u/GFERREIRAZ

Hello everyone,

Me and my wife (both 33yo) just moved to Dubai in Feb 2026 and we've been renting so far, but we feel it's time to buy a car.

Our budget is around 65k AED, we are fine getting a second hand car and not fancy as we are both quite simple and frugal.

We were pretty keened to get a Toyota, particularly the RAV4, because we like the car and seems pretty reliable and low maintenance.

But recently we stumbled upon the possibility of getting a BMW X4 xDrive 30i from 2021. The car is GCC specs with 125k kms, all maintenance has been done on time and in the BMW garage.

This comes from someone we know and that we are sure he would not recommend the car if he knew something was wrong. This was the company's car of the Managing Director in the company this gentleman works for a long time, so 95% of the time was driven by the same person.

I was inside the car once or twice and seems really well taken care, interiors look great, exterior also, no funny noises (at that time I was not looking deeply because I didn't know it was for sale).

The asking price is 70k AED, which is the high end of our budget but when searching the market, this seems quite a good price, and we can afford it with no problem.

If we decide to proceed, a PPI is of course the step to take, just to be sure nothing is wrong that the guy might not know.

Since we are quite new here, wanted to hear your advice if we should go for it, how much we can expect in maintenance costs (I'm okay with not going to BMW garage for it if it's a steal), overall driving experience, etc compared to a RAV4 which we will not exactly know the origin but overall reputation shows it's very reliable (feel free to suggest other cars also within the budget!).

Thanks a lot!!

Hi everyone, me (M33) and my wife (F33) will also go to Zanzibar for our Honeymoon! end of this month (may) for 7 days and we want a mix of relaxing holidays and some activities too.

We did quite some research and decided:

- 3 nights, 2 full days in Matemwe (one of the days do Mnemba island dolphin tour with snorkelling)

- 2 nights, 3 full days in Nungwi (spend one day in kendwa, but nothing else planned yet)

- 2 nights, 1.5 days full days in Stone town (1 day do a prison island, nakupenda and stonetown tour).

We are just gonna take taxi/transfers to move around.

I'm quite an adventurous guy (love scuba and any activity, she is a bit less but ultimately she usually joins and has a lot of fun eheh)

Does this sound like a solid plan? We booked the hotels flexible so we can still change.

We still did not book the activities though.

Any change on the plans or recommendations on activities to do in those places? If you can recommend companies to do it with, would highly appreciate.

Thanks a lot!