After being cooped up in the house for a little over a month, I decided I needed to get out of dodge for a weekend. There was a tour company located in Jeddah that arranged weekend trips within and outside of the city. I called them up and arranged to pay about 250 dollars for a bus ride out to Madain Saleh and its surrounding environs. Madain Saleh is a remarkably interesting historical relic in Saudi, almost more so for the way the Saudis have treated the site than for its significance in the region 1200 years ago, when it was built.
Before I got there however, there was a bus. It was Thursday morning (the weekend in Saudi is Thursday and Friday) and I was waiting at the gap between the nine foot high concrete abutments cheerfully adorned with spools of razor wire that marked the entrance to my compound. The bus arrived about thirty minutes after the pre-arranged time, meaning right on Saudi time. When the doors creaked open and I stepped onto the bus I was greeted by the owner of the tour company and what appeared like two dozen parentless children, but it was early and I was only half awake.
The bus barreled out of the slip road and onto the empty highway that led away, past the airport, to the North. The bus ride was going to take around eight hours to get where we needed to go. I relaxed into a front seat as the proprietor brought over a huge tray of Arab sweets and breakfast-like items. I ate a few and finished drinking a can of Mountain Dew before going into a coma.
A few hours later I woke up, and as is usually the case after a deep sleep in a public place, wiped whatever drool remained dangling from my chin. When I stretched out and surreptitiously took a look down toward the back of the bus I confirmed that it was populated entirely by children. They were remarkably well behaved so I assumed that they weren’t Saudi children, but as I would discover on the ride home, they were all simply asleep.
The lone adult on this field trip, a Saudi man wearing a traditional white thobe (well more normal here than traditional), was the owner of the tour company, and spoke very good English. This was a stroke of good luck as I still couldn’t speak Arabic. As we approached Medina (ye olde’ second Holiest city in Islam, which I am not allowed to enter) he began describing some of the more interesting things along the road side.
As it turns out the largest manufacturer of Korans in Saudi Arabia is located on the highway outside of Medina, “because they use the French printing method,” my tour guide explained. Living is Saudi Arabia long enough you begin to question your sense of irony, but the largest manufacturer of Holy Books in the birthplace of Islam was expelled from Medina because they found that the infidel method more efficiently spread the word of God.
Another nap later I woke up to fields of date palms rolling from the mountains toward the highway. “From Jordan,” my guide explained, “they are hybrids.” And by some botanical trick or other they brought the dates closer to the ground, so that the squat trees looked more like lines of brown and green sea urchins left in the sand after the waters had receded.
The farther north the bus barreled along the closer we came to the remnants of empire. Yellow pickets in long lines and immaculate Ottoman Blockhouses are the only reminders that the forces of the world touched this desert once, long ago. The Hejazz railway brought the Bedouin under closer scrutiny and tighter control from their Turkish sovereigns. The yellow poles are all that remain of the tracks though. The wood and spikes and steel rails had all been carted away in the last half century to be put to other purposes by the locals.
After any number of little naps, dirty truck-stop bathroom breaks, and disoriented glances at the monotonous landscape later we arrived at our first stop. We didn’t know what it was exactly, but we were happy to be somewhere. We parked next to a few idling trucks, and the colorful if somewhat dirty Pakistani truck drivers sitting in the shade wearing their Salwar Khamises. There was trucker debris everywhere, heaps of garbage covered in flies littered the dirt parking lot. We’d somehow managed to pick up an extra Saudi while I was asleep, and he was the local “expert” on Madain Saleh and its surrounds.
A hundred feet or so above the abysmal foreground of truck trash on the rock formations were what was believed to be “the oldest cave drawings in Saudi Arabia.” I have to say I’m impressed that the country has been making efforts lately to acknowledge and protect a lot of their pre-Islamic history, for a long time the rulers of the country didn’t want to admit that anything resembling culture or history existed before the Prophet. This site though, was not among their conservation efforts.
Our guide points out that “they didn’t write the date, so we have no idea how old they are,” but as you can see “here is a camel, and a man, and a woman and a goat,” he astutely continues, “the people in the drawing are very tall, so we think people used to be much taller here.” As a faux academic this was a pretty frustrating site. It’s an important piece of history not just for Saudi but potentially the entire Arab world, and there are no doubt similar drawings all over the Arabian Peninsula. This is what we have experts for, to study the unknown and help shed light on it by drawing from previous finds. There is a rule that for everything that exists there is some kind of porn of it on the internet. In the Academic world if something exists, no matter how short lived or obscure, someone has written an unreadable dissertation on it.
