Day 1 of My Sprint through Saudi Arabia: Jeddah

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.

I arrived in Jeddah at half past eleven in the evening. I had intended to leave my suitcase in storage rather than bring it to the hotel, the plan being to travel with only my backpack and pick up my suitcase on my flight out. However, I was in such a rush to get to sleep that I completely forgot this plan. In what I can only describe as a clear-minded haze, I rushed my way through immigration, answered all my messages, loaded my suitcase into the trunk of the car, and only realised what I had done when we were on the highway.

I set my alarm to half past seven in the morning to give myself enough time for a walk through the centre of Jeddah, after which I planned to return to the hotel and take my suitcase to the airport. I worried about the timing and had some difficulty falling asleep, but it turned out there was no need for stress. My walking tour was fast, with the old city larger than I had pictured but smaller than I had feared. I first made my way to Sharif Gate. This was once the southern entrance to the city, which has since then levelled its walls to accommodate over three million people. Cutting through the southern end of the old city, I found the gate to Mecca in the east. Ironically, it led straight into a row of barriers.

The entire historic centre was almost deserted but for an omnipresent legion of stray cats, who seemed emaciated despite an abundance of automated cat feeders. The next largest group of inhabitants were the cleaning staff and construction workers. Perhaps as much as one half of the old town was being renovated, ostensibly to live up to the hype that Saudi Arabia’s incessant charm offensive has been trying to raise among potential tourists. The state of the mashrabiyas was the clearest indicator of how these efforts were progressing. Some of these projecting windows with wooden latticework practically sparkled with new paint on some buildings, while on other buildings they slanted under the weight of their own age. Many streets and buildings were closed off with barriers, and whenever I wandered too far off the polished paths, I found myself on dusty, crumbled streets smelling of cat faeces.

Still, Jeddah left behind a nice impression, albeit somewhat marred by the premonition of its imminent hollowing out by mass tourism. Within my first few minutes on the street, I had already been approached by a friendly local for a short chat in broken English, and I found that the drivers were not as short tempered as in some of the other Arabic-speaking countries I have visited. I spent around two hours walking along the quiet streets of the old town and reached the northern gate to Medinah before I decided to return to the hotel, where I called a taxi to the airport.

The luggage storage was not too difficult to find. I knew it was supposed to be right by the high-speed railway station, but when I reached it, I had to wait a few minutes for the only employee there to return from his cigarette break. I spent another half hour before lunch looking for the airport aquarium, which is reportedly the biggest airport aquarium in the world. None of the airport staff, however, could tell me where it was.

The flight to al-Ula did not pass peaceably. Around halfway to our destination, we ran into clouds and turbulences, and during our descent, the plane was seized by desert winds. Through my window, looking against the clouds all lit up by the sun, I saw rows of mountain silhouettes bobbing up and down, while the windows on the right side peered over the vividly red earth threatening to meet us in an ungentle manner. When we landed, it seemed as though we had touched down on Mars. The landscape stretched out flat from the airport, suddenly transforming into jagged red cliffs in the distance. In a few spots, vibrantly green trees sprung up against this sea of red, while the houses seemed to yield and subside under the monotonous beige of the foreground.

I rented a car at the airport and drove to the apartment I was renting for the night, but of course because it was an apartment, I had to drive off again to procure myself some food. I had forgotten to properly research what driving in Saudi Arabia would be like, so I was thoroughly puzzled by the broad roads, some of which did not have any clear markings to indicate how many cars could fit on them side by side. I also failed to appreciate the Saudi love for speed bumps, which often appeared completely unannounced and at other times heralded intersections at which whoever came first had the right of way (or so, at least, it seemed to me – I have not yet figured out the system).