The best time to ride a camel in Dubai: months, and the hour of the day

Dubai has a long hot season and a shorter mild one, and the mild one is the evening you have pictured. Roughly from November through March the desert cools down properly once the sun is off it, which is why the camp evenings work so well then: you sit outside, the food is hot, the sky is clear and nobody is uncomfortable. If your dates are flexible, that is the window to aim for.

There is a catch worth knowing, and it goes the other way from what people expect. Those winter evenings get genuinely cool once the sun has gone, and the dunes hold no heat at all after dark. People arrive in what they wore in the city, sit down at an open-sided camp at nine in the evening and spend the rest of the night wishing they had a jacket. Take a layer. It weighs nothing in the car and it changes the last two hours of $69 or $79 completely.

The shoulder months at either end of that window — April and October — are the compromise most visitors actually land on, because that is when their trip happens rather than when the desert is at its best. They work. The middle of the day is warm, the evening is comfortable, and the camps are less busy than in the high season.

High summer is the one that needs a plan. The middle of a summer day in open dune country is hot enough to be the only thing you think about, and a camel led across open sand at that hour is not what anybody came for. The answer is not to skip the desert; it is to move to the ends of the day. Take the sunrise, as $305 does, or take an evening departure and let the camp do the work after the sun is down. The operators run all year and have built the timetable around exactly this.

Sunrise. The quietest and coolest version of the desert, and the hardest to get out of bed for. $305 is the listing built around it: a hot air balloon flight over the dunes as the sun comes up, a gourmet breakfast, a camel ride and the chance of a photograph with a falcon. It is the highest fare on this site by a wide margin and it is the only one that puts you above the dunes rather than on them.

Morning. A practical choice in the hot months and the one most people do not realise exists, because the shelf is dominated by evening departures. $45 names morning or afternoon slots on its own page, with hotel pickup by shared or private 4x4, dune bashing, sandboarding and the camel ride across four hours. With small children it also means the day ends before anyone is too tired to enjoy it.

Late afternoon. This is what the market is built around, and for good reason. You are collected in the afternoon, the 4WD run over the dunes happens while the light is turning, the camels are led on the sand as the sun drops, and dinner follows at the camp. $30, $30, $30, $30 and $30 all run this shape, from four hours upward.

After dark. The part people forget to budget for. Once the sun is down the camps keep going: the buffet, the shows and, on the listings that name it, the sky. $35 is a small-group evening built on sunset, wildlife spotting and stargazing, and $69 names stargazing alongside its three buffets. Out in the dune country the difference from a city sky is not subtle.