Danat Jebel Dhanna Resort, Abu Dhabi

A pre-baby holiday, we were advised, is a must; since I didn't want to fly anywhere and we had been wanting to visit the Danat Jebel Dhanna Resort (owned by the National Corporation for Tourism and Hotels) for years, we decided this would be the perfect opportunity. Jebel Dhanna lies south of Abu Dhabi, about a 3 hour drive from Dubai. To make a 6 hour round-trip worthwhile we had always thought a minimum of 3 nights would be needed, which explains why we'd never been. Unbeknown to us at the time of booking our mini-holiday, a public holiday was declared on the day we had planned to drive down to the hotel which meant that we gained an extra half day of chill-out time and had a full 4 days away!

The Journey

The hotel's website is sadly lacking a proper map, although the directions turned out to be simple so there is no excuse for not having those directions on the site. They had a link to Google Maps which showed the hotel as lying right in the centre of Abu Dhabi next to the Marina Mall - about 200 km away from the actual hotel!

Driving from Dubai, you take Sheikh Zayed Road and turn off right when you see signs to Tarif (Danat Jebel Dhanna Resort is also signposted). This right turn is actually a fly-over that takes you left so that you go onto a bridge over SZR. You then stay on that road all the time, following signs for Al Sila until you see the hotel signs. A word of warning: there are no street lights and it is only 2 lanes in each direction with a lot of heavy vehicles so I can imagine it would be a bit less pleasant driving that road at night. We had no hold ups as all the trucks amazingly stayed in the right-hand lane and we just had to pull into that lane from time to time to let the usual crazy Abu Dhabi head-light-flashing speedster past.

The total journey from Jebel Ali to the hotel was just over 300 kms, so it took about 3.5 hours with a couple of stops. There is a petrol station after you turn off towards Tarif (100 kms from Jebel Ali) and then they have them about every 80 kms or so along the route. Coming back, the first petrol station we came to was 145kms from the hotel although we had passed a couple on the other side of the road before that. The route is not an interesting one and there is absolutely nothing of interest to see along the way, the most exciting thing we saw was a couple of camels being transported in the back of a pick-up truck.

The Hotel

Although not the most attractively-designed hotel (see later on the Desert Islands Resort, it seems aesthetics aren't too much of a consideration in this area of the UAE), the grounds of the Danat Jebel Dhanna Resort more than made up for the uninspiring exterior.

The beach at the Danat Resort is fantastic. Just to see a stretch of coastline that hasn't been destroyed with offshore developments, such as The Palm, was amazing. In the afternoon with the tide out, we saw people walking out to sea for a good few hundred metres with the water only up to their knees - we would have done it ourselves but the sea was a bit too cold for our liking! Beautiful turquoise water, white sand and little thatched umbrellas and loungers all along the front. It is possible to walk quite a way along the beach past the neighbouring hotel (the Dhafra Beach Hotel, which seemed completely empty) and that was the extent of our daily exercise during our 4 days there.

The hotel has one pool plus a small children's pool - complete with slide. The water was a lovely 30 degrees and had a swim-up bar where you could sit in the water on underwater bar stools. As it is February and the hotel is quite exposed, there was quite a fresh breeze blowing all the time so I have to admit the closest I got to going in the pool was dipping my foot in since I didn't like the idea of getting out all wet and being hit by a cold wind. All around the pool were grassy areas as well as a children's play area and various sports facilities: tennis courts, beach volleyball pitch, beach football pitch and basketball. No excuse for getting bored!

We were initially checked into a twin-bedded room. Our last holiday before we become sleep-deprived and we were given separate beds, what is that all about?! We headed off to the pool for some lunch while they got us a king-sized bedroom ready. Both of the rooms (twin and king) were a similar generous size with great views out onto the gardens and beach. The bathroom didn't have a separate bath and shower but I found the bath was the perfect size for me to lay back and doze off in every afternoon. There was a DVD player but we had forgotten to bring any DVDs and the hotel charged Dhs 50 to rent 2 DVDs! I think that is what you would call a total rip-off.

The only disappointing thing in the room was the mattress - a cheap foam one that was fairly rock hard, not the high-end sprung mattress you would expect to find in a 5 star hotel. I requested some sort of padding to soften the mattress and an even lower-quality camping foam mattress was laid on top leaving me a good few inches higher than Simon in bed! From one extreme to the other, this one was so soft that I sunk into it and the next morning the dip I had created was still visible half an hour after I got out of bed. For our last night, I decided the harder mattress was the lesser of two evils.

The Food

Danat Jebel Dhanna Resort is not where you would come for a gastronomic experience. It offers an all-day dining buffet restaurant, a lobby lounge, a pool menu and an Italian restaurant. We got the distinct impression that most of the tourists (predominantly German and Scandinavian it seemed) were on all-inclusive packages since they seemed to eat all their meals at the buffet. The pool, lobby lounge and room service menus all offered exactly the same food and whilst the standard of food wasn't bad, the choice was very limited and after 3 lunches and dinners I had eaten everything that interested me.

