocktail dresses and
stilettos climb out of the car, followed by a man wearing new shoes, a
shirt opened one button too many and too much cologne. Glunz waves them
into a room that looks something like a Studio 54 version of Mad Max’s
Thunderdome. Above the dance floor are V.I.P. rooms where groups of
partyers horse around, spilling $1,000 bottles of Champagne on each
other for the amusement and envy of the crowd.

Western-style excess is, predictably, the predominant ethos among Dubai
nightclubs, which are almost always inside hotels. The mainstream
places include the European-style Peppermint Club, in the Fairmont
Dubai, the South Beach-esque rooftop playground at the One&Only and an
outpost of Paris’s Buddha Bar in the Grosvenor House. But in old parts
of town like Deira, Al Karama and Bur Dubai, you can glimpse the full
United Colors of Dubai. Within several square blocks are a Russian
music club, several Indian strip joints (partial-nudity only), a
Japanese karaoke bar, a few hangouts popular with Eastern European
prostitutes, a mixed gay-straight disco and a spot where you can catch
an Iranian belly-dancing act. The most popular dives, for the moment,
are the dozens of clubs featuring Filipino cover bands, like Maharlika
Café, where the headlining act is a six-piece all-girl group called
Night and Gale that writhes its way through “November Rain” by Guns N’
Roses.

“There’s this incredible dichotomy in Dubai,” Andy Buchan, Time Out
Dubai’s night life and music editor, tells me.”You have the amazing
opulence of places like the 360 Degrees lounge” — attached to the
Jumeirah Beach Hotel — “and then just 10 minutes away, in the old town,
there are spots like Club Africana where you stumble in, not knowing
the first thing about it, and walk out five hours later saying to
yourself, ‘That was incredibly fun.’ “

Officially, much of the fun that Dubai gets up to is forbidden. Mohamed
Abdul Mannan, an executive with the government’s tourism office,
confirms that public drunkenness, prostitution, homosexuality,
possession of illegal drugs and, as he puts it, “kissy kissy” in public
are all punishable with prison time. “You might find some traces of Las
Vegas in our night life,” Mannan says, “but there is a line here.”

Mostly that line seems to be little more than a ripple in the sand.
Some years ago the royal Maktoum family, who rule Dubai, set aside
religious strictures along with Islam’s liquor ban in order to create a
new Middle East playground. “They had no choice,” says Karim Bassante,
a local columnist and radio commentator. The seven million yearly
visitors — many from around the region who can’t live it up in their
own countries — need more than overhyped shopping and gigantic sinking
islands. Now, Bassante asserts, “we have nothing else going for us but
our night life. Imagine if they arrested everyone who went out to
clubs. Who would come and stay in the five-star hotels, or even work in
them?”

A government crackdown seems improbable, if not impossible. The city
needs a monthly influx of more than 5,000 new residents in order to
sustain economic growth. Already, Britain’s Standard Chartered Bank has
warned that property values in Dubai could slip 20 to 30 percent in two
to three years. And given that some of the city’s homeowners are
fun-loving celebrities like Simon Cowell and David Beckham, Dubai can
ill-afford to tinker with the delicate formula of its success.

As 3 a.m. approaches, all the Grey Goose at Trilogy is polished off and
the imported D.J.’s pack away their records. “The thing is,” says
Jessica Glunz, “Dubai definitely has the potential to be a party
capital of the world if the government wants it to be. It’s already the
world’s most famous city, and that took them how long? Ten years?” From
here the revelry moves behind closed doors: I tag along with a couple
of wealthy party boys, who cruise around looking for pretty people to
scoop up. We join the after-hours party at someone’s hotel room, where
there are drinks and dancing and enough drugs to fill a pharmacy.
Pretty soon, the live entertainment arrives: naked male and female
dancers paid to perform with snakes, à la Britney Spears.

ESSENTIALS

Clubs and bars

Most places have a particular theme or cater primarily to one ethnic
audience. 360 Degrees and the Apartment Lounge and Club International.
Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Jumeirah Beach Road; 011-971-4-406-8000. Buddha
Bar International. Grosvenor House, West Marina Beach;
011-971-4-317-6871. Club Africana African. Rush Inn Hotel, Khalid Bin
Waleed Road; 011-971-4-352-2235. El Rancho Mexican. Marco Polo Hotel,
Deira; 011-971-4-272-0000. Maharlika Café Filipino. The President
Hotel, Trade Centre Road; 011-971-4-334-6565. Malabar Choice Indian.
Ramee International Hotel, Al Nasser Square; 011-971-4-224-0222.
Peppermint Club International. The Fairmont Dubai, Sheikh Zayed Road;
011-971-4-332-0037; www.peppermint-club.com. Rooftop Terrace and Kasbar
Middle Eastern.