My Travel Adventures

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.