Road Trip Saudi Style
It was bang on
midnight when the bus pulled out of Buraidah in Saudi Arabia’s Qassim Province.
I was heading for the port city of Dammam on the Persian Gulf but had to change
in Riyadh, the Kingdom’s capital city and one of the world’s most soulless spots.
The other
passengers were mostly poor, male Egyptians, Lebanese, Indians and Pakistanis,
with the surprising exception of a Saudi couple, the wife sheathed in black
from head to toe. A Saudi without a car is highly unusual. Even boys drive over here; standing to reach
the foot pedals; regularly smashing into objects both animate and inanimate.
Nearby where I currently live there was a recent accident in which two sisters
were mown down and killed by underage male drivers in an SUV. The girls were
crossing at a red light, green man in full view, corroborated by witnesses whose testimonies were ignored. The
boys didn’t stop, but the girls’ lives did, and the judge, in his infinite
wisdom, decreed them all to be equally at fault and the murderers were
released, scot free. I bet they've never lost a wink of sleep over it.
Those men on the Riyadh bound bus eyed me furtively, not a hint of friendliness to a fellow traveller. One of them asked for a cigarette and snatched it out of my pack without a word of thanks. The reason, I assumed, was money, and, of course, religion – a disastrous combination – and while I had the cash, they felt they held the holy moral high-ground. In the last couple of months I’d probably earned as much as they’d get in two years and, unknown to them, I had it stashed in a brick of notes at the bottom of my bag, which I used as a pillow once in my seat.
The ticket inspector in his natty green and white uniform leaped aboard, looked at me and with a smile like a split coconut shouted out, “Goodbye Doctor!” Many people had called me doctor here and I really couldn't work out why.
As we pulled out of the city there was relief in getting away from the Kingdom’s conservative, long-bearded, fundamentalist heartland as well as the insanity of the morons trying to manage a university that was only half built and had about seven lecturers.
Once my eyes had tired of the desert nightscape I dropped off to sleep, woken a few hours later when the bus stopped and I was looking at the barrel of a machine gun waving carelessly no more than 10 inches from my face. We were at a police checkpoint and the cop with the weapon was giving the Saudi and his wife a hard time. I reached around for my passport stuffed into a back pocket, but reading my intentions the policeman said, “No problem. Good afternoon, doctor.” A little confused, I checked the digital clock at the front of the bus which read 02.15. The cops took their time going through the papers of the other passengers, aggressively quizzing the shiftier looking characters (all of them fitted that bill) before stepping off ten minutes later, machine guns rattling.
We continued through the desert.
I'd been told the journey would take five hours but just after three I woke to find the bus parked in a large bus station and everybody getting off. I stepped groggily onto the tarmac and asked a guy where we were. “Riyadh,” he answered, giving me a look as if to say ‘are you some kind of moron?’
There where two hours to kill before the 5.30am bus to Dammam and so I grabbed a coffee and a croissant and did a tour of the large bus station, eyes on me all the way. There were quite a few people lying around on solid steel benches and rugs on the floor. One kid used a large piece of cardboard as a blanket. Some were, like me, whiling away the hours watching the nightlife pass by.
The shops sold an eclectic mix of groceries and plastic crap, much like most bus stations around the world. There were alarm clocks in the shape of mobile phones and the mosque in Mecca, Sony Walkmans gathering dust, talking parrots, plastic bars of gold, gaudy artificial jewellery, hundreds of unfeasibly cheap suitcases, Barbie dolls called Bonnie, gigantic ghetto blasters despite music being forbidden, row upon row of perfume bottles named Folie Envie and Lapidus Pour Homme, huge bright red and green teddy bears and razor blades you'd really not want anywhere near your face.
Outside I was set upon by a clutch of taxi drivers shrieking “Taxi! Taxi!” in my face until a patrolling police car dispersed them with a blast of the siren. Porters stood idly around, reminding me of Osama bin Laden's father who had started out in exactly the same job in the docks of Jeddah, somehow receiving the King's favour and rising to become one of the richest men in the country, his construction company still landing the juiciest contracts to this day. Come what may, I felt these Indians and Bangladeshis had no chance of a similar fate.
Looking for a ticket window (the main feature in any other bus station, but not here) a random young guy walked past and asked, “Can I help you?”
“Maybe - I need a ticket to Dammam.”
“Sure, follow me.”
