Saudi Arabia: Travel of an Infidel by Richard Newton

Church bells. Even through the fog of first consciousness I knew that their descending chimes did not belong here. But where was I? Opening sticky eyes, I squinted at a rectangle of curtained light. An air conditioner purred coolness. The bells continued to peal.

Blurred fragments of recent memory: arrival in the early hours at a vast, modern airport; a drive through desert darkness with headlights flashing over road signs in an unfamiliar script; the glow to the left, beyond jagged mountains, of Islam’s holiest city (and the stench of its sewerage as the vehicle crossed a wadi – a seasonal watercourse); then this bed and a scrap of sleep. Now I was waking to the sound of church bells in...yes...in Saudi Arabia, a country determinedly devoid of churches.

How could it be? After all, this was a place in which Christmas is banned and Sunday is a normal working day. The bells faded and a voice intoned: “BBC World Service broadcasting to the Middle East.” Of course, my radio alarm. The bells preceded the morning opening of a frequency.

The news from London surfed waves of static as I padded to the window and parted the curtains. A residential cul-de-sac out there. An ordered oasis of tarmac and pavement, streetlights and green borders, flat-roofed houses and parked Land Cruisers. Beyond, the desert stretched to the purple-mountained horizon.

So now I knew where I was: the guest room of my cousin’s house close to the city of At Taif. But when? The voice on the radio claimed that it was a Friday in 1995. But that was in distant London. When I left there I lost the best part of six centuries in flight. On the Islamic calendar, the year was 1416. And today, as evidenced by the drowsy street outside, was the day of rest.

The easy certainties of Western life had been left behind. For the next couple of weeks I would live within new confines. Confines which even extended to diet. When I shambled into the kitchen for breakfast, bacon was off the menu – it’s illegal here. I made do with toast. We drove south after breakfast, along the top of the Rift Valley escarpment. The road snaked between bare hills and across pale flatness. This was desert at its most uninspiring. No dramatic dunes; just stony ground littered with empty, cart-wheeling camel-feed sacks. No panoramas; just a sandy gauze blotting out everything. Visibility was less than a mile.

Villages were heralded by graveyards of wrecked cars. Dogs scampered amidst the contorted skeletons of American gas-guzzlers. The majority of drivers on the Saudi roads seem intent on adding to the carnage, flagrantly disregarding the directives printed in big letters on the inside cover of the local Highway Code booklet. “Do not scare others unless you want to be scared by them”; “Remember the car is for conveyance and not killing.”

Saudi schools were on holiday and entire families were on the move. Cadillacs and Chevrolets, loaded to road-scraping lowness under stacked roof-racks, overtook us hairily. Occasionally they slowed down, let us pass, then overtook again in order to take a more lingering look at me, my cousin, and his wife – a trio of infidels.

The whitewashed villages we sped through were shuttered and quiet for the day. Only the mosques were open. Groups of men wearing white thobes and checked head-dresses milled about outside, seemingly impervious to the 100 degree heat.

Our journey gave scale to this vast country. From At Taif to Abha: an inch on my map; 360 miles of road; nine hours in a stifling vehicle. Throughout the day, my impression of Arabia as a relentlessly thirsty place was reinforced.

But when we arrived at last at Raydah Forest Reserve, near Abha, my desert-weary eyes had to adjust to a sudden contrast. Lush greenery cloaked misty mountain ridges and valleys. Streams gurgled. Thrushes and linnets flitted between juniper trees. Here, Saudi Arabia’s last leopards survive. And it was here that I was going to help my cousin, an ornithologist working for the Saudi government, to catch and ring birds.

We overnighted in a Portakabin at 10,000 feet. Up here, the evening gained a chill edge and I was forced to do something I had presumed inconceivable in Saudi Arabia in the summer. I pulled on a fleece.

This cool region, embracing the Asir mountains close to the border with Yemen, is a popular destination for Saudi holidaymakers. Abha, the regional capital, is reaping the benefit of the visitor boom. The place throbbed to the rhythm of pneumatic drills as dozens of new tourist complexes took shape to cater for local demand. The combination of unfinished construction and the peeling shabbiness of existing buildings gave the town the appearance of 1980s Beirut.

Despite its holiday resort ambitions, Abha is a deeply conservative town. The matawwa, or religious police (aka The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice), are active in ensuring that holidaymakers do not stray from the strictures of Islam. Even non-Muslims are subjected to their stern scrutiny. When we ventured into town to visit the souk, my cousin’s wife was required to wear an abaya, a shapeless, full-length black cape. Daringly, she left her head uncovered. Most of the local women we encountered were completely veiled. That we encountered women at all was unusual, but Abha’s souk is notable for the fact that many of the traders are female.

