So after a busy day yesterday, let’s try to take it a little calmer. Calmer, but not with any less walking, you’ll see. 

So, what are we going to do? Well, Saudi Arabia is trying to make a name for itself in the tourism industry and is taking a page out of Dubai’s playbook by going for “the biggest/tallest” things as attractions. (At least that’s what it seems to us). If this is true, it works. Because today we will go see the tallest and biggest somethings. We hope, at least. So let’s head out! 

First thing we notice? The heat. Jeddah is hot. Today is starting around 30°C… well… how do we manage? Haha. Its a genuine question because we were told that its not common (or socially acceptable) to wear shorts. Uh oh. But we were told this about 4 years ago, so maybe things have changed. A quick internet search turns up that things have indeed changed. It used to be illegal for men to wear shorts until last February (less than a year ago) in Saudi Arabia, now that only applies in mosques and government buildings. Good to know! Hehe. But, its still not too common. What do we do? Sit on our balcony looking around to see if we can see anyone wearing shorts. We saw one child. What to do, what to do. 

You may be wondering why this is just a conundrum for us now since we’ve been in Riyadh and Dammam already… The thing is those other cities were COLD. We probably had between 10 and 14°C so my partner was wearing pants, sweaters, jacket, hat, and gloves (he’s a baby). A far cry from 30°C. Good thing I’m always wearing pants! What did we come up with? Pants. We will both wear pants, but he will bring shorts in case he gets too hot. Finally, lets go!

Alright, let’s do some quick pictures because we see a lot within just a few blocks from our hotel. It is the historic part of the city after all. First, typical Jeddah windows. They’re wrapped in wood like this, and the coverings are loooooong. They’re meant to be both ornamental but also to help with temperature regulation. Makes sense. It’s 30 degrees in the middle of the winter… can you imagine the summer?! Oof. 

We leave the historic district and go back outside of the bus station we arrived at yesterday from the airport. Now that my partner isn’t absolutely loaded up… look at these busses. SO SO SO many. And they’re leaving every few seconds/minutes. It’s incredible. And all fully full. 

So, what’s the big deal with a lot of busses? Usually we would just see that, think “wow, busy city” and move on, but Jeddah is different. Let’s give a quick explanation. 

As we explained yesterday while travelling… Jeddah sits on the coast of the Red Sea, meaning it has been easily accessible since its founding. Great. Why is that important? Well, it is almost exactly between the cities of Mecca/Makkah (we’ve seen both spellings) and Madinah. These are the two holiest cities in Islam. Makkah is the holiest city that is home to the Kaaba, in the centre of Masjid Al Haram (the Great Mosque). When you pray in Islam, no matter where you are in the world, you have to orient yourself towards the Kaaba. Madinah is the second holiest city and is home to Al Masjid an-Nabawi (the Prophet’s Mosque). (For the record, we know this is an EXTREME oversimplification). Okay, so these cities being the two holiest sites in Islam obviously means that they will receive looooots of visitors, but it goes beyond that. Because of both Hajj and Umrah, people HAVE to come to Jeddah because from here there are many connections to both Makkah and Madinah. You can take the train or bus directly from the Jeddah airport (follow the signage), you can take the bus from the Saptco bus station in Jeddah (where we arrived yesterday), or you can take a private tour/transportation (which is what we’re looking at right now). Since Old Jeddah is right beside the bus station we saw HUGE groups of people performing Umrah waiting to get on the busses. They usually carry around little flags of the countries they’re from, which was quite interesting. We saw Mongolia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, among many others. But, enough staring at busses and random groups of people. Let’s keep moving!

Our first stop is the Lake Arbaeen/Jeddah Lake. A little misleading because it’s a little inlet of the Red Sea, not completely surrounded by land. In the distance you can see the Jaffali Mosque we visited last night. 