The breakfast was excellent, although no pork is served and chicken sausages and veal bacon just don't cut it as far as I'm concerned. The offering was fairly standard of a hotel in the UAE with fresh fruits, tinned fruits, yoghurts, cereals, salad items, smoked fish, eggs, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, porridge, pancakes, waffles and pastries. It's recommended to "breakfast like a king" and I would say I successfully ticked that box every day!

Lunch at the pool consisted of sandwiches (I tried a panini but it was the grilled bread and cold cheese and tomato story again), satay (my no pepper request didn't get through though and the satay was coated in black pepper), noodles (which were tasty but a bit more chilli-infused than expected) and fajitas (served more like a shawarma than the traditional fajita style). All entirely edible and acceptable but nothing that had any 'wow factor'. There were also no tables and chairs set up so we had to eat sitting on our loungers which I generally find a less than ideal way to eat a meal.

Dinner is what gave us the most eyebrow-raising moments though. We saw that the Italian restaurant was closed on Saturdays so decided to eat there the first 2 nights. Unfortunately we weren't warned that the restaurant was tiny and that bookings were essential. The restaurant is called Zaitoun (olive in Arabic) which would make sense if it was an Arabic or Meditteranean restaurant, the menu was 100% Italian though so Olivio would really be a more appropriate name. My impression was that it maybe used to be an Arabic restaurant and the hotel then decided Italian would suit its guests better. The decor was certainly Arabic with low tables and chairs all around the fringes and only about 5 normal dining tables in the middle. The last thing I want to do when I'm eating a 'fine dining' meal is sit down to eat it at a coffee table!

When we got to Zaitoun on Thursday evening we were told that it was fully booked and only the low tables were available but since all the people eating at those tables looked very uncomfortable, we didn't want to chance it. We asked if anyone was about to leave and we could wait but the waiter said everyone had just started. On the way out we saw the manager and told him we thought the design of the restaurant was appalling; he didn't seem too bothered about it but did say that a request for changing the low tables for high tables was sitting with the management. We had a look at the buffet but, not being in the best of moods, I didn't like the look of anything as the chefs seemed to have gone to town with the black pepper. Five minutes after leaving Zaitoun, we saw a group who had been eating there crossing the lobby - a fantastic waitress in the Lobby Lounge checked for us and confirmed there was now a free table! When we returned to the restaurant, there was no apology for telling us the group had just started when they were clearly just finishing and it actually seemed like the waiter and manager didn't even remember us!

The second night provided even more shocks when we heard a group of 4 ladies next to us complaining that they'd been waiting over 1 hour for their meal. We expected something elaborate to come out of the kitchen for them but it was just pizzas...and they were stone cold. Thankfully our experience of the food was very good on both occasions. Simon stuck to Italian favourites of beef carpaccio and pasta the first night with caprese salad and lasagne the second one. I stayed clear of the wheat and had only salmon the first night (after all the fiasco we didn't sit down to eat until 9pm) but made up for it with calamari, veal escalopes and chocolate fondant the next night. Sadly the service wasn't on a par with the food, although it could hardly be expected when the manager seemed to have no interest whatsoever.

There was a great camaraderie amongst the diners in Zaitoun on the Friday night when a group of European hotel guests who were eating in the private dining room of the restaurant decided they were sick of their crying child. Did they take him up to bed? No, they put him outside their dining room and closed the door so that the rest of us could listen to him wailing instead! Everyone started laughing at such an unbelievable thing happening and one lady asked the waiter to go and tell the child's parents that they would have to take him back in with them. The father didn't look amused at having his dinner disturbed!

We did eat at the buffet on our last night and it actually wasn't bad. The salads were varied, there was a choice of mains including fish, chicken, lamb, beef plus a roast lamb leg and there were pancakes and other cakes for dessert. However, the price was extremely high compared to what you would pay in Dubai: Dhs 190 inclusive of 1 soft drink! The food prices throughout the hotel were sky high since everything quoted on the menu then had 16% tax and service added - it has been about 10 years since Dubai started to print the actual prices so that you know exactly what you are paying for an item and I can't understand why this hasn't filtered through to the rest of the UAE. A prime example was the steak at Zaitoun - Dhs 200 plus 16%...I nearly fell off my chair! Beer was Dhs 32 plus 16% and the measure wasn't even a pint but somewhere a bit less.

The Area

On our second day we headed out to see if there were any other restaurants around that might not be so pricey and to have a bit of variety. In a word...NO. We thought Jebel Dhanna was a small town but when we reached a security gate with soldiers carrying machine guns and a big 'Criticial National Infrastructure' sign we realised that the area is a major oil zone. From within the resort this wasn't obvious until the last day which had no haze and we could see about 30 kms down the coast to a huge docking platform for oil tanker ships to pick up oil / gas - the pristine water at the beach certainly gave no hint we were in the middle of an oil field.

The next day we drove over to the main town of Ruwais, hoping this might offer something a little bit cultural. It didn't. The complex has been built purely to house those people working in the area's oil industry and consisted of what seemed like hundreds of villas, townhouses and apartment buildings. We found the central market which consisted of a supermarket (with the grumpiest cashier I've ever come across) as well as a shop selling cassette tapes - I didn't know cassettes were even still getting made! A posting to Ruwais would certainly be classified as a hard-ship posting anyway.

