Well, the day has come to leave Riyadh behind. You’d think that that would mean leaving Saudi Arabia behind, but we’re not ready to leave just yet. However, that being said, we don’t know what we will do today or where we will end up. Let me explain…

We have a train ticket to Dammam today, a city on the coast of the Arabian/Persian Gulf. Why do we want to go there? Because it is pretty much on the border with Bahrain (pretty much because it is Al Khobar that is actually on the border). You can imagine that since we are going there our plan is to go to Bahrain. This is possible over land through the King Fahd Causeway that links both of the countries to each other. So far, so good. However… my partner needs a visa to enter Bahrain. But… he doesn’t want to fly out of Bahrain because he is complicated and would like to cross at least one land border while in the Middle East. Online it says you can get an eVisa with an airline ticket, which he obviously does not have. He just has to complicate everything. And how do you cross the Causeway? There’s a bus. Up until yesterday the bus had free seats for 95 SAR (~35 dollars), but this morning there isn’t the option to buy a ticket… so… by the end of the day we may only get to Dammam and spend the night, or we may be somewhere else. Who really knows. You’ll find out once we find out!

First thing is first, let’s get to the train! We leave the hotel nice and early, and refuse to take an Uber. We ask the hotel for help to leave as they had offered to call us a taxi to pick us up from the airport…. but they were of no use. They told us just to go outside and hail one. So we do that. We immediately get a taxi as it is driving by and in “no time” (for Saudi traffic) we’re at the train station ready to start our journey!

The station seems quite new, and very pretty. Not the same level of impressive as some of the Russian stations when we were there in 2018, but still nice nonetheless.

And we’re off!

As with most trains, the cars and seats are all numbered. Our ticket was for a forward facing window seat according to the website when we purchased the ticket a few days ago. When we got on the train, the numbering indicated that my partner’s seat was a backward facing aisle seat. Weird… we wanted to sit by the window… My partner puts his heavy bag up at the end of the car in the luggage rack and walks to his seat. As he’s about to sit the woman in the other seat says something to him in Arabic. He says “laa arabii, injilizii,” to her, trying to convey that he doesn’t speak Arabic, he speaks English. The woman says something different (we think) in Arabic. My partner says “sorry, I don’t understand” and she says something else. My partner is just awkwardly standing there without knowing what to do… Finally another woman from the seat across from the first woman just said “I can help you, she is saying that she cannot travel with a man.” My partner was shocked. From our understanding this hadn’t been a law in a “long” time in Saudi Arabia. So he asked this other woman “okay, what do I do then?” The woman just kindly said “I don’t know, I am only translating.” Then the first woman, the woman who was in the seat behind her (without anyone next to her), and the woman who was translating (who had a small child with her) all began to talk and point at different seats. Finally the woman asked if my partner would sit with the man that was sitting alone at the back of the train. Of course we agreed and went there. Unfortunately, it was not a window seat, and this window was even frosted. While waiting for the train to leave my partner was just thinking to himself and hoping that no one showed up for this seat! If someone did, what would he do? And then to top it all off… another man boarded the train and went to sit with the woman behind my partner’s original seat. The whole thing repeated again. The mother clearly motioned for the two women to sit together and have my partner and the new man sit together, that would be easiest and we would keep “our” seats. But the women didn’t agree. Instead it was decided that the new man would sit in that seat with the mother’s child (who was a boy) and this woman would sit with the mother. The woman in my partner’s seat would be left without anyone next to her. Luckily, these musical chairs were the last thing to happen before the train left. No one else boarded, so no one took my partner’s new seat. Pfew. What an interesting series of events! At least it worked out in the end.

A little comment here though… when buying the train tickets everyone has to put their sex as part of their identity documents. If it is culturally still uncommon (or maybe for the older generation only?) to have non-related men and women traveling together, why wouldn’t the train company not allow them to do so? One thing is the law, but another is what actually still happens in society. When we bought my partner’s ticket there wasn’t anyone seated next to him. Just a thought on a new and interesting situation we lived.

Well… you saw what it looked like from the plane, and you probably have your own idea of what Saudi Arabia looks like geographically… and we are here to tell you that you are right. It probably only took 15 minutes on the train to leave the outskirts of Riyadh behind, and then there was nothing. It was all just desert.

So crazy to just be zooming by nothing but sand. It was even so bad that the train tracks must have been covered in sand because from some of the pictures you can probably tell that we were going through sand clouds, probably that had been on the train tracks. Crazy!

And we told you that my partner didn’t get a window seat, so how did we get these pictures? For big parts of the trip my partner just went and stood between train cars at the doors to be able to see out those windows. We don’t think it’s too common to do that as many people looked at my partner with curiosity, but then he would make obvious moves with his cameras so they understood he was filming outside and they would all just leave.

