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.

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.