Unfortunately for the drawings here though, by the look of the Arabic graffiti beginning to overtake the carvings, they will all be gone before anyone knew when they were.
The next stop was genuinely interesting. A chain link fence blocked direct access to the large structure, but the façade of the 100 year old station from the old Hejazz railway was mostly intact, complete with Mosque, cisterns, and some kind of wind driven pumping apparatus. I also noticed for the first time that we had two cars full of Chinese people following us. I listened to them talk for a minute or two before I tuned into what language they were speaking before I could narrow it down to Mandarin.
“Where are you from?” I asked. (In Chinese, yeah, it’s one of the three phrases I can still pull off)
They looked at me for a full 30 seconds with their mouths open before responding…”China.”
Apparently they don’t get a whole lot of white guys speaking to them in Chinese in Saudi Arabia. They had joined the tour late, taking their own cars from KAUST (the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) where they taught Engineering. Before long we were back in the bus again and off to the most interesting site of the day.
We stopped on a small hill overlooking green fields littered with date palms. Behind us are the mostly standing remnants of an abandoned mud walled city. I had been to a similar place in Oman, by accident, and it was an incredibly fun place to roam around. This particular city, populated by one of the tribes that left the dessert before Saudi Arabia was Saudi Arabia, was itself a defensive fortification, though a small fort was added to the mountain adjoining the homes below by the Turks. The city was designed in a pattern not unlike a Mandala, so that anyone attacking the town would simply get lost in the dense geometry of its construction while the defenders could move their livestock to the center of the town and form a defense. It became more and more ingenious as the minutes rolled on, and by myself I got incredibly lost. Eventually I aimed for the old Turkish fort on the hillside and somehow found a shortcut through the holes in the walls of crumbling houses.
While I wandered atop the fort getting a good glimpse of the old abandoned town, and in the distance its modern replacement, one of the little Saudi scamps started up a conversation. He wanted to know about Obama and America mostly. After a few minutes it became clear that he was a really bright kid, and spoke English near fluently. “You know what president Obama told the king?” He asked.
“Nope.” To be honest I just wanted to be left alone, but there weren’t any other white guys to pawn him off onto.
“He said Saudi Arabia has a weapon more powerful than the atomic bomb…they have the Jihad.” Now, despite the fact that I don’t think anyone calls it the atomic bomb anymore, and that any president would be committing political suicide publicly telling an Arab ruler that the Jihad at their disposal was more powerful than the American military, I didn’t hold it against him. Most Saudis are fiercely patriotic in my experience. With the exception of the many who have gone and studied abroad anyway.
Although one of my first weeks in Saudi Arabia I had a curious interaction with a twenty-something at the cell phone shop. I went in with an older coworker to pay for an internet connection. When we sat down he asked me, “When did you come to Saudi Arabia?”
“About a week ago.”
“These people are all fucking crazy. I don’t know why someone from America would come here, I want to leave as soon as I can, and go to America.”
Even my coworker, Bob, who had lived in Jeddah for more than 20 years, was completely taken aback by the guy’s directness in putting down his country. I don’t think it’s happened again in the year since actually. But anyway, where were we…
So the kid in the mud city, who was just about to enter high school, did finally start feeding me some interesting anecdotes about his family history. The scion of the family was apparently fabulously wealthy, and had ten sons to split his money. The boy’s father was one of the ten. His father and his nine brothers each received an ungodly amount of millions of dollars when they came of age. (he quoted something like 400 million, but who knows what it really was) They built massive homes, drove expensive cars, and spent years at a time in five star hotels in Europe, and in the end all nine brothers went completely bankrupt while the boy’s father wisely invested his money. Apparently all nine uncles now live completely on the largess of the boy’s father.
Now naturally one should be skeptical about the stories of a 12 year old boy, so back on the bus I asked our guide if he knew the family, and I was told simply that his father had “a lot of wasta.” Wasta is the Arabic word for “influence” and in a country run by a king, and a landscape full of oil, that usually translates to a rich fucking dude.
