Jeddah & Tabuk

Leaving Taif past midnight, Abdulrahman and I had the incredible mountain road to Mecca to traverse before getting down to Jeddah. To keep himself awake, he stopped for a strong coffee and requested I play some big tunes. So we sang and chatted our way westward. One thing we talked about was Abdulrahman’s upcoming engagement. Despite us being the same age and more and more of my friends tying the knot back home, marriage seemed an intangible concept to me. For Abdulrahman however, it was a soon to be had adventure. Abdulrahman’s mum and sisters had been searching around other families in their circle of friends for a potential wife, looking for a respectable family with a girl who is well thought of by the community. Upon choosing a girl, Abdulrahman’s mum and sisters got to see what the girl looks like so they could describe Abdulrahman to her, and then later, describe her to him. When all seemed well, his dad met with the girl’s dad to agree on a dowry which sealed the engagement. After the engagement event it is made official and Abdulrahman can finally enter his fiancé’s family house and could talk to her for the first time. During the 6-12 month engagement they will get to know each other’s personalities within the setting of the family home and then marry. Abdulrahman was obviously excited by the prospect of beginning to get to know his new fiancé in a couple of days (after the engagement) but I was also sure that he was nervous. Part of me couldn’t imagine growing up with that marriage tradition, one that fell mostly out of your control, where at first glance marriage was more about cultivating close family bonds and status rather than love. However, from the way Abdulrahman described it, he saw it as a system that places high value on the way the extended family work together, ensuring shared expectations and family support. Family is incredibly important in the Middle East and Abdulrahman said that of course people mess around before marriage, just like everywhere in the world, but his commitment to building a stable future and family for him and his new wife was the most important thing to him. While arranged marriages are often seen as categorically evil or as a concept for fun reality TV shows in the West (strange how it can be both), I think without talking to those involved, or considering the cultural background to the practice you allow your own prejudices to get in the way. Every case is different, and in Abdulrahman’s case he was excited. I wish him and his future wife all the best in their new adventure together. 

Jeddah

We arrived in Jeddah around 3am and went up to Abdulrahman’s apartment to crash. I ended up spending the next week in the city, staying with both Abdulrahman and Manuel (the Colombian I had met at the hostel in Baish), these are some of the highlights of my time in this sweaty coastal city. 

Al Balad 

Much like Riyadh, Jeddah doesn’t welcome the wanderer, the walker or the adventurer. Jeddah was made important, and therefore rich, by being the oceanside gateway to Mecca and as such it has welcomed travellers to its shores for over a millennium. However, as with most places, the admirable human desire for innovation and modernisation has been tainted and subverted by some degree of avarice. In Saudi Arabia, terrific wealth has begot unbounded expansion and ambition however, the slow kineticism of an interpersonal life is dying. Pathways and pavements, the arterial network of a city, have been replaced by the insulated and unconnected life of A to B car travel. Chance, spontaneity and sensory exploration are being filtered out bit by bit. This paint by numbers life of prescribed and delineated experience should fill us with dread but the comfort of a slowly approaching dystopia is enough to keep us all plugged in. Jeddah’s old town, Al Balad, was Saudi Arabia’s answer to Morpheus’ red pill, a way to reconnect a with the city’s lost reality. 

Before Jeddah, only Fez’s old town had ensnared me so fully. In Fez, the instant you passed beneath the arched threshold and into the climbing sprawl you were dropped out of your time. The modern world became an intangible echo of the past or a speculative thought of the future. Chaos and serenity lived side by side in the alleyway maze, dyssynchronous rhythms fuelling a frenetic and beautiful street dance. In Jeddah, elegant town houses, unconcerned with posture but rather with intricacy and vibrancy, reached upwards out of the dark alleys that they had produced. Built from Red Sea coral 500 years ago, the white houses were discoloured, mottled, cracked and weathered, signs of the passing centuries. But still they harboured colour. Wonky yet elaborately patterned wooden window screens (rawasheen) enclosed in a carved wooden latticework (mashrabiya) often provided striking greens and blues to the scene. In some places they were in as much disrepair as the buildings, showing signs of rotten joints and bent nails. However, there is something of a stoic grace to antiquity, one that cannot be defiled by the elements or neglect. Despite the frantic rallying of the historical restoration axis of evil that appears at the advent of tourism, the restorative progress in Al Balad was in its infancy and I was glad. 

