Just 25 years ago, Dubai was a scatter of buildings huddled against a burning

sky. Now it is one of the world's fastest-growing, state-of-the-art cities.

Harry Reid visits to discover how it is retaining links with its traditions

DUBAI is a quick trip to the past, a swift swing into the future. Recently there was a small exhibition of pictures of this, the most celebrated of the seven United Emirates. It was held by the creek, the great curving inlet from the Gulf where aged dhows still set sail for India and East Africa. You can see them being manually loaded on the wharf which extends along one side of the creek, modern gleaming white goods contrasting with bundles of clothes and bags of spices.

Anyway, the exhibition showed pictures of the creek as it was just 25 years ago. They showed little more than a scattering of low-rise buildings, most of them looking like huts. And that was it; that was what is now Dubai City. Then you step out of the little exhibition building and you can hardly see the sky; the creek is now dominated by spectacular high-rises, many of them hotels. It has become a cliche to say that Dubai is the Hong Kong of the Middle East; but it has grown infinitely more rapidly than Hong Kong, it has a more certain future, and its links with its past are more secure.

Patrick MacDonald, the Scot who runs Dubai's Commerce and Tourism Promotion Board, says: ``Dubai offers a first-world infrastructure, but the genuine Arabian experience is all around you. You can be deep in the desert in 20 minutes. You can visit the souks, the mosques, and the old windtower houses in Dubai City. Or you can enjoy the facilities of some of the world's most sophisticated hotels, with their discos and international restaurants. You can shop in world-class air-conditioned malls. You can play golf on two of the best courses in the world.''

That is the hard sell, but his essential point, the constant contrast between the old and the new, is utterly valid. As he says, Dubai City is not a sanitised tourist product; on the other hand, it isn't Marrakesh or Cairo either. It is an emphatically state-of-the-art city (the hotel designers are taking their art to ever more fanciful extremes, with ever larger and more extravagant atriums. One visitor suggested that a tour of the atriums would be a worthwhile day's entertainment in itself).

Dubai City is ultra-new; yet glimpses of the old Arabia are indeed around every corner. It isn't dirty and it is hassle-free. It is remarkably bereft of crime. If all this sounds too good to be true, you might be right. It might be best to visit before the problems start, before, say, the Russian Mafia move in. But be warned - don't even consider visiting Dubai if you don't like huge modern hotels.

The Dubai boom started with the discovery of oil in 1966. Actually there was a lot less oil than in Abu Dhabi, the Emirate immediately to the south. Till then Dubai had based its gentle prosperity on trade; sensibly, the oil money was used to expand the trading and industrial facilities, such as the huge new port at Jebel Ali.

The first of the new hotels in Dubai City were built in the early 70s; hotels like the Sheraton and Intercontinental. Amazingly, the first Dubai boom nearly fizzled out, and these hotels were struggling 10 years later. Then the Emirates Airline was founded in 1985 and there was a concerted drive to attract tourists, and Europeans in particular. Tourism is now flourishing - yet it still accounts for just more than 10% of Dubai's gross product.

Now the many hotels in Dubai City are booming, but the really dramatic developments are out-of town.

For example, if you move a just little south down the gulf shoreline, you can observe the nascent shape of what will be the most futuristic hotel of them all. The Chicago Beach Resort will consist of two hotels and a water park; the Tower Hotel, currently being built on a man-made island just offshore, has a sail-shaped design, and will be 321m high, thus making it the tallest hotel in the world. An atrium - inevitably - will soar all the way up this edifice, from the huge lobby to the top of the tower.

Onshore will be its sister hotel, boasting 600 rooms and 10 restaurants. The first phase of this extraordinary conception - part fantasy, part bombast, part masterpiece - will open next year.

This is merely the most extravagant of many similar developments. Further down the Dubai coast at Jumaraiah (beside the Emirates Golf Club, home of the Desert Classic) the Abjar Hotel and Beach Club is being built, to open in 1998. Here too there will be a variety of restaurants and bars, and extensive watersport facilities, as well as 550 deluxe guestrooms.

This project, which will inflict rather less damage on the Dubai skyline, is being overseen by Klaus Reincke, a dynamic German who was recently appointed vice-president (operations) of Abjar Hotels, Clubs, and Resorts and who was my host for three days in Dubai.

Reincke personifies the frenetic, forceful drive of Dubai, where everything is changing, everything is moving; he runs the Royal Abjar Hotel, the newest and most luxurious of all the hotels in Dubai City, as well as the Sheraton and Ramada hotels which, despite their names, are owned by the Abjar group - and in addition he is masterminding the creation of an Abjar resort village at Fujairah. This is generally regarded as the gentlest, most remote and least developed of the seven Emirates - and the only one on the Oman coast.

On top of all this, Reincke is taking time to look out for likely businesses to buy for Abjar in Europe; he has recently been casting his eye over hotels in both Paris and London.

The Royal Abjar, which unlike most of the big Dubai City hotels is not on the creek but in the business district, is a remarkably friendly and intimate place, given its great size. It has several restaurants (including the Flying Dragon where the chef, Danavan Rajith, prepared the best Cantonese food I've ever tasted), a vast health and leisure centre and - wait for it - an absolutely colossal atrium. The staff come from all corners of the world, including Scotland.