The kid, AbdulAziz, continued this tale as we wandered again through the town and while getting lost (again) and finally getting to the bus after everyone was seated and ready to go…to lunch. To which we returned to our surprisingly well apportioned hotel. After some passable kebabs and rice and salad, we were off again…to the Desert!
The bus rolled along, and then offroad for a bit, through a beautiful piece of sandy desert some 20 miles from Madain Saleh. We passed a number of rocks, there was Camel rock, baby camel rock, turtle rock, and eventually we got out at elephant rock, and watched the sun turn the world pink for a half hour. There is a quality to sunsets in the desert whose only parallel I can find in a snowstorm. It sounds odd, but the desert is essentially emptiness itself, and a hush seems to fall over every tourist when the sun begins painting it, in the same way the snow simply turns everything into emptiness and seems to induce the same silence.
At any rate it was beautiful, pictures were taken, Bedouin rode horseback into the sunset, and the bus roared back to life. Also worth noting, because part of me hopes it doesn’t become a trend, this was the first time I’d ever seen someone using an entire Ipad as the primary method of photographing his journey (one of the Chinese guys of course.)
The sun had set, it was getting dark, we’d been on the road all day, my brain was relatively fried; so what better place to take us next than a museum filled with relatively small text? Despite the atrocious degree of misleading propaganda and myth sold to the average Saudi I have found every museum in the magic kingdom to be surprisingly accurate and relevant. It’s almost like going to Washington D.C. for a Glen Beck Tea Party rally and then moving straight into the Smithsonian. It kindles a glimmer of hope.
The Madain Saleh museum had a lot of old maps (which I love) of the prevailing powers of the tribes, and the extent of the ancient Nabatean Kingdom (the guys who built Petra in Jordan). There were a number of archeological relics on display and a bunch of other stuffed which I’m ashamed to say I was just too tuned out to bother reading.
And like a lifetime movie, despite common sense and good taste, the tour continued. Our last stop of the day was a little date market, which despite everyone’s fatigue was pretty cool. There were five or six little date shops, which stocked a few dozen varieties of dates, none of which I could make any sense of. It was a lot like trying to buy rice in Japan, everything looked pretty much the same. But I knew Medina dates were some of the best in the business, so I just bought some of those.
The next day the tour of Madain Saleh actually arrived at Madain Saleh, which isn’t so much as a site as the remnants of an old city. There are over 100 tombs carved into the rock face in the now walled off and restricted piece of that desert, and while not nearly as imposing or well preserved as the old capital of the kingdom at Petra, was still a stark and beautiful remnant of one of the forgotten chapters of human history. Our magic school bus stopped at the first tomb and the tour guide, with a much better grasp of these sites than the cave drawings of yesterday, began his tour-guidery. I put in my Ipod.
In Petra the city was imposing. I walked in a valley beneath the tight spacing of hundred foot walls of rock closing in from both sides. In Madain Saleh I was struck by how small the tombs seemed in comparison to the expanse of the desert spreading beneath it beyond the horizon. We drove from groups of tombs to groups of tombs, we walked inside, took pictures, saw the cave paintings and dark holes in the Earth that once contained the decaying genetic history of an extinct civilization.
But it was not always this way. Madain Saleh for all its majesty as a tourist attraction was not cordoned off and sanitized for hundreds of years. It was abandoned and left alone, vanishing in plain sight and reduced to the bedtime boogey man of the nearby towns and tribes. Even twenty or thirty years ago the expats who drove off-road for hours in their jeeps with maps would find the bones of the long dead littering the tombs, sometimes crunching under their boots. The place was said to be cursed and inhabited by Djinns, the wild demons of the desert that infected the living like a parasite and drove them mad. Fear, naked and illogical, sometimes remains the most ardent preserver of history.
In the midst of all the tombs we stopped at another partially reconstructed Hejazz railway station. This one though had been remade to look new, with benches and lampposts dotting the newly built platforms above the slowly expanding rails. One of the last functioning trains of the railroad was hidden inside a locked building, which, to our disappointment, was closed on Fridays. It all had a very disneyesque feel to it. It was a good effort, and probably would pay dividends if they ever completed it, but when surrounded with so much genuine, untouched history why bother with crude restorations? It was like leaving a Vegas magic show to play three card Monte in the alley outside.
After we left the station the bus rambled past a rock that looked like a face. Go tourists go!