During the day, Al Balad was baked incessantly. Small flies swarmed from ancient sewers and hunted in the direction of the bitter odours that repelled me. On the wider streets the occasional man with a purposeful stride and blinkered ambivalence to his surroundings walked past. Their white thobes billowing with every movement while the bunting above them hung motionless, desperate for the faintest gust of sea air to penetrate the old streets and allow the fabric to dance again. Away from the main thoroughfares, hundreds of street cats scrabbled in the dust. They stripped rotten meat from long discarded bones and ran to the safety of the darkest corners. Past midday the tall houses offered a slowly lengthening shade. Low angled sunlight, which came funnelled through narrow alleys, enriched fading colours and highlighted the endlessly characterful faces of the men who I found in the streets. Mostly they were old men, sat on their doorsteps watching the world contentedly or taking an enquiring yet detached interest in their son’s running of the business behind them. In small squares or shaded corners some old friends would come together for tea. Life moved slowly as the humidity waned and our patch of Earth turned its face from the sun. 

As I walked happily aimless through the streets, I remember my desire to absorb as much as I could, but it wasn’t until I returned at night that I felt the beating heart of Al Balad. Arriving with Manuel and his girlfriend, I immediately felt they weren’t going to be the sort of people I wanted to explore with. They wanted to know where we were going and which way was quickest. I didn’t have answers to either question and I didn’t want to produce any. It wasn’t long before they left me to get food and I could breathe the unburdened sigh of a misanthrope who’s friend has just left him to sweet solitude once more. 

In contrast to the daytime, the streets of Al Balad came alive after sunset. Gone were the rancid smells, flies and sweat. Now, freshly cooked food and the mysteriously intoxicating scents of incense combined, and the freshness of the not too distant sea air felt tangible once again. The streets were packed with exuberant children playing games, swaggering teenagers delighting in new found freedom, young families and old couples, everyone contributing to the rejuvenating buzz gracing the ancient streets. Closed wooden doors from the day had been retracted and dazzling shops appeared on the bottom floors of the town houses, spilling harsh white light onto the street in the process. After a while I headed towards the Bedouin Market and this was where I really felt in amongst the culture and the people again. And that’s the beauty of a market. A total immersion in the unfiltered, unabridged and untamed life of the people. Unlike the dull-eyed vacant stare of a supermarket shopper, market eyes are aware. No matter if it’s in Shoreditch or Saudi Arabia, a market is a primal place, one of sensory expression, a connection to a place, a product and a people. 

The Bedouin Market was the busiest section of Al Balad, everyone was funnelled between carts of produce while lively sellers watched all eyes that crossed their stall. To my right was a large North African guy in a stylish thobe and taqiyah, he commanded the entrance to the market with his sheer size and buoyancy of his personality. Behind him skinny Pakistani guys manned carts, their eyes and hands darting with impressive speed to keep up with business. Behind the overflowing carts was the pavement where the old men sat. They were backlit by the same harsh white lighting coming from the shop fronts and while they watched the same scene as me I’m sure they remembered clamour of selling at the frenetic cart-side, a job that now fell to their sons.

Food

Due to the complete illegality of alcohol in Saudi Arabia, restaurants and cafes are the places to be on an evening. Most of my time in Jeddah, therefore, was spent with a cold juice or a hot tea in a hand that would have gratefully received a beer. To accompany the litany of non-alcoholic beverages, I ate my sorrows away. These are some of my most memorable food experiences in the city 

Breakfast

Leave all notions of cereal, pastries, sausages or bacon at home. Saudi breakfasts are traditionally based around the Bedouin staples of bread, dates and coffee. However, Yemen has thankfully influenced Saudi Arabia over the millennia and many of the most popular dishes eaten in Saudi Arabia to this day have a Yemeni origin, the main breakfast dish being masoub. In its basic form, the dish consists of mashed bananas and torn flatbread. However, this is then enriched with butter, cream, spices, honey, and dates. A delicious concoction if I’ve ever heard one. With a heavy creamy nature similar to porridge but with the added sweetness of honey and the addition of bananas (to give false hope to health freaks), masoub is a great start to a day. In fact, the good thing about breakfast is you have the opportunity to work off all of the fatty, sugary, heart clogging nonsense during the day, you’ll inevitably fail, but at least you can try. 