We went on a labarynthine tour, ending in the bowels of the building where the guy seemed surprised to stumble upon the ticket office. He took my passport and photocopied my details as well as the visitor’s visa, then issued a ticket costing 25 Riyals (£4) for the three hour, 320km journey.
Back outside, under a wonderfully dark sapphire sky, peppered by silver stars, the dawn chorus sparked up with the mullah’s wail. I'd just stepped round believers kneeling on the floor of an impromptu mosque in the departure lounge.
Waiting for the prayers to finish I lit a cigarette and kicked through the sand, litter everywhere, under a perfect crescent moon, looking out at eroding sandstone minarets and the urban sprawl. Finally the driver emerged, coughed, cleared his throat, spat and climbed aboard. The breeze block city stretched for miles and on its outskirts were countless warehouses stockpiling the sort of useless crap sold in bus stations, imported to a nation whose economic production other than oil is pretty much zero.
The desert came again, dotted with black camels, lined by endless pylons, and a road sign read Qatar, UAE, Oman, adorned by a helpful single arrow. Follow the sun, boy.
Blinding in-yer-face sunlight made my head jerk up and I was blinking awake in a godforsaken breakfast stop where one glance at the food on offer killed any appetite I’d had. The coffee was just about manageable and I bought bottles of water, praying I wouldn't need to use the bus toilet.
There was some sort of lodging house next to the cafeteria, the doors hanging from hinges, windows smashed and trash everywhere, but on investigation I saw two bodies huddled in a corner under dust-coated rags, brown bird-like feet sticking out and only a muffled snore indicating there was life under there. Nobody seemed to care one way or the other.
‘Wonder where the swimming pool and sauna are?’ I mused before the driver yelled at me to get back on board.
By 8am we were in Dammam and I was besieged once more by screeching taxi drivers. Negotiating a price with one of the more honest looking guys, we set off past Dhahran, a mini-USA in the sand and the epicentre of the world's oil industry; in fact, the exact site where oil had first been discovered at Lucky Well Number 7 by Tom Barger’s American team of geologists in the late 1930s.
On the highway we skirted the chronic traffic, dust and pollution of Dammam and the driver stopped to fill up with petrol and a meeting with his boss who handed him his passport. Petrol currently costs 45 Halalah a litre – about 12p, while in Britain it was selling for £1.20. The boss asked me how much we' d agreed for the ride.
"200," I told him.
"You pay 250, OK?"
"No, not OK. We've already agreed a price, Mustafa."
"250, OK?"
I got in and we headed off, but during the journey the boss called three times using the only English he knew: 250, OK?
We dodged Al-Khobar too; the newish city that sprang up beside Dhahran and Dammam to house the army of immigrant workers - there are 9 million expats in the Kingdom. Finally the palms on the Corniche told us that the sea was just beyond and my escape was almost complete.
Before long we were on the King Fahd causeway, a 26km long bridge completed in 1986 at a cost of $718 million to link the Saudi mainland with the island of Bahrain, the sea shallow enough at 12 metres to support the road above the water. In the middle of the causeway is border control located on a small, artificial islet where at the weekend drivers flood across from Saudi to commit sin in the liberal neighbour.
On a Monday morning the checkpoint was all-but deserted. We passed easily through and I breathed a sigh of relief as we entered the capital Manama, drains blocked and up to its knees in rainwater from a winter deluge. I found a hotel – the Delmon – and crashed, waking at 5pm for a shower, dinner and beer, body clock shot to pieces.
Happily drunk after only minimum intake (abstinence certainly makes boozing cheaper) I found myself in a lounge bar with a stage and five perfectly formed Byelorussian blondes winking at me and the few other guys in the audience, dancing around to Kylie, dressed in tiny miniskirts and kinky boots. I stumbled along to Diggers Bar where a Filipino band entertained us with rock and roll cover versions and as I left one of the female singers was headbanging along to Guns and Roses ‘Sweet Child of Mine’.
The weather in the Middle East (even in winter) is usually so stiflingly hot, dusty and humid that walking is a seriously unpleasant business, but this rain in Bahrain was fantastic. I’d never seen such a sustained downpour out here, so I gladly forked out a few Dinars for a plastic cape and pounded the streets, the raindrops a therapeutic drum roll on my head, kind of like a massage, which, in fact, some ropey Chinese bird with black teeth had offered me that very morning as I finished off breakfast in the hotel lobby.