And then we came upon one of the most famous images in Saudi Arabia (besides Mekka and Medina anyway). The tomb of one of Madain Saleh’s governors was an absolutely majestic site. The egg shaped mass of rock sits in the sand completely apart from any other geological structures. We didn’t bother to climb inside this one because the inside would have looked much the same as the dozens of other tombs we’d clambered through during the day, but our tour guide earned his tip here. When everyone had gotten on the bus and I wanted to get one last picture he climbed up with me and got down on his knees in the sand to take my picture in front of it. I didn’t really want my picture in front of it but I wasn’t about to turn down a guy who was willing to get his robe all dirty for me.
And like this re-telling the day continued on long past a sensible ending. We had one last stop before we exited the grounds. There was a large room carved into a pretty set of mountains, which I skipped by because the urge to climb was on. This was probably the highest point in or near Madain Saleh and it commanded some purdy views. As I reached the top I saw a bunch of the Chinese dudes pointing at me and before long the guy with the Ipad was standing next to me taking pictures into the sun. We’d lost sight of all the Arabs though. They had all crept through a crevice and into a cave to look at some carvings. There were the obligatory undated carvings in Arabic with the usual praises of Allah and his Prophet Mohammed ((Peace be upon him)in case the religious police are reading) which prompted our guide to suggest that the race that dwelled here 400 years before the birth of Mohammed had managed to convert to his as of yet unspoken religion. Another set of carvings which pre-dated the Arabic script were left agonizingly undeciphered, but were still pretty cool looking.
The earliest carvings were about twenty feet above us, “because the people here were at least 8 meters tall,” said the tour company proprietor. “Wait, what? You don’t mean that do you?”
“Yes, of course they were that tall. It’s not hard to believe, because Adam (of garden of Eden fame) was thirty meters tall.”
“Adam? Was thirty meters tall? You can’t really believe that.”
“Why?” He honestly asked me why I didn’t believe that the supposed Biblical progenitor of the human race was 90 feet tall. He had a perplexed look on his face like this was an established fact.
This is turn left me somewhat perplexed as I didn’t even know how to respond. So he simply continued trying to convince me.
“Yes that is how he and Eve (of the fall of the race of man fame) traveled so quickly across the world.”
Jeddah, the city I live in, means ‘grandmother’ in Arabic. And the name is supposedly a reference to the fact that Ole’ Eve died and was buried there. Presumably by Adam? Who knows? But he continued to explain after this factoid that Adam died somewhere in India, and I’m sure we’ll find a human skull the size of a Volkswagon there sometime soon.
I’ve heard any number of these mythological/religious kinds of statements in my time here. And many of them leave me in the same bewildered position of simply accepting what they say with a shrug and a headshake because I can’t even begin to fathom how these beliefs took root in the first place. It feels like trying to explain cosmology through interpretive dance. (though I admit when artsy hippies put their minds to it, they think they can explain everything through interpretive dance)
From what I’ve gleaned in my short time darting across the Islamic world I’ve noticed that Islam has perhaps the most convenient mythology of the world’s major religions. It came quite a bit later, almost as if it was caulked between the inconsistencies of the others, completing a system of worship and an utter departure from reality. It is important to know that in the Islamic gradient the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia often strays for more toward the extreme and fundamental than almost all the others, with the possible exception these days of Pakistan. It is no small coincidence that so many of the religious schools in Pakistan are chartered by briefcases full of money and a Saudi patron.
But enough of that, the bus left and we had an unbearably long ride back full of now screaming Saudi children. I’ll spare you the details as anyone who’s gotten this far has already suffered enough. I did notice as we passed the Marquis sign of a Bank of Riyadh that at 7:19 about an hour after sunset that the temperature registered 39 degrees Celsius. So riding along through the darkness, the air hovered around 102 degrees. Soon after that we ate some food at a gas station restaurant and the bus purred on back to Jeddah.
As I sit here writing this at a seaside coffee shop, way too long after the fact, it is Saudi National day, and I am watching the locals celebrate the nation’s founding/independence in their beloved suicidal way. Three kids stood atop a slow moving hummer waving enormous Saudi flags while slowing traffic to a snarl behind them, though most of the traffic behind them consisted of other dudes of varying age either sitting in the open windows or out the sunroofs of their cars waving flags and honking as well. It is not called the Magic Kingdom for nothing.