Dinners

Continuing the theme of lurking cardiac arrest, we move onto one of my favourite dinner locales and also the scene of complete and utter betrayal, Al Wezzan. One of the oldest and most famous Lebanese restaurants in the city, Al Wezzan came highly recommended by Abdulrahman. When we went we had a feast of mezze dips and fresh salad items to dip into them, followed by masses of grilled meat and flatbread. Everything was incredibly tasty and fresh. Along with the meal, we got sweetened pomegranate juice served inside a halved pomegranate and Abdulrahman asked me what it is called in English. Thank God he did because, that word was about the hardest thing for him to say in the English language and it caused a lot of laughs. By the end of our main course, Abdulrahman had given me an Arab name (Jassim – meaning strong man) due to my Arabic skills and we had eaten so much that we got up to pay without dessert. I insisted on paying for the meal because Adulrahman had paid for everything for me for the last week. However, me paying for the meal made him feel very uncomfortable, like I was buying his hospitality. But, I had to say thank you somehow and I can’t think of a better way than freshly cooked meat. On my second time to Al Wezzan with Manuel, I was determined to get dessert. I asked the waiter if they had knafeh and the answer was yes. I was immediately excited. However, I had experienced the sorry state of Saudi knafeh in Riyadh and so was wary, I had to enquire more thoroughly. I asked, “Is it Nabulsi knafeh?” (the original type of the dessert with white-brine cheese), once again the waiter assuaged my fears. Knafeh was ordered and we waited. It wasn’t long before the waiter came back and placed something on the table. Some bastardisation of perfection. What we had been served was a terrible imitation of khishneh knafeh filled, not with cheese, but with thick sweet cream. I was astounded at the level of betrayal, seething with unfulfilled rage. But it was made even worse when the waiter returned and said to me, to my actual face, “It’s great, right?” (or the Arabic equivalent). Stunned out of my usual British sensibilities and into an untrodden realm of restaurant confrontation, I simply said, “This is not knafeh.” Unfortunately, this man had come to play and fired back with the simple assertion that it was. I then brought out the big guns. I told him I lived in Amman and ate Nabulsi knafeh regularly and the thing he had put in front of me was not Nabulsi knafeh. He then said, “Oh no this is (insert some word that isn’t ‘knafeh’ here), it’s with cream instead of cheese.” SO WHY DID YOU BRING IT TO ME?! I was done fighting and instead we left, the overly sweet abomination lying unfinished on our table.  

Manuel was living in a neighbourhood called Al Bawadi. His apartment was bare but nice but he wasn’t keen on his local area saying that it’s a bit dodgy. During my time there I saw plenty of rubbish on the streets and rundown sections but the neighbourhood actually had a lot going for it too. With tonnes of local restaurants and shops, the prices weren’t hiked up for rich Saudis and I didn’t feel out of place walking into an establishment looking like a bedraggled backpacker. There were two places in this neighbourhood that impressed me especially: 

1. مطاعم ومطابخ قدر وصاج الطعم الحجازي الأصيل– Yes, I’m aware this isn’t in English, and that’s because this inconsiderate restaurant doesn’t have an English name. Pretty much they sell rice dishes, sauces and meats on a daily rotation. The menu is organised into days and so what is available to you is always changing. The spiced rice with some sort of curry sauce I had there was unbelievable, with a more liberal helping of spices and flavour than many of the more simple dishes I had been eating in Saudi Arabia. Simple, no frills, tasty food. That’s what dreams are made of. 
2. Houna Tunis – This was the scene of the first meal of mine and Manuel’s reunion. I had been living with Abdulrahman for a while and when he went back to Taif for his engagement I moved over to live with Manuel. The restaurant was blue and white to the extreme and felt like a Greek taverna, with a relaxed vibe which stretched the speed of table service. We sat and ate one mixed seafood dish in a rich tomato and pepper sauce and one dish containing a green sauce made from peppers that was topped with olives, eggs and various other bits and bobs. All of it was incredibly tasty and counted as a very successful introduction to Tunisian food for me. As per usual bread was involved. And as per usual it made the meal 10x better. This bread wasn’t unleavened like the majority of Arabian bread, instead we were served hot fluffy pockets of heaven straight from the oven. Consuming hot bread is one of the greatest pleasures available to mankind. Prometheus stole fire for us, raising us from aimless creatures living in a physical and creative twilight to ones with a roaring fire in both hearth and soul. People became bakers (and other less noble professions) to harness this new found fire. Prometheus was punished by having his liver pecked out by an eagle for eternity, all so we could inhale enough bread to give us diabetes (as is our human right). So, to honour this most noble of sacrifices we ordered three baskets of fresh bread and devoured the lot. 

