Jan 15 - A lot of traveling today. My original plan had been to get to Riyadh yesterday and spend a day there before flying out of KSA, but I didn’t want to change hotels two days in a row. Also, Riyadh is very expensive, even for this country. In retrospect, I know there are things to see there and any future trip to KSA will need to include it.
The first part of our drive goes through some more dune fields. These, unlike those west of Ha’il, are without vegetation and clearly on the move. At one point we go up a steep incline to a plateau, cutting through horizontal sediments.
Finish our 340 km drive at the King Khalid International Airport. Yet again we are hit with rain, and a lot of airport construction that makes finding the car rental return a challenge. Janet notes that we are now at an endpoint to our KSA tour, and we have yet to see any infrastructure pertaining to oil extraction.
The airport is slick and efficient, with minimal standing in line. Maybe we just hit it at a good time of day. Change out all my remaining Saudi riyals. There is a pause at the ticketing counter, where they are confused that we don’t show an onward ticket with the same airline. I am obliged to produce a paper copy of said ticket. But they do not ask me for my Kuwaiti visa, which I have ready on my phone.
As we are closing our chapter on the Kingdom, it is time to reflect on our almost three-week visit. More than the other rich, oil-producing Arab nations, it has historically remained simultaneously as a headliner when it comes to OPEC strategies, but also virtually closed to foreign eyes. The latter aspect is most of the reason we came to visit.
Our tour here involved doing a lot of things I wasn’t sure would work. I just set it up months beforehand and tried not to think about all the crap that could go wrong. Now that it is over and we have stamped out at immigration, there are some things that have certainly stood out.
First, that the glitz and uber-modern scenes one sees of places like Dubai are not at all what Saudi cities look like. The best way I can describe the urban development I saw is to call it well-funded but haphazard and seemingly careless. Storefronts are often seen abandoned and strewn with garbage, like disposable real estate. It is as though limitless space in the desert has led to no consideration of how to focus the energy of a city or engineer an efficient way to get around in that city. As I have stated several times recently, the number of U-turns necessary to get from one place to another seems almost comical. Why can’t the roundabout just be round? I realize that I am missing an important observation, that being what the capital city Riyadh is like.
The exception to the banal urban sprawl are areas where the government is obviously and deeply focused in creating tourist-related infrastructure and preserving (and renovating) sites of historical interest within the city. Here they have placed huge amounts of funding, nearly all of which is ongoing, and most of it looks good so far.
As for the execution of the travel plan, it went better than I thought. Everything I set up worked. From the rental car to booking hotels in relatively unvisited cities. It helped a lot to know some Arabic, but it could have been done anyway.
As for the people, I had heard from others that Saudis were polite and friendly. I really was impressed with how well this was confirmed. Maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising, as I’ve found that people in countries that don’t receive many tourists tend to be the most genuinely curious about them and are also quite welcoming. The fact that incredible and completely coincidental oil wealth literally sprung from the ground hasn’t altered the positive and humble nature of the people living here.
Finally, the natural beauty of KSA is significant. I suspected this beforehand, so planned for myself a lot of distance to cover in the car, without restriction on when we could get out and look at things along the way. There is interesting geology everywhere, readily visible due to lack of vegetation. If you are into wide open spaces and few people, it serves that up nicely. KSA has a population density of less than 17 people per square km, among the thirty countries with the lowest such statistic.
Saudi Arabia