Saudi Diaries — Part 1: The Departure & Arrival

There is a specific kind of excitement that comes not from fear nor confidence, but from the total absence of a reference point. I had been excited before trips (I almost always am) :-) I had been excited before flights as well. But standing in the check-in queue at Vienna Airport, looking down at my boarding pass for a country I had never visited, whose language I could barely read (definitely not understand!), whose customs I only knew from second-hand stories, one old English class report I wrote in my second year at university, and geopolitical headlines — this was something else entirely. This was the excitement of stepping off the edge of a familiar map.
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It was 2023. The world had just barely started to return to "normal" after almost 3 years of total chaos.

Traveling anywhere during the COVID-19 era was an exercise in bureaucratic endurance and endless swabs stuck in one's nose. But Saudi Arabia had its own particular layer of complexity packed into the convenience of an App. There were forms to fill out that led to other forms and long lists of rules and regulations. And then there was the Kingdom's structure and dedication to digitalization that made the whole thing easier than traveling from Vienna to my home country, Croatia. I registered everywhere they wanted me to register and made sure to understand everything I needed to know before I even boarded. There were PCR tests, there were vaccine certificates, and then the realization that right before my flight, the rules had changed and I needed only the PCR test and the vaccine certificates :-) I had printed everything in triplicate. I checked my folder of documents three times at home and in the taxi to the airport, and twice more at the gate — not out of dread, but out of the restless energy of someone who simply could not wait to get there.

A friend had told me once that the anticipation before a trip is always more intense than the trip itself. I was determined to prove him wrong.

My friend Abdulaziz was the reason I was going at all. He had extended the invitation with a kind of quiet, unhurried certainty that is characteristic of him — not "you should visit sometime," but "come, I will show you everything." He grew up in Saudi Arabia, and he made sure I would get to know his world with an ease I can only admire. He was the one who told me that the Visitor Visa for Saudi Arabia existed in the first place. When he said the country was changing, that it was opening, that it was worth seeing with my own eyes, I trusted him completely. And so, sitting at the gate, watching the other passengers — many of them pilgrims going to Umrah, a few Saudis and some business travelers, and then a handful of Europeans like me with wide eyes and overstuffed carry-ons — I felt a very particular kind of aliveness. Something was about to happen. I could feel it in the way you feel the first few meters of a rollercoaster: the slow, deliberate click of the ascent before everything lets go.

The flight itself was uneventful in the way that long flights are, which is to say it was quietly strange. Almost five hours is long enough to feel the geography shift beneath you. I watched the landscape through my window shrink from Europe's greens and greys, over the blue of the Mediterranean, down the long spine of Egypt, and the Red Sea, and then into something I had no instinct for: the vast, pale expanse of the Arabian Peninsula. Even at 10,000 meters, the desert below looked absolute. There was something powerful about that amount of emptiness — and I found, to my own surprise, that it thrilled me.
I did not sleep. I pressed my face to the window instead.
We descended into Jeddah just after sunset at around 6:30pm.

Then the door opened.

Not the terminal door. Not the arrivals gate. I mean, the moment the cabin crew cracked the aircraft door at the parking position, the outside world came in to introduce itself. I had expected heat — of course I had, I had checked the forecast daily for two weeks — but no forecast could have prepared you for this. The air that rolled in through that door was not simply warm. It was dense, physical, almost muscular. Humid in a way I had not anticipated for a desert country, heavy with the salt and weight of the Red Sea coast. It hit the skin differently than European summer heat — less like warmth and more like pressure, like being leaned on by something large and patient and very, very old. For a moment, standing in the aisle with my carry-on and my folder of PCR tests, I just stopped. My lungs needed a second to understand what was happening to them. My brain needed a second longer to register that it actually liked it.
Then we fled onto the transfer bus, and the doors hissed shut.

The air conditioning was set to a temperature that I can only describe as hostile. After that wall of humid heat on the aircraft stairs, stepping into the bus was like being submerged in cold water. I went from sweating to shivering, then back to sweating, in about 20 steps. Around me, passengers reached for their jackets with the practiced ease of people who knew this was coming. I had left mine in my checked bag, naturally. I stood there in a short-sleeved shirt, leaning against a cold bus window that felt almost punitive in its contrast with what had been outside a few seconds ago. The terminal, when we arrived, was no different — enormous, super busy, and refrigerated to the same aggressive degree. Saudi Arabia, I would learn, has a complicated relationship with air conditioning (as do most of its neighboring countries). The heat outside is a fact of nature. The cold inside is a point of national pride.

But the temperature was not the thing I remember most vividly. It was the sounds.
Arabic was around me since boarding in Vienna — I had heard it in snatches. But inside the terminal, in the arrivals queue, it was way different from what was expected. Everyone around me spoke some other language. German, English, Hindi, Urdu, Russian, and some languages I can't even guess the origin of. It was every polyglot's dream. I was trying to hear some Arabic among the travelers, the officers. from the announcement system overhead; the low, rapid exchanges between border agents; the easy, laughing back-and-forth of families arriving home a few meters away. A language that I had always known abstractly as beautiful — as something to be admired in calligraphy, in the melodic rise and fall of the call to prayer heard near mosques in Europe— was suddenly alive around me, three-dimensional, constant. I let it wash over me and tried to pick out shapes in it, the way you try to find familiar constellations in an unfamiliar sky.

I knew, in the loosest possible sense, a few words. Salam and Marhaba — hello. Shukran — thank you. La and na'am — no and yes. These I had in my pocket like small coins, hoping they would be enough. As for reading: the signs throughout the terminal were bilingual, Arabic and English, which was a mercy. Whenever I encountered a sign that was Arabic only, I did what any reasonable adult reduced to functional illiteracy does — I squinted at it and tried to sound it out the way a first-grader approaches an unfamiliar word. Slowly. One letter at a time. ا... ل... م... My lips moved slightly. I probably looked like I was praying.
In a way, perhaps I was.

The immigration queue moved slowly and quietly. It took me quite some time to get to passport control. When I finally reached the counter, the officer looked at my passport and visas, leaving all the PCR printouts and the vaccine certificates on the side. He said something to me in Arabic (don't ask me what, I have no clue) and then switched right to English. I guess my facial expression was a reaction enough for him to figure out I didn't understand a word he said. A single question about the purpose of my visit. I told him: tourism. He looked at me once more, took my fingerprints and an arrival photo, and then brought his stamp down on my passport with the decisiveness of a man who had far more people to process, and waved me through.

I collected my suitcase. Got through x-ray luggage control (all incoming luggage on international arrivals in Saudi Arabia is being scanned) and finally walked through the automatic doors into the arrival hall.
Abdulaziz was there, of course — waiting in the crowd, looking entirely unruffled as though after a 7-hour car ride (that's how long he drove to pick me up!!!) airports were his natural habitat. When he saw me, he smiled and welcomed me in Arabic. I did kinda respond, or at least tried to, in the proper way. I guess he can tell you how I succeeded or failed at that. And then we switched to English.
"You made it," he said, and picked up my bag before I could object.

The heat outside met us again at the exit, immediate and uncompromising. But this time I was ready for it, or at least I told myself I was. I breathed it in — the warmth, the humidity, the particular smell of a new country that you can never quite identify and never quite forget. In the car, he had a few cold drinks waiting for me. And, oh boy!, was I grateful for those :-)

Somewhere out there, beyond the airport roads and the glow of the city, was everything I had come to see.
Yalla, said Abdulaziz. Let's go!

And we went.

Saudi was out there. Just waiting for us! :-)