Many other restaurant meals were had due to the lack of a fully functioning kitchen in either of the apartments and all were good. Indian street food, Mexican empanadas or good ol’ no nonsense rice and meat, Jeddah had plenty to offer.

Activities

When I wasn’t stuffing my face or sat in the air-con of one of the hundreds of cafes in the city, my presence encouraged my hosts to get out and about in the evenings. Before Abdulrahman went to get engaged we spent a lovely evening cruising about the corniche, a rare walkable section of the city. There we got tea, played thumping club music in his car and had a lovely chat with views of the tallest fountain in the world (King Fahd’s Fountain) in the distance. 

However, when Abdulrahman left, Manuel and I were a little more active with our evenings. On one such occasion we went to the mall. Now, in general, I am not a fan of malls. In fact, I would say that I actively dislike them. However, I was assured this one would be worth my time. Manuel and his girlfriend had picked me up from Al Balad and then it was clear that Manuel was in a bad mood and his girlfriend didn’t appear to be the chattiest person in the world. Things were going poorly. However, when we arrived and found our way to the appropriate area of the mall, all sadness was tossed aside and we all had a fantastic evening. The mall had an enormous activity zone on one end and Jeddah’s growing liberal attitudes were starting to show; boys and girls were hanging out together and having fun. There was bowling, ping pong, archery, go karting, pool and more but to entertain us while we waited for space on one of the bigger activities, Manuel and I took a swing at the punch bag machine. Both of us had experience with martial arts (including a session the day before) and through sheer basic knowledge of boxing mechanics, we had soon gathered a small group of teenage spectators eager to see some high scores. Warmed up and ready for more, we decided to try our hand at archery next. I channelled my inner Katniss Everdeen, storming the Capitol and uniting the districts under my banner, the Mockingjames. In other words, I did well at archery. The final activity of the evening was bowling and as I made absolutely clear in this post from Jordan, I’m not someone to be trifled with on the lanes. Dangerously athletic but dangerously inconsistent, you never know what ten-pin carnage may ensue. On this occasion I pulled it out of the bag and dominated the game. 

The final activity of my Jeddah trip was by far the most exhilarating, go karting. On the outskirts of the city is the track uncreatively named “The Track”. It was an enormous outdoor track with plenty of variation in the corners and a long straight. We did our completely unsupervised safety video on our phones and then got straight into the cars. With Manuel having a background in both car and motorbike racing I had to bring my A-game to stay ahead of him and register a good time. After the first round, hands aching from gripping the wheel, I had registered the fastest time by the skin of my teeth. So we went again, swapping cars and this time Manuel got the better of me as I struggled to control a slightly less grippy car. The whole experience was a white knuckle thrill ride under a slowly setting Saudi sun and I loved it.

Black Market Boys

Even though I mentioned the saddening lack of ice cold beers to counteract the oppressive heat in Jeddah, the city is a fairly liberal place, and with more liberal ideas comes a desire to get tasty illegal things. On my arrival to Manuel’s flat he showed me two water bottles in his fridge but he warned me not to drink out of one of them. It turned out that he had made that mistake late one night and accidentally swigged a gulp of secret moonshine. The illegal liquor that Manuel had procured was made by a chemistry student to make some money on the side. Alcohol is a lucrative black market commodity in Saudi Arabia. Manuel and I had bought some olives from the market and one very pleasant evening sat watching TV with moonshine and salty olives, our very own makeshift moonshine martini. 

Another day another peek behind the black market curtain. We visited one of Manuel’s friends, a motorbike mechanic. This guy and his assistant were stoned beyond belief and yet it seems they had been left in charge of the reassembly and reconstruction of various expensive machines. Manuel had told me that the guy is always high and to be that high that often in Saudi Arabia means you have to also be very rich. Drugs come across the desert borders in the hands of smugglers and they charge an extortionate fee due to the risk of being publicly beheaded if caught. Sat in the utter filth of this guy’s bedroom which smelt distinctively of the rabbit hutch in the corner, I wasn’t getting rich guy vibes or in fact genius mechanic vibes. But after Manuel got him talking about the motorbikes he was working on, the guy’s brain suddenly switched gear and the level of mechanical expertise he was functioning on became clear. We ordered a huge box of chicken strips and sauces to the workshop/house and had a pretty chilled evening there. 