I didn't take any photos since there have been a number of cases reported in the papers recently of tourists in Abu Dhabi being arrested for taking photos where they aren't supposed to! They had a genuine excuse, as far as I could read, since in other countries taking photos of palaces is not a criminal offence - but apparently it is in Abu Dhabi so be warned! With armed guards on lookout points all around the area I had a sneaking suspicion that photography would definitely not be allowed here.

There is a petrol station in Ruwais so if you don't have enough fuel to make it the 145 kms to the next one, fuel up here after you leave the hotel.

Sir Bani Yas Island

Visiting Sir Bani Yas Island was my main motivation for wanting to come down to Jebel Dhanna. Sir Bani Yas is a nature reserve established by the late Sheikh Zayed and until recently, outside the Royal Family, only guests of the Danat resort could get access to visit the island. There is now an Anantara hotel, Desert Islands Resort, on the island itself but guests of the Danat resort are still allowed to visit at a cost of Dhs 250 per person.

We were escorted to the Sir Bani Yas ferry terminal, 16 kms from the hotel, where we boarded a speed boat to make the 20 minute crossing to Sir Bani Yas (on the way back we were in a standard passenger ferry-style craft). Once on the island, our group of 6 was met by a Scottish guide who took us on our tour in an African safari-style open-sided jeep. We had expected quite a small island but discovered that it is actually 87 km square - about the same size as Barbados. The island is home to giraffes, sand and mountain gazelles, eland, red deer, oryx, other types of antelope / deer, ostriches, hyenas and cheetahs. With the exception of the ostriches and hyenas, we managed to see all the animal species on the reserve. Although not native to Arabia, the cheetahs are used as a natural control on the gazelle population which numbers over 12,000.

Although a nature reserve, Sir Bani Yas is certainly not an eco-friendly island. Fresh water is piped over to the island from the desalination plant on the mainland and is used to irrigate the entire island which would otherwise be completely barren. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of water that must be used for all the trees, shrubs and grass planted to feed the animals and give them shade - plus for the thousands of animals to drink. The tour lasted about 1.5 hours with the cheetahs and giraffes definitely being the highlights for me.

We hopped on the Desert Islands Resort shuttle bus to have lunch at the hotel before heading back to our car for the drive home to Dubai. We expected the hotel to be a few minutes away from the arrival dock but it was a 20 minute drive to another part of the island and as the resort came into view we were really disappointed to see quite an eyesore. On a nature reserve we would have expected a very low rise development built to blend in but this was 4 storeys high with green roof tiles! Certainly cheaper to build but a real shame in this day and age for any architect to design such a building.

Despite its exterior, the interior of the resort was a very traditional Arabian style and the pool area outside was gorgeous. All the staff we met were excellent and a step above those at the Danat resort, as would be expected from an international hotel chain of this calibre. The one thing that I would have been really upset about if I was a guest at the Desert Islands Resort was the beach. The resort has been built on reclaimed land which we couldn't understand considering the vast empty spaces of the island and this meant that their beach could not compare to the beautiful natural beach at the Danat Resort. We were pleasantly surprised to find the food prices at the Desert Islands were cheaper than at the Danat though and I succumbed to temptation and had a delicious steak sandwich.

Conclusion

Although we had a really relaxing 4 days, Simon and I both felt that from Dubai it would be better to head to Al Aqah on the East Coast for a long weekend than drive all the way down to Jebel Dhanna. Al Aqah has 4 or 5 hotels now with each one offering 2 or 3 restaurants so there is much more choice for eating out, plus the food prices are cheaper. At just a 2-2.5 hour drive through the mountains it also offers a far more interesting and quicker journey. All the animals on Sir Bani Yas can be found at the Arabian Wildlife Centre on the Sharjah-Dhaid Road and a trip to the AWC is only 1 hour from Dubai, or can be made en-route to Al Aqah. You don't get driven around in a safari jeep since it's more of an open-air zoo, but to drive 3 hours plus the boat transfer doesn't really add up to a good idea in my mind if the whole reason to go to Jebel Dhanna would be to visit Sir Bani Yas.

For people living in Abu Dhabi, Jebel Dhanna is only 2 hours away and the pristine beach would make a weekend break worthwhile. I would definitely choose the Danat Resort over the Desert Islands Resort though since the beach is so much better and the price extremely lower (Dhs 700 B&B per night versus Dhs 1,350 B&B per night). To get to the AWC from Abu Dhabi would be a long drive and since there is nothing similar on offer in Abu Dhabi, visiting Sir Bani Yas Island would make sense - although Al Ain Zoo also has similar animals to marvel at and is closer.

I've waited years to go to Jebel Dhanna and am glad that we finally made the trip, despite the few hiccups we encountered. We don't regret having gone since we had a lovely few days away, but we won't be returning since it just doesn't trump other locations within the UAE for the perfect weekend break.