This position was also very helpful for the train stations. There were two stops between Riyadh and Dammam at Hufuf and Abqaiq. My partner tried asking how long the stops would be, but without success. He wanted to run outside and check out the train stations and towns as we did in 2018 while crossing Russia, but better to just stick by the train since we didn’t know how long the stops would be. And good thing we did. Both stops were about 5 minutes, and no one else got off to stretch their legs, we were the only two to do so. But that let us get both of these pictures to share with you.

And now it was on to the last little bit of the trip. And look what we saw!!! So cool! Hehe.

Well, as we arrived to the station we took advantage of everyone’s distractions to get pictures of what the train was like inside.

And then we were here, welcome to Dammam!

So… after 4 hours on the train we arrived to Dammam much earlier than the bus to Bahrain tonight. So… should we try to buy a bus ticket then? Let’s! Our plan is simple, we will ask for an Uber to take us from the train station to the bus station. If there are tickets, great! If not, we have already found a potential hotel we can stay at. This plan started off poorly when no one wanted to pick us up… But eventually we made it to the bus station.

Time for another “story time”. Another interesting experience.

We get out of the Uber and start walking towards the bus station and are immediately “swarmed” by many, many people all asking us where we are going (swarmed in quotation marks because it’s not as negative as the word would suggest). At first they speak to my partner in Arabic, but then when he only speaks in English some leave. They just keep asking where he is going. He tells them Bahrain, they tell him that they will take him! He obviously says no and tries to keep going to the bus station, but they keep asking. Finally, he gets a plan. Easy way to get rid of them? Tell them you won’t pay, hehe. He asks how much it costs, they say 250 SAR (~90 dollars) he says that there is absolutely no way he pays that much, maximum is 95 SAR (~35 dollars) because that’s what the bus costs. They laugh and say that that is impossible. He tells them that of course it is impossible, and he understands that, that’s why he’s taking the bus, he doesn’t want to insult them. But no. Many people left when he said 95 SAR, but one man didn’t. He dropped his price to 150 SAR (~55 dollars). But my partner said, “thank you very much, but I am okay to pay for the bus at 95 SAR, so that’s what I will pay for the bus.” He drops the price to 100 SAR. Uh oh. The whole point of saying 95 SAR was for them to disagree, leave us alone, and we would take the bus… but it didn’t work. At this point he’s not sure what to do….

Luckily there’s a car of young guys just sitting there waiting for something (maybe a friend). My partner approaches them and asks about driving with these guys to cross the border. “Is it safe?” Everyone almost dies laughing, “of course it’s safe!” To make sure that no one is insulted, my partner quickly says “no, no, nothing against you. If this happens in my country I will get robbed or worse. It is dangerous to get in a random car in my country.” They understand most of what my partner says, but they say it is safe. One of the guys is from Yemen and tells us that Saudi Arabia is very safe and we have nothing to worry about. My partner talks to these guys a bit more, until he’s more convinced. Another driver also comes over to try to win him over, but immediately leaves when he says that the price was already negotiated to 100 SAR. BUT! At this moment the driver says that 100 SAR is with more passengers in the car, if my partner is so worried about “safety” he can drive alone for 150 SAR. Haha, clever. Fine, it’s currently 2:30 pm and the bus doesn’t leave until about 5:30 pm, and won’t arrive to Manama (Bahrain) until about 8:30 pm. This guy says he will drop us off at our hotel (which we don’t have) in about an hour. Let’s do it. Oof. Good thing my partner’s mother won’t know about this until it is successfully completed! AND! We double- and triple-checked with SO many people around that we felt comfortable enough that nothing would happen to us. PLUS the guys we had met at the Real Madrid game were from Al Khobar (the border town) and they had told us not to take the bus, but instead take Uber or a car over (Uber was extremely expensive). So… with all of that said… it’s probably fine to do this, right?

So we get in the car and head off down the highway. The driver is telling us that he is Saudi, but lives in Bahrain, while he works in Saudi Arabia. So he has to cross every day and the Causeway is a toll road, so he prefers to drive people over to help with the cost. That’s probably why he allowed my partner to negotiate the price a bit lower (but in reality, there is probably a high “English” tax). As we’re driving he also tells us that Saudi Arabia is very, very safe and we have nothing to worry about. Once again we tell him that we weren’t really worried because it was Saudi Arabia but because this would not really be safe in our home country. He says he understands, but tells us that my partner is much younger than him so he wouldn’t be able to do anything physically and if my partner got a weird feeling he could call the police and they would be there in seconds. Another good opportunity to tell him that back home it would not be seconds, you could be waiting a long, long time.