The hotel is only five minutes by car from the international airport, and directly under the main flight path - but such is the quality of the insulation that I saw the planes but never heard them. And it is only eight minutes away from the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club, whose hyper-modern sleek white clubhouse, designed in the shape of a dhow, has become one of the symbols of the new Dubai.

Klaus, who has won many awards in his hotel management career, is particularly pleased that Dubai is trying to promote year-round tourism. ``Wherever I've been working, in Europe, in North America, and in the Caribbean, I've always been against what I call the `seasonising' of tourism,'' he says. ``And we are all working together here to create and to promote events and festivals and major spectator sport classics which will encourage people to come all the year round.'' It is true that two of the biggest sporting events - the golf Desert Classic and the horseracing Dubai World Cup - are both held in the month of March, but many other events are spread throughout the year. And the participant sports and activities on offer - including desert safaris - benefit from the subtropical climate, which is exceptionally dry. Average temperatures range from 750F in January to 1050F in July.

Conditions in the Gulf, with its warm water and minimal tidal flow, are ideal for scuba diving, sailing, and waterskiing. Kingfish, red snapper, and barracuda are caught for sport.

One of the the best centres for water sports is the renowned Jebel Ali hotel, which is about 45 minutes from Dubai International Airport, just off the main road south through the desert to Abu Dhabi. It is situated in 60 acres of landscaped gardens by the Gulf, and has become popular with British visitors; it is even more popular with Germans. It has an unusually high percentage of repeat guests.

There are currently 269 rooms and a further 120 are being on built in five low-rise blocks on to a site to the south, right by the Gulf. The hotel is certainly very peaceful, and the only blot on the horizon - literally - is the huge industrial complex to the north, built around the biggest man-made deep water port in the world. But to the south everything is tranquil. Dubai juxtapositions, once again. The Jebel Ali is noted, incidentally, for special offers in the high summer season, through till the end of September.

The Jebel Ali was built in 1981 to service an international airport which was never built, so it was turned into a resort hotel. The airport plan was dropped after it was decided that one international airport was enough for Dubai (pop 600,000) for the time being. But before too long, the way things are moving, a second one will be planned, though probably not at Jebel Ali.

Meanwhile, the existing international airport at Dubai City is expanding fast. A charter terminal will open in February next year. A feature here will be a bulk duty-free centre where ``wholesale quantities of goods can be booked in advance. There is no upper limit to the quantities that can be ordered. We'll deliver anywhere in the world,'' according to an airport spokesman.

The airport - which was recently voted the best worldwide business airport -is the home of Emirates Airline, founded as recently as 1985 but already established as a leading player in world aviation. It has won 97 international awards and last year was voted Best Long-haul Carrier by Britain's most frequent travellers. It has 23 aircraft and last year carried 2.3 million passengers. The aim is to increase this to five million passengers by the year 2000; recently Emirates took delivery of its first Boeing 777, which can fly non-stop from Dubai to New York. Six more will arrive in the next 18 months.

Despite the obvious success of the airline, the chairman, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saaed Al Maktoum, is well aware that there is more to the politics of international aviation than winning awards, gratifying as these may be. He says: ``We seem to find it easier winning awards than winning traffic rights. Despite the Dubai Government's open skies policy, with which we wholly agree, many of the carriers who benefit from fifth freedom rights to and from the Emirate still lean on their government to delay our entry to their markets. We are disappointed at this lack of reciprocity.''

The airport remains the gateway to what is in many ways the perfect mid-haul destination; visitors are assured of a genuine welcome in a clean, crime-free, liberal, and cosmopolitan environment, and any number of activities and sports are on offer, as well as an extraordinary variety of shopping opportunities.

Any caveats are minor. For example - the taxis are not metered, which can lead to some hassle. And from a culinary point of view Dubai City is too international; it is difficult to find authentic Arabian food. Almost all the good restaurants are in the big hotels; outside these hotels, it is difficult if not impossible to find licensed premises. The road system - which is British-designed, down to the belisha beacons - is coping reasonably with the growing traffic but already there are signs of incipient gridlock. The curse of European motorways, the unexpected and apparently inexplicable traffic jam, may not be too far away.

To finish where we started: Dubai City is, supremely, a juxtaposition of the old and the new. If the glitz of the hotel atriums and the sheen of the shopping malls are the most obvious manifestations of the new, the creek itself is the best part of the old. The abras or water taxis, which ply constantly across this endlessly fascinating stretch of water, at the very apex of the world's trade routes, are primitive, ramshackle, and a little hairy for anyone who is a wee bit wary of water. You sit on low benches along either side of the boat, just inches from the water.

My abiding memory of Dubai is of a group of Arabs on an already overcrowded abra making space politely for two tentative Europeans, who were encouraged to jump on board just as the abra pushed off the wharf to weave in and out of the wooden dhows and the barges as it crossed the creek.

If you looked immediately around, you could easily believe you had gone back centuries in time; if you raised your eyes to the overpowering, shimmering walls of glass and steel looming over the creek, you were far into the future.

The Dubai World Cup - turn to Page 43.