Then we crossed the pedestrian bridge to get to the other side of the street (key, because cars don’t stop for you unless you are crossing legally). Remember how we were mentioning that Saudi Arabia likes to do “big things”? If you look past the first monument (not sure what it is of) to the right, you’ll see a white building (also unsure of what it is)… but, in between, you may be able to make out a “small” building with a circular bulge in it. That is the world’s tallest lighthouse. The Jeddah Light stands guard for the Jeddah Islamic Seaport, but we can’t really tell it’s immense size from this distance. And we can’t get any closer to it (that we know of) without taking a cruise ship in or out of Jeddah. So… this is what we get. But we saw it! You can also see the port on either side of the big towers, and the path that we will take going forward. Notice that it’s covered for the first few metres. My partner was already feeling the heat…

Well… after walking a bit further we arrived at the Central Fish Market. We were going to just walk by without entering, but if we’re here and it’s out of the sun, might as well take a look inside. 

A LOT of fish and people buying their fish. As a port city, they must catch the fish just off the coast, but we didn’t see any fishing ships or anything like in Sharjah. But we did see a lot of interesting fish. 

And we don’t have fish markets like this at home, but, like in Sharjah, they also do everything for you right on site, like clean the fish. 

But we’re not about to buy some fish and carry it with us for hours as my travel partner wanders aimlessly for hours in this heat… so on we go! Next stop? A beach. Ish. We were looking for potential places for us to swim in the Red Sea. There are many places labelled “beaches”, but this is a “beach” in the sense it’s “sandy” and next to water, but you can’t swim here. But it gives us a chance to point something very interesting out.

Your eyes are probably drawn to the two boxes that are behind me, and here we are to improperly explain them to you. And if we use improper language or terms, please understand that we are not experts. Anyway, these are boxes that contain carpets that have the prayer rugs placed directly on them. Therefore, when it’s time for prayer you can unroll these carpets and they are already properly oriented towards Makkah so that you can conduct your prayers. We have seen these in squares and parks, but we would soon see that Jeddah has quite a few of them along the coast. We believe that they are in places that it is not “quick” to get inside a mosque. This goes back to what we noticed in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia it seems that the majority of people stop for the call to prayer and go to do their prayers at that time. This is probably even more so in Jeddah with such an important role for it between the two holiest sites in Islam and with so many pilgrims coming through Jeddah. 

Continuing along the coast a bit further we came up to this, the Red Mosque, also properly known as Mohammed Hassan Farsi Mosque. 

And just out in front of it is “Lantern Square”. Not sure if either of these are really used very often. The only people we saw around were a few workers that were on break from the midday heat. 

Just beyond that we crossed over another little inlet of the Red Sea that forms Youth Lake and we get our first glimpse of another “tallest”. Well.. formerly… the Jeddah Flagpole! 

We will eventually get there, so just hold on for any type of background, haha. We can only walk so fast!

Just across this bridge was where the navy/military things began, so we made sure not to take pictures in that direction just in case. But we couldn’t not take this picture. We love travelling and maps, and this is a nice one.

And then we get closer, and closer. Hopefully it’s worth it because it’s a bit out of our way and it’s hoooooot. 

Welcome to the Jeddah Flag, what was once the tallest flag in the world. When we visited we had learned that it was the tallest, but turns out that Cairo has a taller flag now and Saint Petersburg will soon be getting one as well. Uh oh. 

And, was it worth it? It was worth a little stop and picture. It’s way more impressive in person, but still cool. If you have a car and drive by it it’s probably enough. But we crossed towards the middle of the roundabout for no reason at all, and had a hard time weaving through traffic to get back on our way. 

Then we made it to another “beach” area, again with huge signs saying no fishing or swimming. I guess it makes sense since the port is right there, but my partner really wanted to get in, hehe. 

Not many people around in the middle of the day. And, we walked all the way here and can’t see the attraction we came for. Hmm… what could be going on..? Nothing. Nothing is going on. My partner didn’t properly read the map so of course our main attraction isn’t here. On we go. 

We just keep walking and walking until we reach our actual goal. This. 

We know, we were disappointed as well. We hyped this thing up so much, found the tallest lighthouse and the second/third tallest flag, and now we show up and don’t see anything but the Red Sea… is it broken? What’s going on? Well, it’s not like we will waste the walk. We have no other plans, so we just walk the Jeddah Corniche. But let me tell you, even I was hot at this point. And no one else was silly enough to be walking around at this point. We need to learn how to be more “local”. But whatever, my partner takes this opportunity to film as we walk up the Corniche since there weren’t people around, so the pictures only start as we make our way back from the end. 