Tabuk

I left Jeddah after a dinner with Manuel and his girlfriend then spent the next 15 hours on a coach to Tabuk in the north of the country. My return to the boundless expanse of the desert felt like a homecoming. Stony plains dotted with trees were washed with successive waves of sunlight and shade, ridges of burgundy stone rose in the distance and behind them a harsh saddle of shining but sable rock dominated the horizon, the tumultuous sky bending to its will. As perspectives slowly changed along our serpentine passage through the desert, a gathering darkness aided the theatrics of the already ostentatious vastness of the scene. Sand was collecting, the strong wind allowing grains liberation from their usual rolling, tumbling or bouncing movement, today they were soaring together. The sandstorm whipped around us, visibility reduced to the fuzzy outline of the roadside a few feet below me but the bus continued unconcerned. 

On my arrival to the road where my hotel was supposed to be I was lost and for good reason, the hotel was completely unsigned. When I walked in there was no reception so I wandered around the empty halls hoping to bump into someone, until a largely unhelpful employee finally took me to my room in which the WIFI was not working. My furnished apartment, which smelt strongly of varnish, was functional and I slept until it was time for a magnificent Yemeni dinner. I had planned on visiting the vast beauty of Wadi Al Disah during my time in this end of the country but the lack of Couchsurfing connections and my general tiredness meant I was ready to head back to Jordan to chill for a week before going home. Therefore, the next day, after a cheeky PCR test, I walked around the city in the bright but frail early morning sunshine. 

First, I walked along wide avenues where the smell of breakfast food swept across the fresh morning air. Sometimes, I would slow down to get a better look at the chefs hooking tameez bread out of the large round ovens with metal hooked sticks, the ease at which they did it was a sign of their skill. These small local breakfast shops, which were filling up with tea-fuelled men, were a nice break from the general monotony of homeware behemoths elsewhere on the street. I turned off the large avenue and headed towards what I assumed was the old town (from a cursory look on the map). What greeted me was a long, wide, pedestrianised street. It was tiled underfoot and I soaked in the rare carless quiet, giving myself time to peer into shops selling carpets, farwa coats and other garments as I made my way steadily uphill. It was incredibly tranquil walking along that road in the sunshine, the hustle and bustle of the souq (which flanked the street to the right) hadn’t started up yet and so I was left with the quiet work of a shoemaker. He was sat solemnly on the roadside with his basic tools focussed on his craft, all the while shemagh wearing drifters moved around the street in front of him with lackadaisical ease. At the top of the hill was the old fort but I was barred entry by a smiling black-toothed guard who explained that I couldn’t go in because of something to do with a school (my Arabic didn’t grab much more from him than that). So, a little disappointed but not disheartened, I continued my scenic wandering through the constantly changing shopping areas. Two men in particular caught my eye. Both sat on rocks under the shade of a big tree on the pavement. One had prayer beads hanging loosely from one hand while the other held and sipped at a cup of tea, his eyes more aware than the other’s. The light breeze enlivened the sunlight which played on their dark clothing and the lower limbs of the tree gently waved above their covered heads. All the while they chatted like old friends, as happy in the silences as they were in the lively rush of conversation. Behind them, and continuing along the small road I was stood on, were shops grinding corn and other things to be put into sacks and then shipped off in the trucks that stood waiting. The smell of freshly ground produce was sweet and the constant back and forth of business contrasted beautifully to the two men, contented and still.

