UAE: Sheikh, Rattle & Pour! The New Year's Eve Edition

Welcome to Dubai, a city that looked at Las Vegas and said, "That's lovely, but could we make it taller, shinier and considerably more expensive?"

After arriving at Dubai International Airport, head to our hotel where everyone gets their own room. No sharing with a stranger who snores like a malfunctioning cement mixer.

Once everyone's settled, we'll head into Old Dubai, the bit that existed before the city discovered skyscrapers, supercars and gold-plated everything. We'll explore the atmospheric lanes of Al Fahidi, wander through the spice and gold souks and cross Dubai Creek aboard a traditional wooden abra. This costs considerably less than a Dubai taxi and provides approximately the same level of reassurance about the driving.

At the Gold Souk, you'll see jewellery so enormous that wearing it would probably require planning permission. Meanwhile, the Spice Souk is your opportunity to buy a small bag of something fragrant that will sit untouched in your kitchen cupboard until 2034.

Then comes the important business: we're off to The Irish Village, one of Dubai's best-known pubs, for welcome drinks and our first official meeting of the Tipple Tours Arabian Expeditionary Drinking Society. Here we'll discover that although Dubai is famous for luxury, you can still find a proper pub, a decent beer and someone complaining about the price of everything.

Tonight's challenge: Find out how much a pint costs without making an involuntary choking noise.

We're getting up early today. Not because we're particularly enthusiastic about mornings but because we're going to watch camels being raced by robots! Yes, actual camels. With actual robotic jockeys.

Welcome to Al Marmoom Camel Race Track, where one of Arabia's oldest sporting traditions has been upgraded with technology that looks suspiciously like something built by a particularly ambitious school robotics club. Instead of human jockeys, the camels carry small remote-controlled devices while their owners follow alongside in vehicles, operating the jockeys remotely. It's the only sporting event where the athletes have four legs, the jockeys need batteries and the spectators may have to explain to their friends back home that none of this was a hallucination.

After our camel-related education, we'll head to the Mall of the Emirates.

Here we'll visit Ski Dubai, an enormous indoor winter wonderland in the middle of a desert. Outside, the temperature might be approaching 30°C. Inside, it's below freezing. Somebody looked at a country consisting largely of sand and sunshine and decided what it really needed was snow.

You'll have time to enjoy the Snow Park, take ridiculous photographs and discover that being dressed for the Arabian desert is entirely unsuitable for standing next to a snowman.

After recovering from this meteorological identity crisis, we'll head out for a proper craft beer evening.

Tonight's destination is Goose Island Tap House where we'll explore a selection of beers and hold the inaugural Tipple Tours International Beer Identification Championships. The rules are simple: taste the beers, attempt to identify them and explain your answers with the confidence of someone who has absolutely no idea.

Tonight's challenge: Identify the mystery beer without describing it as "beery".

Today we're leaving the shiny skyscrapers behind and heading into the desert, where we'll discover what happens when Mother Nature decides she wants her property back. And tonight, we'll be welcoming the New Year in Dubai, where even the fireworks have a bigger budget than most Hollywood films.

Our first stop is Al Madam Ghost Village, a mysterious abandoned settlement slowly disappearing beneath the sand. Entire rooms have filled with dunes. Doorways lead into mountains of sand. The buildings look as though someone started an ambitious renovation project in 1987 and then went out for cigarettes.

After lunch, it's time for something completely different. We're heading deeper into the desert for a 4x4 dune-bashing adventure. Our professional driver will take us over enormous dunes, down steep sandy slopes and around corners that appear to have been designed by someone with a personal grudge against suspension systems.

Then it's time to swap sand dunes for party shoes. It's New Year's Eve in Dubai!

Back in the city, we'll have time to freshen up, remove approximately three kilograms of sand from our underwear and prepare for a night of Arabian extravagance.

We'll head out for our Tipple Tours New Year's Eve celebration, with great company, celebratory drinks and a suitable spot to enjoy Dubai's legendary midnight festivities. Expect dazzling lights, spectacular fireworks and enough excitement to make New Year's Eve in your local Wetherspoons look like a parish council meeting.

As midnight approaches, we'll raise our glasses to another year of extraordinary adventures, new friendships and decisions that seemed perfectly sensible at the time. And when the clock strikes twelve, we'll welcome the New Year in a city that has never knowingly done anything on a small scale.

Tonight's challenge: Take a photograph in the ghost village that looks like the world's worst property advert, then take a New Year's Eve photograph that makes everyone back home deeply regret their decision to spend £85 on a ticket to the village hall disco.

Happy New Year from Tipple Tours!

Today we're travelling to Abu Dhabi, the UAE's capital and a city that somehow manages to make Dubai look slightly restrained.

Our main mission is to visit Craft by Side Hustle, a pioneering licensed craft brewery. For years, the UAE wasn't exactly the first place that came to mind when somebody suggested a brewery tour. Now, thanks to the people behind Side Hustle, you can enjoy locally brewed craft beer in Abu Dhabi. We'll aim to arrange a special group brewery experience, meeting the people behind the beer, learning about brewing in the Emirates and, most importantly, sampling the results. We'll investigate how a brewery operates in a country better known for oil, skyscrapers and air conditioning powerful enough to refrigerate a rhinoceros.

And yes, there'll be tastings. This is Tipple Tours, not a guided visit to a bottled-water factory.

But the day isn't over: next, subject to opening hours and travel logistics, we're heading into the desert to visit the extraordinary Emirates National Auto Museum. This collection includes some of the most ridiculous vehicles ever constructed, including a gigantic Jeep that looks as though it was designed for a family of 47. There are extraordinary custom cars, unusual machines and vehicles that make a Range Rover look like a shopping trolley.

We'll return to Abu Dhabi for an evening exploring its licensed bar scene, potentially including Belgian Café where we'll investigate the important cultural differences between Belgian beer, American craft beer and whatever someone has just ordered because it had a funny name.

Tonight's challenge: Find a vehicle in the museum that could comfortably transport the entire group and a week's supply of beer.

Our final morning begins with a visit to one of the UAE's most extraordinary landmarks, Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque.

After four days of robot camels, beer tastings, abandoned houses and enormous vehicles, it's time for something genuinely breathtaking. This magnificent mosque features gleaming white marble, spectacular domes, intricate decoration and architecture that makes even Dubai's more extravagant buildings look slightly underdressed. We'll explore respectfully, learn about the mosque and take in one of the country's most beautiful sights.

Then it's time for our final farewell.

Over five days we've explored abandoned villages, watched robotic jockeys race camels, experienced winter in the desert, travelled across enormous sand dunes and visited a pioneering craft brewery. We've discovered that the UAE is considerably stranger, more varied and more interesting than its reputation for luxury shopping and expensive hotels suggests. And we've hopefully proved that a proper adventure doesn't need to involve a luxury yacht, a designer handbag or a man named Sebastian explaining cryptocurrency. Just curious people, extraordinary places and the occasional excellent beer.

Transfers to Abu Dhabi Airport or optional onward transport to Dubai can be arranged according to flight schedules.

Final challenge: Explain your holiday to someone back home without them asking whether you've made the entire thing up.