This is the Hassan Enany Mosque. That’s all the information we have for you, hehe. One thing we will say is that it may be an important mosque because there were “tour busses” with pilgrims stopped at it. Moments before this picture was taken the grassy area was covered in pilgrims eating their meals. If you know, you can let us know! 

Just beyond the mosque was the Prince Abdulnajeed Roundabout. It looked pretty interesting with all of the flags and Arabic calligraphy, but, that’s all we know. From here we could see other mosques, sculptures, etc, but we were already too far from our hotel to keep walking. 

Back along the beach we go. 

Now, we don’t have much more to tell about this part. We just walked slowly along the Corniche taking in the greenery and sculptures. It’s definitely a nice walk. But it was definitely too hot, and we didn’t see a place to change into shorts. 

We got back to the start of the Corniche and didn’t know what else to do. So we hid in the shade a bit to try to decide. 

At least we had internet, so we were able to find out that what we had come to see only started at 6 pm. It’s now only 4:15 pm. Uh oh. Do we sit down and wait 2 hours to hopefully see what my partner walked all this way for or just call it quits and start walking back slowly? The answer? Neither. 

Well… we’ve come to the sad realization that we won’t be able to visit Palestine on this trip as we had planned and hoped. Things are not currently in the best conditions to visit the occupied territories, so we have decided to not go. We bring that up because instead we walked along Palestine Street in Jeddah. If only we could visit the country itself…

We just walked straight along the shade without much of a plan. This is one of the “walking trails” in Jeddah and it has a few restaurants and little shops along it. We just walked until we reached Al Andalus Road, again, just for symbolism, hehe. At which point we took two pictures of signs to mark the occasion. One for the Gaza Strip and the other for the country of Palestine. 

With that, we were done. Both in terms of the street and in our energy. It was time to head back and hope we could see what we came to see. 

We arrived back at our starting point just in time to catch the sun setting over the Red Sea. Don’t get us wrong, absolutely beautiful, but not exactly what we came to see. 

But! There are loooooads of people out now. Just sitting around on the grass while eating and socializing. They must know something we don’t, so we sit on the grass as well and just read a book. Or maybe it’s just cause it’s cooler out now. We will wait and see.. and we didn’t have to wait long!

King Fahd’s Fountain. The tallest fountain (of this type) in the world! Apparently the sea water is pumped at a speed of 375 km per hour to a height of 312 metres. Crazy. 

So, we won’t bother you with all the pictures and videos we took here, that’s for our other content streams (shameless self-plug), but we stayed until the sun was well and down and we saw all of the fountain in all of its lit up glory. 

Then my partner started the looooong walk back to the hotel. Public transit busses aren’t too convenient here, they mainly run along the main arteries of Jeddah, with none coming to the Corniche. I guess we could’ve take a taxi or an Uber, but here we are, hehe. 

We took the exact same route back to the hotel, so we visited the “beaches” again, with a view of the fountain still easily visible. A lot more people were out at these beaches now!

And we also saw the giant flag pole from the distance. Apparently it doesn’t stay up?

And then while we were crossing one of the bridges we were surprised to hear something jumping in the water. Very weird sound in the dark. We were able to take a picture where you can (hopefully) see some movement in the water. What must be swimming underneath in the darkness that makes the fish jump..?

Well, we’re getting closer to the start of our journey, so let’s take one final picture where you can see both highlights at once. 

Now all of the “beaches” are filled with cars and people enjoying some free time. Most people pulled up with their cars as close as they could get to the sea and then either sit in them while eating or get out to enjoy the fresh air. Once again we’re reminded that in the Middle East it’s normal for people to do things late at night because of the heat. 

And as we walked past the last beach just before the fish market we saw a film crew. Is there a movie being produced in Jeddah while we’re here? Who knows, but it seemed like a big production. Maybe we just saw someone important. Kind of reminds us about that time we saw a music video being filmed for NGT48 in Vladivostok.

Well… that’s it, that’s all. We’re about 5 km away from the flag and fountain before we can’t see them anymore because of buildings in the way, and the flag is now back up. We take one final look at Jeddah Lake, and then it’s time to get some much needed food and rest. 

Good night from Jeddah!