Jan 13 - Up early to pack up and get on the road, as today’s drive will be about six hours. Down in the reception, waiting to check out, I meet a man sitting there with a keffiyeh who asks me where I am from. When I tell him he smiles, “I am Kuwaiti! USA and Kuwait, brothers!”
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This time, our 300 km drive through the dune fields of Al-Nufud al-Kabir is in the bright sun. It is interesting how different it looks, the rich orange color now much more subdued. I feel like returning to Jubbah for lunch, since it is such a nice place, but it is already too many hours to get to our destination today. We basically go non-stop until reaching Buraydah (pop. 745,000). On the way, sweat it through four different police checkpoints, but for each they thankfully show no interest in asking me for driving documents. There isn’t much to see on this road once east of Jubbah, the landscape is mostly flat and gray, and a series of large electric transmission lines follow us the whole way.
Buraydah is predictably sprawling and vast, but we find the hotel without a single mandatory U-turn which is unusual. The room is decent enough with the world’s tiniest kitchen and helpful staff who bring a fold-out bed for Odette.
We head west through some small streets to an area with restaurants. It is immediately clear that we are in a section of town populated by almost all migrant workers. It feels like we stepped out of KSA and into South Asia. The dress is not Saudi at all (most looks Pakistani), and I hear relatively little Arabic being spoken. Additionally, we realize after about ten minutes of walking that we haven’t seen a single woman. We find a Nepalese restaurant, where they make us up a great dish of momos (chicken and veggie dumplings). Many people in this restaurant look Nepali to me, not surprising considering how many come to the GCC countries for work. Go shopping for some breakfast food after this, and finally, after almost an hour on the streets of Buraydah, see three women buying fruit. They also look Indian, and we are gobsmacked that one is not even wearing a hijab.
