My Travel Adventures

The night before leaving for Burundi, I had an interesting conversation with a political scientist from Nigeria. I had asked him why French and British Africa were so different, and why much stronger connections exist between Paris and its former colonies than is the case for London. For all their faults, my political scientist friend said, the British had gone much further than the French in building lasting institutions and educating the general populace. Not only that: the British colonial venture involved a broader segment of society and faced somewhat more democratic scrutiny. He pointed to the former colonies of Belgium as a case in point for how autocratic colonialism destroyed society. It was in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi that some of the worst violence broke out in the decades after independence.

When I boarded my flight to Entebbe, I politely asked the flight attendant whether she could help me make my next flight, which was scheduled to leave for Bujumbura just forty-five minutes after our arrival. Much to my surprise, she said yes, and sat me in the row right behind business class. The plane took off five minutes ahead of schedule, and it arrived by the gate in Entebbe a full ten minutes ahead too. Still, I felt stressed, so when the business class passengers started leaving, I asked another flight attendant to let me leave with them. In the blazing Ugandan sun, I rushed across the tarmac into the airport building where the airport staff already stood waiting for people transferring for their Bujumbura-bound flight. They sped me through customs and up towards the departure gate in no time.

I arrived in Medina at nine in the morning and was out of the airport within fifteen minutes. A taxi dropped me off right in front of Quba Mosque, a glistening white building with three domes and four minarets at the southern end of the city. Quba prides itself on being the oldest mosque in the world, its first stone being laid by the Prophet Muhammad in the first year of his emigration to Medina (the Hijrah). The current building, however, retains little to nothing of the original structure, which underwent gradual changes over the centuries until it was abruptly knocked down and replaced in the 1980s.

I started my second day in Saudi Arabia by eating the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner, after which I headed to the old town of al-Ula. I had saved two parking lots on my phone: one just south of the old town and one just north of it. I did not like the idea of walking all the way from the parking lot into the old town under the scorching sun, but when I arrived at the southern parking lot, I found it had a whole fleet of golf carts and a minibus. I cannot conceive this whole operation to be profitable. The buses and golfcarts are free, and they depart as soon as a single person climbs on board, employing perhaps dozens of drivers. I ought to note that many of the drivers were women, which I did not find remarkable at the time, but it now strikes me as quite a large stride from the times when women were protesting in Saudi Arabia for the right to drive.

My return flight from London to Nairobi took me through Jeddah: in recent years, Saudi Arabia has been investing a lot of money into the national carrier and Jeddah’s airport, hoping to turn the city into another Dubai. The flight itself did not really catch my eye. It was only slightly cheaper than most of the other ones on offer and it involved a layover in the middle of the night. What did catch my eye, however, was the option of a day’s layover in Jeddah, which I had never visited before, and which opened the possibility of turning a day’s layover into a whole weekend.