In the recesses of their shops, they would furtively lift their veils as we bartered over Bedouin jewellery and Yemeni daggers. Many of the revealed faces were dark, almost African, and the banter was warm and genuine. But when we stepped back out into the crowded alleys, the atmosphere was uneasy. We were undoubtedly outsiders.

The heart of old Abha has long since been transplanted by bland modernity. But in the terraced valleys surrounding the town, the past survives. Villages rise as clusters of mud and stone towers four or five stories tall. Some of these formidable houses are painted with bright geometric patterns in red, yellow, blue and red. Most are louvred with slates to deflect the rain. It rains much here.

In ancient times, the people of Asir were able to take advantage of the damp climate and abandoned the nomadic way of life essential for survival in the rest of Arabia. They settled, cultivated alfalfa and sorghum, and evolved a distinct culture which reflected their permanence. They defended their villages fiercely, and remain deeply distrustful of the outside world.

From the relative cool of Asir, we descended into the raging furnace of the coastal plain. Intense heat and extreme humidity combined witheringly. It was intolerable. Relief came shortly in the form of a sandstorm.

Visibility degenerated and the temperature dropped. Soon we could see no further than the pulsing hazard lights of the truck immediately in front of us. Thick curtains of sand whipped across the road and drummed the side of our Land Cruiser. We crawled through this for an hour, then turned left onto a rutted track and stopped within close sight of water. I needed my cousin to ratify it: “The Red Sea.”

The wind subsided at dusk, the sand settled. We slept on the beach under the full moon, among the mangroves. Come dawn, the air was clear to the horizon. Pelicans and herons settled in the placid shallows. Two fishermen waded out to tend to their nets, returning to shore with a basket full of fish. They greeted us with smiles, and insisted on giving us a dozen fish for breakfast.

We set off at mid-morning, heading up the coastal highway. The heat was tremendous, and under the strain the air conditioner packed up. We endured it until midday, then chose to find a sheltered cove to take a cooling dip. A man in a Toyota pick-up followed us off the road and sat in his vehicle for the duration. There are few places in the world where I have been made to feel quite so foreign.

Heading back up the 5000-foot Rift Valley escarpment towards the town of Al Baha, my cousin told me to look right. Just sheer rock. “Keep looking.” An incredible valley came into view. In contrast to its stark surrounds, it was a riot of greenery: date palms and banana trees. A large marble outcrop rose from the vegetation, and on top of it there was a tight huddle of tall, mud-brick buildings in the Yemeni style. It was one of the most stunning places I’d ever seen, and would be a major tourist attraction in any other country.

Saudi Arabia is not well served by guidebooks, and the locally available maps are not entirely reliable. It took a fair amount of detective work to put a name to this place: Dee Ayn. There are numerous such gems tucked away in this secretive kingdom.

Back at my cousin’s house within a French-run wildlife research centre, we decided one evening to visit downtown At Taif. We set off at dusk as the call to prayer wailed from every mosque. Driving through the outskirts of the city we watched the shutters come down on shops and cafes; a ritual repeated five times a day. A successful shopping expedition is all a matter of timing.

After we parked, the mosques began to disgorge their congregations. Bustle returned to the city streets. We had an hour before the next prayer time to browse in the souk and find a bite to eat. The latter was no easy task, for a tightening of sharia law had resulted in most of At Taif’s restaurants closing their doors to women.

With few options open to us, we bought from a street vendor roast chicken shaved from a spit and served on pita bread – shawarma. It was a race against time to complete the transaction before the muezzins began to call the faithful to the final prayer of the day. The city closed again. Cane-wielding matawwa trawled the streets to round up truants.

For Muslims, all roads lead to Mecca. Not so for us. When we departed At Taif a few days later for the airport at Jeddah, the most direct route was denied to us. Eighteen miles from Mecca, road signs directed Non-Muslims onto the so-called Christian by-pass. This was as close as we could approach the holy city unless we were to convert to Islam.

After the long and winding detour, arrival in chaotic Jeddah. The highway broadened into a wide, fast-flowing river of turbulent traffic: a 70-mile-an-hour traffic jam. The downtown skyline rose behind a plethora of billboards advertising everything from Coca-Cola to the Casio electronic prayer compass.

Flying out of Jeddah at two in the morning, I sat across the aisle from a woman wearing a head-to-toe abaya. As we slipped out of Saudi airspace, so she slipped out of her black shroud, revealing a spectacularly vivid dress and enough jewellery to make even Liz Taylor envious.

Under the influence of my first beer for a fortnight, I wryly extended my neighbour’s metamorphosis into a metaphor for Saudi Arabia itself: a nation which, behind a forbiddingly austere veil, conceals hidden treasures. She caught me looking and scowled.