My next employer had told me to sit tight in Bahrain as they “have a man in the embassy” who can issue me with the all-important legal work visa “within days”. Unfortunately, the man in the embassy wasn’t in the embassy and those days eventually took about two months, so when the hotel sweetly put a Christmas tree up in the entrance hall I got a pang of homesickness, went down the road to a bucket travel agent and bought a dirt cheap ticket to London via Doha and Muscat, finally stepping out of Victoria Station to find snowflakes drifting down from the December sky.
Those men on the Riyadh bound bus eyed me furtively, not a hint of friendliness to a fellow traveller. One of them asked for a cigarette and snatched it out of my pack without a word of thanks. The reason, I assumed, was money, and, of course, religion – a disastrous combination – and while I had the cash, they felt they held the holy moral high-ground. In the last couple of months I’d probably earned as much as they’d get in two years and, unknown to them, I had it stashed in a brick of notes at the bottom of my bag, which I used as a pillow once in my seat.
The ticket inspector in his natty green and white uniform leaped aboard, looked at me and with a smile like a split coconut shouted out, “Goodbye Doctor!” Many people had called me doctor here and I really couldn't work out why.
As we pulled out of the city there was relief in getting away from the Kingdom’s conservative, long-bearded, fundamentalist heartland as well as the insanity of the morons trying to manage a university that was only half built and had about seven lecturers.
Once my eyes had tired of the desert nightscape I dropped off to sleep, woken a few hours later when the bus stopped and I was looking at the barrel of a machine gun waving carelessly no more than 10 inches from my face. We were at a police checkpoint and the cop with the weapon was giving the Saudi and his wife a hard time. I reached around for my passport stuffed into a back pocket, but reading my intentions the policeman said, “No problem. Good afternoon, doctor.” A little confused, I checked the digital clock at the front of the bus which read 02.15. The cops took their time going through the papers of the other passengers, aggressively quizzing the shiftier looking characters (all of them fitted that bill) before stepping off ten minutes later, machine guns rattling.
We continued through the desert.
I'd been told the journey would take five hours but just after three I woke to find the bus parked in a large bus station and everybody getting off. I stepped groggily onto the tarmac and asked a guy where we were. “Riyadh,” he answered, giving me a look as if to say ‘are you some kind of moron?’
There where two hours to kill before the 5.30am bus to Dammam and so I grabbed a coffee and a croissant and did a tour of the large bus station, eyes on me all the way. There were quite a few people lying around on solid steel benches and rugs on the floor. One kid used a large piece of cardboard as a blanket. Some were, like me, whiling away the hours watching the nightlife pass by.
The shops sold an eclectic mix of groceries and plastic crap, much like most bus stations around the world. There were alarm clocks in the shape of mobile phones and the mosque in Mecca, Sony Walkmans gathering dust, talking parrots, plastic bars of gold, gaudy artificial jewellery, hundreds of unfeasibly cheap suitcases, Barbie dolls called Bonnie, gigantic ghetto blasters despite music being forbidden, row upon row of perfume bottles named Folie Envie and Lapidus Pour Homme, huge bright red and green teddy bears and razor blades you'd really not want anywhere near your face.
Outside I was set upon by a clutch of taxi drivers shrieking “Taxi! Taxi!” in my face until a patrolling police car dispersed them with a blast of the siren. Porters stood idly around, reminding me of Osama bin Laden's father who had started out in exactly the same job in the docks of Jeddah, somehow receiving the King's favour and rising to become one of the richest men in the country, his construction company still landing the juiciest contracts to this day. Come what may, I felt these Indians and Bangladeshis had no chance of a similar fate.
Looking for a ticket window (the main feature in any other bus station, but not here) a random young guy walked past and asked, “Can I help you?”
“Maybe - I need a ticket to Dammam.”
“Sure, follow me.”
We went on a labarynthine tour, ending in the bowels of the building where the guy seemed surprised to stumble upon the ticket office. He took my passport and photocopied my details as well as the visitor’s visa, then issued a ticket costing 25 Riyals (£4) for the three hour, 320km journey.
Back outside, under a wonderfully dark sapphire sky, peppered by silver stars, the dawn chorus sparked up with the mullah’s wail. I'd just stepped round believers kneeling on the floor of an impromptu mosque in the departure lounge.
