TRAVEL: Is This the Most Amazing Resort on the Planet?

TRAVEL: Is This the Most Amazing Resort on the Planet?; Iain Mayhew VISITS DUBAI'S NEW ODYSSEY, THE JUMEIRAH PALM, WHICH CAN BE SEEN FROM SPACE

IT'S a job to know what to make of Dubai. One sign on a bridge across the motorway between the airport and the city centre proclaims: "At the Global Crossroads of Finance and Initiative."

Dubai

There are other signs, too. Media City - turn left here for CNN, WBC, Reuters, all neatly packed into acres of gleaming air-conditioned glass and concrete. Internet City - IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard - ditto, and in a complex barely a USB connection away.

The six-lane highway which runs through town, a black ribbon stretching from Sharjah to Abu Dhabi, is straddled by Porsche and Mercedes showrooms, office buildings and hotels and vast empty sandy spaces where you know that, within six months, there will be another towering edifice which defies the laws of construction.

Certainly the lights at this crossroads between East and West seem to be permanently stuck on green. Which brings me neatly to the reason I am here this week.

Not content with the Burj al Arab, a hotel of such sumptuousness that non-residents are actually charged 200 Dirhams (about pounds 30) to have a nose around inside, or the twin Emirates Towers, which makes Canary Wharf seem like a pimple, Dubai has got several billion dollars together and is building The Palms.

These are two islands, in the shape of palm trees, stretching up to 10 miles out to sea. When they are finished - the first by late 2005, the second 18 months later - they will be visible from space, although any passing alien would have little idea of the effort that has gone into this extraordinary project.

Satellite pictures can already pick up the way the thing is taking shape, as millions of tons of sand and rock are being heaped by a fleet of barges and dredgers way out into the Arabian Sea.

The Jumeirah Palm, just along the road from the Burj al Arab, is well under way. Even its sales office looks like a mini-palace, with marble floors and manicured lawns.

THE Palm at Jebel Ali, a few miles up the coast, will have a huge marine park, villas on stilts over the water and another sizeable batch of top-class hotels.

Each island, funded by the government of Dubai and international banks, will have villas and apartments, de luxe hotels, marinas, cinemas, spas and shops. At Jebel Ali there will even be an underwater city for divers to explore (a good gimmick, this - every month a member of Dubai's ruling Maktoum family will drop a kilo brick of gold into the water. Whoever finds it can keep it).

With luxury on this unprecedented scale, it's no surprise that the rich and famous are already vying for a villa on the islands.

David and Victoria Beckham have put down a deposit on a pounds 1.2million pad and Anthea Turner and Grant Bovey are also looking for a bolthole on The Palms.

The islands will cost pounds 2billion to construct and that's before they've even started on the hotels and villas. Together they will add a whopping 80 miles of new beaches to this stretch of the Gulf coast.

Things don't stop there. Dubai is famous for its shopping festival, so they're building Festival City along the banks of the Creek, with a 50-storey hotel, golf course, apartments, restaurants and shops surrounded by canals. There goes another couple of billion.

Oh, and there's the new marina with glittering towers of apartments all with a view over the Gulf.

Dubai was once a sleepy trading port on the Persian Gulf famous for its pearl fishing - until the Japanese started mass-producing the little things. Fifty years ago the main transport in the town was by donkey, camel or dhow.

Oil was discovered in 1966 and the Sheikhdom joined with its neighbours Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and other Sheikhdoms to form the United Arab Emirates. That was it, really. The old pearling fleet was replaced by huge oil tankers and the floating gin palaces of bankers who found the area a haven for trade.