Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Burj Khalifa anchors the Dubai week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Dubai puzzle set.
The Burj Khalifa produces 7 tons of human waste per day, and for years much of it was not connected to a sewer — instead, fleets of trucks called 'poop trucks' lined up daily to haul sewage to a treatment plant. At peak times, trucks waited up to 24 hours in queue.
Source: Medium Lessons from History, envirology.co.nzJust 55 years ago, only 13 cars were registered in all of Dubai. By 2020, there were 1.83 million registered vehicles — a 140,000x increase in roughly two generations.
Source: bayut.comResidents who live on or above the 150th floor of the Burj Khalifa can see the sun for noticeably longer than people at ground level. During Ramadan, this means they cannot break their fast at the same time as the rest of the city — they must wait an extra 2-3 minutes for sunset to reach their altitude.
Source: bayut.com, nearfarmag.comDubai replaced child camel racing jockeys with robots in 2002 after a ban on using children under 15. The robot jockeys weigh about 27 kg, are equipped with GPS and heart rate monitors, and are remote-controlled by owners driving SUVs alongside the track at 65 km/h.
Source: Wikipedia Camel racing, whatson.ae, thenationalnews.comBefore 2007, many of Dubai's gleaming skyscrapers were not connected to a municipal sewage system at all. Steel pipes stored waste and transferred it to trucks. The Jebel Ali treatment plant, completed in 2009, still received 30% of the city's sewage by truck as late as 2013.
Source: Wikipedia Sanitation in Dubai, Medium