Well… we weren’t originally going to stay in Dammam today, but the prices to our next destination were a little lower if we wait an extra day (even taking into consideration an extra hotel night), the hotel is nice, and we (my partner) would benefit from a little “rest day”. So, what can we do? Well… to be honest we’re not sure at all. We decide to go to the Corniche and go from there. 

If my partner was thinking ahead and had planned everything out beforehand he would’ve taken the picture in the other direction. You get a nice view, but we see something off in the distance and decide to go find out what it is. We honestly can’t really make out exactly what it is, but when has that ever stopped us before? We get to walking. 

Well… my partner was stubborn. He probably should’ve crossed the street, but he stayed and walked along this side of the road. A LOT of construction. 

Well, we make it to the “top” of the bay, to this beach. But we’re not even close to done walking yet. 

We walk a bit more and for the first time you can kind of make out what we’re walking towards in pictures. 

Not sure if it’s clear from the picture, but there’s a spiral structure on the man made island. What is it? Not sure. But it reminds us of the Abdulla Bin Zaid Al Mahmoud Islamic Cultural Centre in Doha (the “spiral mosque”) or the famous “twisted minaret” of Basra in Iraq. Either way, we’re going to find out. 

We keep walking along this roadway until we get to the entrance. Although it looks fancy, it’s free to enter. So, in we go. 

As soon as you walk past the gate there’s a parking lot. When we were here there weren’t a lot of other people here, so it was pretty empty. But we later read that it’s very busy in the evenings and especially on weekends. Why? What’s here?

It’s a bunch of green space with trees and these little areas where you can sit with your family and enjoy a picnic or something like that. 

Well, this looks like a good spot to just sit back and relax! So that’s exactly what my partner does. We sit next to the sea and he reads while I contemplate my existence while staring out over the Gulf. 

Eventually we moved a little further back off of the seats by the water and on the grass between the trees and he read some more.

Then I convinced him to get moving again and to take some pictures of me. So, here you are. This is the big tower we could see from afar that originally brought us out to this man made island. (It’s called an island but it is attached to the land). 

This is the Fanar Tower at Murjan Island (now we know where we are). Interestingly the “spiral mosque” of Doha also used to be referred to as the Fanar Mosque. That got us thinking… “fanar” must mean something in Arabic, and of course it does, it means “lantern”. Makes sense, it’s almost like a lighthouse (and it comes from the Greek “phanòs”, and in Spanish “faro” means “lighthouse”). Very cool. 

The plaque you can see behind me is one thanking Saudi Aramco for their contribution to building and then maintaining the tower. 

And now we start leaving the park for the “long” walk back. As we said, there’s this parking lot at the start, and as we returned we saw a few people selling different things for the park-goers. 

One thing we’ve noticed on the streets of Riyadh and now in this parking lot is that it seems that Saudis enjoy eating cooked corn with butter as a snack food. We saw it all over Riyadh as we walked around, and now it’s here as well. (We assume with butter, we could be completely wrong, but we’re sure of the corn part). 

Then we took the last picture in the park before leaving. We believe that the sail says something about thanking the people involved in opening this Corniche in the year 1413 AH. We used a translation app to see, but we don’t trust it 100% with names and things like that. 

And with that we get going! Time to start the walk back towards the “main” Corniche and eventually back for food and the hotel. As we walk back we stop to take a look back towards the island and the beach we previously stopped at on our to the island. You can see that it’s getting later on in the day. 

And as we were walking back something weird happened. A BUNCH of birds that looked like Cormorants started flying over us. It was A LOT of birds. A lot, a lot. It was very impressive. (You kind of have to squint and zoom in on the below picture to see the lines of birds crossing the sky).

Imagine that we had time to see this, think it was weird and take a picture, then film a video of almost a minute, and the birds still not be done flying by. And it’s obviously not common because there were Saudi cars that pulled over to film as well. And, weirdly, they were flying from the Arabian Gulf into the desert. Kind of weird for a water bird… if we’re right about the species. 

Anyway… we made it back to the “main” corniche in time to watch the sunset over Dammam. 

And then we looked back to where we were all day. It’s too far to appreciate with the picture, but the Faran Tower is there in the middle of the picture. You can kind of make out the trees of the island. 

We walk back towards the hotel and struggle to find food in the neighbourhood. Many places are permanently closed. We settle for the restaurant attached to the hotel and a little convenience store. At least it looks tasty! (And it was). Now it’s time to get some rest for another travel day tomorrow! Good night from Dammam!