Waiting for the prayers to finish I lit a cigarette and kicked through the sand, litter everywhere, under a perfect crescent moon, looking out at eroding sandstone minarets and the urban sprawl. Finally the driver emerged, coughed, cleared his throat, spat and climbed aboard. The breeze block city stretched for miles and on its outskirts were countless warehouses stockpiling the sort of useless crap sold in bus stations, imported to a nation whose economic production other than oil is pretty much zero.
The desert came again, dotted with black camels, lined by endless pylons, and a road sign read Qatar, UAE, Oman, adorned by a helpful single arrow. Follow the sun, boy.
Blinding in-yer-face sunlight made my head jerk up and I was blinking awake in a godforsaken breakfast stop where one glance at the food on offer killed any appetite I’d had. The coffee was just about manageable and I bought bottles of water, praying I wouldn't need to use the bus toilet.
There was some sort of lodging house next to the cafeteria, the doors hanging from hinges, windows smashed and trash everywhere, but on investigation I saw two bodies huddled in a corner under dust-coated rags, brown bird-like feet sticking out and only a muffled snore indicating there was life under there. Nobody seemed to care one way or the other.
‘Wonder where the swimming pool and sauna are?’ I mused before the driver yelled at me to get back on board.
By 8am we were in Dammam and I was besieged once more by screeching taxi drivers. Negotiating a price with one of the more honest looking guys, we set off past Dhahran, a mini-USA in the sand and the epicentre of the world's oil industry; in fact, the exact site where oil had first been discovered at Lucky Well Number 7 by Tom Barger’s American team of geologists in the late 1930s.
On the highway we skirted the chronic traffic, dust and pollution of Dammam and the driver stopped to fill up with petrol and a meeting with his boss who handed him his passport. Petrol currently costs 45 Halalah a litre – about 12p, while in Britain it was selling for £1.20. The boss asked me how much we' d agreed for the ride.
"200," I told him.
"You pay 250, OK?"
"No, not OK. We've already agreed a price, Mustafa."
"250, OK?"
I got in and we headed off, but during the journey the boss called three times using the only English he knew: 250, OK?
We dodged Al-Khobar too; the newish city that sprang up beside Dhahran and Dammam to house the army of immigrant workers - there are 9 million expats in the Kingdom. Finally the palms on the Corniche told us that the sea was just beyond and my escape was almost complete.
Before long we were on the King Fahd causeway, a 26km long bridge completed in 1986 at a cost of $718 million to link the Saudi mainland with the island of Bahrain, the sea shallow enough at 12 metres to support the road above the water. In the middle of the causeway is border control located on a small, artificial islet where at the weekend drivers flood across from Saudi to commit sin in the liberal neighbour.
On a Monday morning the checkpoint was all-but deserted. We passed easily through and I breathed a sigh of relief as we entered the capital Manama, drains blocked and up to its knees in rainwater from a winter deluge. I found a hotel – the Delmon – and crashed, waking at 5pm for a shower, dinner and beer, body clock shot to pieces.
Happily drunk after only minimum intake (abstinence certainly makes boozing cheaper) I found myself in a lounge bar with a stage and five perfectly formed Byelorussian blondes winking at me and the few other guys in the audience, dancing around to Kylie, dressed in tiny miniskirts and kinky boots. I stumbled along to Diggers Bar where a Filipino band entertained us with rock and roll cover versions and as I left one of the female singers was headbanging along to Guns and Roses ‘Sweet Child of Mine’.
The weather in the Middle East (even in winter) is usually so stiflingly hot, dusty and humid that walking is a seriously unpleasant business, but this rain in Bahrain was fantastic. I’d never seen such a sustained downpour out here, so I gladly forked out a few Dinars for a plastic cape and pounded the streets, the raindrops a therapeutic drum roll on my head, kind of like a massage, which, in fact, some ropey Chinese bird with black teeth had offered me that very morning as I finished off breakfast in the hotel lobby.
My next employer had told me to sit tight in Bahrain as they “have a man in the embassy” who can issue me with the all-important legal work visa “within days”. Unfortunately, the man in the embassy wasn’t in the embassy and those days eventually took about two months, so when the hotel sweetly put a Christmas tree up in the entrance hall I got a pang of homesickness, went down the road to a bucket travel agent and bought a dirt cheap ticket to London via Doha and Muscat, finally stepping out of Victoria Station to find snowflakes drifting down from the December sky.