The Border 

At the hotel I discovered some disturbing news, the health declaration form for entering Jordan didn’t include Al Durra (the land border I had arrived through) as a valid exit point. Having already booked by bus to the Saudi border town I was now in full investigation mode. Unfortunately for me there was no information anywhere online apart from a warning saying if you fill in the form incorrectly you can be fined thousands of pounds. So emails were sent and the Jordan Tourism Board who replied saying that “the form doesn’t include Al Durra”, yes, yes I know that, that’s why I was asking for some clarification. When I asked for the second time if it is still possible to cross there , they replied, “Yes”. Ok great. But knowing Jordanian administrative procedures are completely up to the whim of some random bloke on the day, I decided to enlist my Jordanian friend Firas to ring them and check. He told me that they had said there is no way of entering Jordan through Al Durra. *World weary sigh*. Back to square one then. I decided then that I would just go through the much closer border crossing of Al Mudawwara. I had previously avoided the idea of using this border crossing because I had experience with Al Durra which is also close to the city of Aqaba on the other side. Al Mudawwara on the other hand may be close to Tabuk but it was a country mile from anything in Jordan, in fact it was in the middle of the remote eastern desert and renowned for drug smuggling. Anyway, it was an option on the health declaration form and I was losing the will to live, so I quickly decided it was my best shot. After cancelling my bus and wrestling with the health declaration form for over an hour due to a grainy 350kb screenshot being too large a file for the insertion of my passport photo, I headed downstairs. I needed to get everything printed, you know, like you can in a normal hotel, one of those ones not run my incompetent and suspiciously absent men. Annoyed, I slid my room key under the office door and got an Uber to the PCR testing facility. The girls in there had been very friendly and spoke excellent English the day before and so I was confident they would help me out. I was right and I soon had all of the documents that I needed to get across the border. Now to get there. 

I ordered an Uber to the start of the straight road leading to the border because the border would be an hour further in the Uber and I’m not made of money. I hoped for a hitchhike and no more than two minutes later a gruff looking Jordanian said he was going to his farm in Bir Ibn Hirmas which was around two thirds of the way there. I hopped in and we started chatting about all sorts from family to religion, he was really nice and soon announced he would take me all the way to the border. What a guy. 

At the border he wished me luck and I approached the booth. I went inside and talked to the guards, they said that it was impossible to cross the border on foot and that I would have to go back to Tabuk, find a taxi that would take me all the way back and through the border. There was no chance I was doing any such thing. So, I waited, pacing the quiet patch of pavement next to the border waiting for an opportunity to flag down a car. Not many came past and most that did were families. If there is a woman in the car, you’ve got no chance of getting a lift. After almost an hour, one car stopped. It was a taxi taking a Saudi guy to Jordan and there was room for me. Neither of them spoke any English but they seemed friendly. Saudi customs was a breeze, as with my entry to the country the guards were smiley and chatty but the Jordanian side… well that was a different story. 

At the arrival gate I was asked for my Jordan pass (the pass that waives the visa fee and allows access to all the tourist sites of the country), I didn’t have one because I didn’t want to visit anything. Then they asked for my visa. As a Brit, I can get one on arrival so I told them and they asked for the fee of 40 JD. I offered up my debit card and they told me that they only took cash. Now this is where the problems began. I didn’t have any Jordanian dinars because I had been in Saudi Arabia where dinars don’t help you out much and I didn’t have enough of any other currency to change into dinars (I’m not the sort of guy to be carrying around £40 of any currency in my wallet). I quickly suggested that I just pay for the Jordan pass online, show them proof of payment from my bank and then they waive the visa fee and let me through. Seemed like a pretty good example of fast thinking from me, but it was shut down without explanation. From then on things were going nowhere (even with the help of Firas whom I had called to help translate). Eventually my taxi driver, seeing the impasse at which we had found ourselves, decided to pay for my visa and I could pay him back when we got to Ma’an (the first town we would reach in Jordan). This was a huge relief and a massive help, they stamped my passport, I now had my visa. Now only the simple task of passport control. I was practically home and dry. But that’s when they get you. 

As the man flicked through my passport, and the various stamps therein, I watched on with hope and perhaps complacency, certain the worst was behind me. However, I was then asked to take a seat and my passport was taken elsewhere. Never a good sign. A few minutes later I was told to follow an employee to a drab back office where a steely eyed balding man sat behind a large wooden desk holding my passport. This guy had obviously missed the countrywide memo for a friendly tourist-centric patter for all Jordanian officials. This was not the usual, “What are your plans in Jordan?” or “What address are you going to stay at in Jordan?”, instead this was an interrogation meant to trip me up, to bend my words and make me confess. 

