Saudi Arabia - Bucket and Spade Country!

 

So, a short but very pleasant week in Durban after Ivory Coast and again I’m off to lands afar – this time its Saudi Arabia. The trip started off fantastically from JHB in that I marched myself off to the Slow Lounge – an airport lounge for, amongst others, holders of a Platinum FNB bank card. How special I felt. As it was my first time in an airport lounge (never been a Business Class celebrity, let alone First Class) I behaved like a small child. I was greeted almost immediately by a waiter who gave me the guided tour of the whole lounge once I mentioned it was my first time. I was quite impressed with how smart, clean and large it was. And being fairly late in the evening, almost completely empty. There are showers, different types of couch-like chairs, private sleep rooms with their own TVs, and free food and drink. I may have made a small pig of myself…

Slow Lounge	Bathroom with shower

Flight out was on Etihad which, while long and exhausting, was a comfortable flight. It seems many Aussies and Chinese fly home from SA via Abu Dhabi, and the Chinese being as populous as they are, dominated the plane. So I was very grateful that I was sat next to a young blonde female student who neither talked incessantly, nor snored while I was trying to sleep. Not too shabby!

Om nom nom. Starting with desert first…

The flight took an hour longer than expected (8.5 hours) following a massive backlog of inbound flights due to fog at Abu Dhabi airport. We sat in the hold for the entire hour (I timed him – his holding pattern accuracy was good) and I counted at least 7 of us all holding in the same place at different altitudes, although one other aircraft was on the same level as us, more or less on the opposite side of the hold. We turned on top of another aircraft that must have been only 2000’ below us so that I could read the “Etihad” lettering on the body clearly.

A painful 6 hour stop in Abu Dhabi before boarding the flight to Jeddah. However as big and, I’m sure, impressive as Abu Dhabi and its airport must be, there were fewer shops to wander through than JHB International and all much smaller and with rip-off prices much like every other “duty free” store I’ve ever walked through.

Abu Dhabi international concourse – one big circle of very little

I stand corrected. I typed all of the above during my 6 hour layover, and when I actually left the central concourse above to walk to my departure gate it took me nearly 20mins and I passed through a number of smaller shopping zones. Certainly the one above is the main one, but it was by no means the only.

The flight to Jeddah was filled almost entirely with Indians. They were all wearing white robes (really just a thin blanket over their shoulders) and with the lugging of baggage etc. most of the robes were falling off revealing that they were topless underneath. Sadly this was just the men – the women were in Saris which weren’t at all open. But it was a strange sight to board the plane and see rows of half naked men – like a charter flight to a nudist retreat. But they were the worst passengers I’ve ever seen (and I’ve flown with Russians heading home from oil rig work). They couldn’t speak English, so ignored every single instruction from the cabin crew. When they initially boarded they immediately chose their own seats, delaying the flight while the cabin crew had to sort it all out and move them around. As we were lining up on the runway to take off an old lady got up and started wandering down the aisle. Same story on landing. They just did everything they were asked not to do and had to eventually be shouted at like school kids – I felt really bad for the poor cabin crew having to work like kindergarten teachers!

Hmm… Not quite as posh as the Slow Lounge – but you can shower with the convenient hand shower while having a pooh – bonus!	The plane was full of Indians – must have been a religious pilgrimage to Jeddah or something

We arrived in Jeddah but the agent wasn’t waiting for me, and with 40 hours with only a couple of hours doze I got very irritable. After standing next to the arrival doors for an hour, texting people in SA and SA (see what I did there…) he finally sauntered up and got crapped on by me. Quickly, however, I realised it would have been safer to have just not said a word. He clearly had severe anger issues (I’m not kidding). His boss phoned him to crap on him for being late (clearly my project manager had had a go at his boss) and he instantly started shouting aggressively back into the phone before hanging up on his boss. They couldn’t find my ticket for my onward flight so decided to take me to a hotel for the night.

That had to be the worst drive I have ever undertaken. I’m honestly not doing a “Cathy Mitchell” and adding exaggerations and embellishments to the magnitude of 5 or 6 times the truth, this guy drove so close to the car in front (at 100kph) that I couldn’t see the car’s number plate! He would start to overtake the car in front on the narrow shoulder, pull up almost level and then hoot rudely because the car hadn’t moved out of his lane to let my guy in. He wedged himself between two cars, straddling the lane marker and did the same. And the traffic was heavy and we never stopped doing 100 for more than a few seconds. At one point someone pulled into our lane in front of him. He chased the other guy, overtook him, cut him off and then slowed down to 40kph, blocking the guy behind. It was unbelievable. He was incredibly rude. The Indian man behind the front desk at the hotel got shouted at loudly for answering the reception phone while he was dealing with us – in other words not giving us his full, continuous attention.

Wow! I was so tired by the time I got to the hotel that I took one of Cathy’s pills that “just relaxes you allowing you to fall asleep”. What a liar Cathy turned out to be. I showered, left completely unintelligible comments on Whatsapp, plugged my phone in to charge and TURNED IT OFF (?!) and don’t remember any of that. If you darted a charging bull with a crushed up pill it would fall asleep before it hit you! So my alarm didn’t go off but thankfully the driver called up to my room at 5am to tell me “you must come now!”, which I did in a frantic dash.

The main drag through Bisha	Road quality on the outskirts of the town
Much better roads once out of town	This reminds me a lot of southern Namibia
Squiggly kilometres to Squiggle	Some very large, isolated homesteads / compounds

Final flight was to Bisha, not unlike Bishu in complexity and size. The photos are once I left Bisha and drove the 1 hour to camp. The camp is a small open-cast gold mine which is busy being decommissioned and slowly taken apart. The same mining company has a number of mines dotted around and is clearly looking for more, using us to map the ground along what I assume is a gold-bearing vein (lode) body. There aren’t any geologists here to question – certainly no English speaking ones, so I can only speculate.

Palm trees seem to be the only planted tree in the country	Between a spike and a hard place…
Very arid and inhospitable