“The monorail driver waves at no one in particular every time the doors close, a small private ceremony repeated for an audience of sunburned toddlers and rolling suitcases.”

The Palm Jumeirah Monorail does something strange to your sense of scale. You board at the trunk of the island — Gateway Station, technically, though no one calls it that — and for four minutes you glide above a boulevard of apartment towers and date palms that look like they were planted yesterday, because they were, geologically speaking. The whole island is reclaimed land, and from the monorail window it has the eerie perfection of a model railway set. Then the track curves and the thing at the end of the crescent appears: Atlantis, enormous and pink, sitting on the horizon like a fever dream someone forgot to demolish. Your kids press their faces against the glass. You check your phone for the booking confirmation. The doors open into heat that feels personal.

January in Dubai runs about 24°C, which is nothing by local standards but feels miraculous if you left Edinburgh at 4°C and horizontal rain. The taxi queue at the airport was twenty minutes. The drive to the Palm was another forty, most of it along Sheikh Zayed Road, where the skyscrapers thin out and the highway narrows toward the water. By the time you reach the island's single access road, the city feels surprisingly far away. That's the trick of the Palm — it's fifteen kilometres from Downtown Dubai, but it might as well be its own principality, one where every building is a hotel or a residence and the main cultural institution is a waterpark.

The aquarium in the lobby, and other ways to lose your children

Atlantis operates on the principle that more is more, and then a bit more after that. The lobby has a Dale Chihuly glass sculpture hanging from the ceiling — three thousand hand-blown pieces in orange and amber, the kind of thing you'd see in a museum if the museum also had a check-in desk and a man offering you chilled towels. Behind reception, floor-to-ceiling windows look directly into the Ambassador Lagoon, a tank holding sixty-five thousand marine animals. Your four-year-old will stop walking. You will lose ten minutes of your life standing there watching a manta ray glide past a woman trying to find her room key.

The rooms are large in the way that Dubai hotel rooms are large — you could do light exercise in the bathroom. Ours faced the Arabian Gulf, which at sunrise turns a colour somewhere between apricot and copper, and at midday becomes so bright you close the curtains and nap. The beds are firm. The air conditioning is aggressive. There's a Nespresso machine and a minibar priced for people who don't look at prices, though the two complimentary water bottles are genuinely useful because you will be dehydrated within an hour of arriving. The balcony is wide enough for two chairs and a small table, and from it you can hear the Aquaventure waterpark — a low hum of screaming that becomes white noise by the second morning.

Aquaventure is the thing, if you're travelling with kids. It's included with the room, which matters because a day pass runs around $95. The Leap of Faith — a near-vertical slide that drops you through a clear tube inside a shark tank — is the headline attraction, but the lazy river is where families actually spend their time. It winds through the grounds for over a kilometre, past waterfalls and under bridges, and the current is strong enough that you can just float and let it take you. We did three laps. My daughter did seven. The lifeguards are everywhere, attentive without being theatrical, which is the kind of thing you notice when you're responsible for small humans near deep water.

“The Palm is not a neighbourhood — it's an engineering project that happens to have restaurants. But by the third morning, you know which pool chair gets shade at 2 PM, and that's a kind of belonging.”

For food, Bread Street Kitchen — Gordon Ramsay's outpost on the ground floor — does a solid breakfast, though the buffet at Kaleidoscope is the path of least resistance with children. It's vast, chaotic, and features a chocolate fountain that my son located within ninety seconds of entering the room, a personal record. For dinner, walk along the boardwalk toward the newer Atlantis The Royal next door. The promenade is pleasant at dusk, and there's a stretch of independent-ish restaurants — Jaleo, Dinner by Heston — that feel slightly less like eating inside a theme park. The best cheap meal on the Palm is at the food court in Nakheel Mall, a ten-minute taxi ride back toward the trunk. The shawarma at Al Hallab is $8 and better than it needs to be.

The honest thing: the resort is enormous and sometimes it feels like it. Walking from the room to the beach takes eight minutes through corridors that smell of the same engineered fragrance. The wifi held up fine for video calls but stuttered during streaming at peak hours. And the sheer number of guests means the main pool is busy by 9 AM — if you want a lounger without a towel already claiming it, set an alarm. None of this ruins anything. It's just the texture of a place built for two thousand rooms, operating at capacity.

Walking out into the heat

On the last morning I took the monorail back alone, just to see the island from above one more time. The Palm looks different leaving — you notice the construction cranes on the outer fronds, the half-finished villas, the way the beach curves in a geometry that only makes sense from a satellite. A woman next to me was FaceTiming someone and holding her phone toward the window. The driver waved as the doors closed. At Gateway Station, the taxi rank was empty and the air smelled like warm concrete and jasmine from a planter someone had recently watered.

One thing worth knowing: the 2 bus from Mall of the Emirates reaches the Palm's trunk, but the monorail to Atlantis runs only until 10 PM. Miss it and you're looking at a $10 taxi. The monorail itself costs $6 return and is worth it once, for the view. After that, just take the cab.

Rooms at Atlantis start around $326 a night in low season, climbing past $680 in winter. What that buys you is the waterpark, the aquarium, and the particular comfort of not having to plan anything for three days — which, if you've been parenting through a Scottish January, is worth more than the room itself.