At first he was very focussed on my previous time in Jordan and why I had spent so much time in the country. When I explained that I was volunteering, he proceeded to try and get me to confess to working illegally. Obviously that didn’t work. So he changed tactics, asking if I had seen much of the country during my time in Jordan in 2020. I replied honestly saying I’d been all over. Of course this was a ploy, he followed up by asking me, “If you were in Jordan during lockdown in 2020 how did you see so much of the country, you broke the lockdown rules?” I had to crack a smile at this one, it was sneaky. After explaining myself, he asked if I was a rich man, not a question I’ve been asked many times before, one simple look at me or my tattered Sports Direct trainers can usually tell you that the answer is no. But he had seen all of the stamps in the passport and then I had been volunteering in Jordan for eight months so I saw it as a fair question. I told him that I had stayed for free in Jordan because the owner of the hostel is a good friend. This astounded him. Astonishment turned into disbelief. And disbelief turned into hostility. He said that I was obviously lying, no one would let me stay for free for that long and that I was obviously working illegally. I was staying calm and collected, answering honestly and with an uncharacteristically chirpy and enthusiastic demeanour.

Since, he hadn’t managed to wheedle out any evidence of illegal teaching or hostel work in the country, he began to grasp blindly for straws. He asked me if I was in the army or previously volunteered for the army saying, “Look at you! You look like army to me.” Not sure whether thanking him with a salute and a wink was the correct move at this time, I just reiterated my normal non-military life. If I wasn’t army I must be a spy and this was where the questioning moved on to next. He questioned why I was travelling through the Middle East with “no plans, no job, and no friends”. No friends. This guy was apparently done with investigative national security questions and instead attempted to hurt my feelings. My lack of contacts in Saudi and my chill attitude wasn’t sitting right with him saying, “Nobody just goes to Saudi Arabia for a month with no friends in the country, you cannot be a tourist”. Things weren’t getting better for me. In fact, he had started the interrogation with questions I could answer, but now he was attacking my unemployment and inability to form close emotional bonds with my peers. These things are for my therapist not for you. As a final Hail Mary he scrolled through the stamps in my passport, found a visa for South Korea and said, “You’ve been to Korea? North Korea?” I replied that as he should be able to see it clearly says South Korea on the visa. He then questioned why I was working illegally in South Korea, a stab in the dark comment which didn’t make sense as I didn’t even manage to get there before Covid. Then sighing and running his hands over his face and head, he summarised the things I had claimed during the interrogation. As he rounded up he said, “This is what you are trying to tell me?! I’m finding it very hard to believe. Wait outside.” 

During the interrogation I had been calm, forthcoming and friendly. But now, without my passport and with the endless assertions that this man didn’t believe a word I said weighing on me, I sat and contemplated my chances. I thought it was about 50/50 that I would go to some sort of jail until proof had been dug up about my whereabouts during 2020. So, with no internet to tell my family of my situation, I sat very nervously in my cold metal chair in the empty border station. My taxi driver came and sat next to me, shaking his head at the Jordanian bureaucracy and smiling at me as if that would help my heart not thump its way out of my chest and onto the shiny tiled floor.

An agonising ten minutes later, a border guard emerged from the back office and gave me my passport saying, “You can go,” i.e. the best three words I could’ve heard right then. We left the border station and were out into Jordan, speeding through unspoilt Jordanian wilderness. To my left were the flat topped mountains on Wadi Rum’s wild and untouched eastern frontier which rose unsteadily from the plain below. Slopes curved down from vast ridges and, closer still, the old Hejaz railway cut through the desert to join us at the roadside. This railway made Jordan what it is today, connecting the Ottoman Empire with the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia, bringing pilgrims through the long traversed land. Unlike the pilgrims of a bygone age on a journey of physical and spiritual discovery, I could let my heartrate return to normal, the unknown lay behind me and I could casually embrace the dry desert wind because I was back home. 

Final Thoughts 

Saudi Arabia has far-reaching and ambitious plans for its future as a global tourist hub. Futuristic projects seem to be everywhere in the country and sure enough tourists are beginning to flock. But the dazzling futurism of Riyadh and the glitz of Jeddah aren’t the things that will stick with me when I think of Saudi Arabia in the decades to come. Instead, it’ll be the kind smile of my hitchhike driver in the mountains near Wadi Lajab, the elegant ease at which Sudanese workers moved in the goat market in Baish or the infallible generosity, openness and curiosity of Abdulrahman in Taif. One day I hope to return to Saudi, to make the trip to the monumental Wadi Al Disah and to see the uncompromising desolation of the Empty Quarter that inspired and terrified Thesiger in equal measure. But mainly I hope to return to Taif, to eat a meal with Abdulrahman and his future sons and share stories of the years since we last met. Saudi isn’t about the places, it’s about the people; the people you’ll never forget meeting and the people you’ll hope to meet again.