Anyway, we’re out of Dammam and through Al Khobar and we turn onto the Causeway. At this point the man starts asking about our visas and things like that, and he’s not too happy that my partner doesn’t have a visa for Bahrain. Quickly we tell him that we don’t need one, we get a visa on arrival as long as we pay 5 BD (~18 dollars), and he asks us to please take a screenshot of where it says that, just in case. We also start quickly looking for a hotel where we can stay in Bahrain in case we need to give a local address (and we will lose our data on our phone once we cross the border). BUT we want one with a good cancellation policy in case we can’t cross the border. All of this on what has only been a 30 minute drive so far. And then we get asked about our Saudi visa, because “maybe they won’t let you go by land”. At least this one was easy, we told him that we had already talked to the Ministry of Tourism of Saudi Arabia and they said we could do this. He’s not convinced, but we keep driving.

And then it’s time to cross. The crossing was super easy. Our driver spoke to both border guards quite a bit in Arabic, then asked for my partner’s passport, and then the border guards just asked how long we would be in Bahrain. That was pretty much it at both passport checks. In Bahrain he had to pay the 5 BD (which you are able to pay in Saudi Riyals, which is 10x the difference, so we paid 50 SAR), and we were off. Sadly, we didn’t get a stamp for Bahrain, it’s apparently all digital. So sad. But we’re in!!! We’re adding another country to the list!!! Welcome to Bahrain!

Here the drive was a little weirder, haha. Our driver asked us if my partner liked to drink and party, he said not really. The driver was absolutely shocked. Then he told him that in Bahrain you can do anything you want, it’s all okay for tourists. We were a little surprised as this is still an officially Muslim country, but okay. The driver kept insisting that you can do whatever you’d like. Okay, okay, we get it. And then just to drive the point home when he was dropping us off he went on a side street to get to the hotel a bit faster, and there were men standing in front of buildings that would come towards the car yelling at us. We obviously had no idea what they were saying, but the driver told us that they were offering different “vices” for tourists to enjoy. Very strange, first time we’ve seen that sort of thing in this region of the world.

But, we’re here. We say thank you to our driver and he tries to get us to go back with him to Saudi Arabia when we leave, but he leaves around 6 am, WAY too early for my partner to wake up. “We’ll see” we say, as we take his contact information, haha.

It is now just before 5 pm and we’ve made it to Manama. We paid 55 SAR (~20 dollars) more than if we would have taken the bus, but we made it to Bahrain before we would even board the bus in Dammam. Probably worth it. And now, of course, the day can’t be over yet. Let’s go explore a bit of Manama!

Like many times when we first arrive to a city and it’s late, we have no idea what we will see or where we will go. My partner just chooses a direction and goes. First thing we notice? Around here it is very commercial. Nice for us cause then my partner can go and get some food at a market or convenience store or something. Maybe at this one? Do you think they celebrated the World Cup victory?

Then we just continued walking along, looking looking. And now just comes a bunch of pictures. We had no idea what we were looking at while we were walking, but of course we then looked it up online to be able to pretend to our dear readers like we are cultured and fully planned ahead. First stop, the Gudaibiya Mosque.

And just across the street from it, we’re already at stop number two.

We can obviously tell that the first one is a mosque, but all we could tell about this second one is that it is a fancy gate and there must be something fancy behind the fence, but only later did we discover that this is the old Gudaibiya Palace (not sure if “old” is capitalized or not in this instance).

Juuuuuust a little bit further, we see a HUGE palace through a very impressive gate. Apparently this is the Gudaibiya Palace. You can see it through the fence up on the slight hill through the gate.

It seems like this is similar to the Qasr Al Watan in Abu Dhabi in that it seems to be a working palace. Online it says that political and economic meetings happen here, the Prime Minister’s office is here, and it was on these steps that the proclamation was made for the accession to the throne of Salman Al Khalifa in 1942. Seems quite important. And when you exit the palace you’re greeted with this artwork of the country.

Well… we don’t know if you can visit the palace as we did in Abu Dhabi, but we definitely can’t visit this late in the day, so my partner keeps walking. After a few minutes we come to the one thing we had actually planned on seeing tonight, Al Fateh Grand Mosque of Bahrain.

It is absolutely HUGE and very nicely lit up. We will definitely be returning soon to check it out from the inside since it is open to visitors. So, we won’t say anything else about it for now since we hope to convey more information about it once we actually visit the mosque. For now, we just cross the street to the mall to get some food at the supermarket before starting our walk back to the hotel. The last thing we see for the night is just past the mosque back towards the hotel, the Isa Cultural Centre.

Well… that’s it. What a loooooong day it was. Waking up early in Riyadh, taking a train to Dammam, driving to Manama, and here we are in a new country! What a day! Good night from Manama!