Dubai road trips: Lost in the boomtown

There it was: an overpass bending gracefully over stalled traffic on Dubai's main highway.

And there I was: driving through a sandy haze kicked up by construction equipment, plowing into dead ends and discovering a special boomtown brand of road rage as I rambled over a confusing web of roads freshly carved in the desert. But I knew _ somewhere, somehow _ there was a way onto that bridge.

I found it after about 20 wearying minutes by tailing a taxi that I figured had far better local driving intuition. He did. The cabbie simply went off-road through an empty lot to get onto the overpass connector.

Getting behind the wheel in Dubai offers more …