​Saudi Diaries: Part 14: The Causeway to Another World — A Spontaneous Visit to Bahrain

Abdulaziz looked at me. There was a glint in his eye — the same one I had learned to recognize over the past two weeks, the one that always meant something was coming.
“What if…” he said. And then he stopped.
He let it hang there. He knew exactly what he was doing. By now I understood that Abdulaziz didn’t tease by accident — he teased with precision, like a chef plating a dish he already knew you’d love. I waited. I had learned, somewhere between Jeddah and Riyadh, that rushing him only made the silence longer.
“Bahrain,” he finally said. “The causeway. We’re going. Now.”
I laughed because for a second I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

Three Things I Knew About Dammam
Somewhere on the long drive from Riyadh, or maybe it was on the drive from Al Ula to Riyadh,… we had been talking about the Eastern Province — what made it different from everywhere else we’d been. I told Abdulaziz the three things I knew about Dammam before I’d ever set foot in it.
It’s home to one of the largest water desalination plants in the world — a strange kind of miracle, turning sea into something a nation can drink. It’s the beating heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas industry, the engine room of the whole Kingdom’s economy. And it sits close to the King Fahd Causeway, a 25-kilometer road-and-bridge span across the Gulf connecting Saudi Arabia to Bahrain.

I remember saying, almost as an aside, that I’d love to see the causeway someday. I didn't even think about driving acress it. Just see it. An engineer’s curiosity, nothing more.
I didn’t think anyone was listening closely enough to remember.
Abdulaziz always was.

The Plan That Took an Hour
He looked at Khalid — our Dammam Khalid, the one who’d shown us the city the night before. They exchanged a glance, and in that glance an entire itinerary was born and agreed upon without a single word being said out loud.
We had nothing planned for the rest of the day. We had a car. We had passports. That was apparently all the justification required.
Within the hour, we had packed one small backpack between the three of us. Toothbrushes. Passports. Wallets. Nothing else. No bookings, no research, no plan beyond the bridge itself. We were in the car, pointed towards the border, before I had fully processed what was happening.
This, I would come to understand, is travel in its purest and most terrifying form. No safety net. Just the road, and the decision to see where it leads.

The Plan That Took an Hour
He looked at Khalid — our Dammam Khalid, the one who’d shown us the city the night before. They exchanged a glance, and in that glance an entire itinerary was born and agreed upon without a single word being said out loud.
We had nothing planned for the rest of the day. We had a car. We had passports. That was apparently all the justification required.
Within the hour, we had packed one small backpack between the three of us. Toothbrushes. Passports. Wallets. Nothing else. No bookings, no research, no plan beyond the bridge itself. We were in the car, pointed towards the border, before I had fully processed what was happening.
This, I would come to understand, is travel in its purest and most terrifying form. No safety net. Just the road, and the decision to see where it leads.

Do I Even…?
Somewhere on the approach to the border, a much less romantic thought interrupted the adventure: did I actually need a visa for this?
Neither Abdulaziz nor Khalid had ever crossed that border with someone who wasn’t a GCC citizen. None of us knew. I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, squinting at vague guidance clearly written with airports in mind — nothing about a causeway, nothing about arriving by car from Saudi Arabia on a whim.
It occurred to me, somewhat absurdly, that not many Croatians find themselves deciding on the spot to drive from Saudi Arabia into Bahrain. There was no rulebook for this. We were writing it as we drove.
For a moment, real doubt crept in. What if they simply turned me away at the gate? What if the adventure ended right here, in a line of cars, before it had even begun?
Abdulaziz didn’t share the worry. “It’ll be fine,” he said, easy as anything. “Visa on arrival. Don’t worry about it.”
He was guessing. I knew he was guessing. And I trusted him anyway — because almost two weeks in, he had not once led me wrong.

Twenty-Five Kilometers Over the Sea
Then the bridge appeared.
There is something almost audacious about the King Fahd Causeway — the idea that you could simply build a road across open water and connect two countries by it. Twenty-five kilometers of concrete and steel, laid over the Gulf like a dare. As we drove onto it, the land fell away behind us, and there was nothing on either side but turquoise water reaching for the horizon.
I rolled the window down slightly, just to feel it — the salt in the air, the strange hush of driving suspended between two nations, belonging fully to neither for a few minutes. It is a specific kind of feeling, being nowhere and somewhere at the same time.
The border formalities, when we reached them, were almost anticlimactic after all that buildup — a visa fee paid, a passport stamped, a few quiet minutes of bureaucracy that somehow still felt like a small triumph. My worry from an hour earlier evaporated with the stamp on page 17 of my passport.
​And then, we were in Bahrain.​

An Island, A Country, A City — All at Once
Bahrain unfolds differently from Saudi Arabia. It’s compact in a way that Riyadh or Jeddah never could be — the island, the country, and the city all seem to blur into one single idea, close enough together that you can feel the whole place at once.
We drove without a destination, just following roads because they looked interesting, watching the character of the place shift block by block. There was a relaxed, cosmopolitan air to it, tradition and modernity sitting comfortably side by side, less guarded somehow than what I’d grown used to across the causeway.
Eventually, we got to an apartment-hotel and checked in for the night. Khalid had made a booking from the car, somewhere between Dammam and here. No plan beyond that. Just rooms, beds, and the rest of the evening ahead of us.

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Pizza, Salads, and a Movie
We decided, without much discussion, that the evening called for nothing. No sightseeing. No agenda. Just rest.
Abdulaziz went out for pizza — simple, familiar, the kind of comfort food that tastes the same in almost any country. And because he is who he is, he came back with something extra: three different salads, because somewhere along this trip he had noticed that I liked eating salad even alongside pizza, and he had simply remembered.
We ate on the coffee table in the living room of the apartment, laughing about the last days, replaying moments from the drive, arguing lightly about a movie to put on. Nothing about the evening was remarkable on paper. Pizza. A film neither of us fully watched. Conversation that drifted in and out of focus.
Later, I stood on the balcony for a while, looking out at a city none of us had planned to visit, and I found myself quietly putting the evening down on my mental list of the best travel moments of the trip. A list that was getting longer and longer by the minute. The best travel moments aren’t just the grand ones. Sometimes they’re the pizza nights

The Breakfast I Made
We woke up well past noon the next day, with nothing planned and no interest in changing that.
The guys went to the nearest grocery store for basics — eggs, bread, cold cuts, butter. I wasn’t invited along. By this point in the trip, I had earned something of a reputation for buying far too many groceries whenever I was let loose in a store, driven by an inability to walk past anything that looked interesting without wanting to try it.
Back at the apartment, I took over the kitchen. It was meant to be simple — scrambled eggs, warm bread, a bit of cold cuts folded in, something like a breakfast burrito. Then I discovered there was no salt in the apartment, and none on my shopping list either. So I improvised: fried the cold cuts in butter first, letting it pick up their saltiness, then cooked the eggs in that same butter. A workaround born entirely out of necessity.
The guys ate. They said it was the best scrambled eggs they’d ever had.
I don’t know if that’s true. I’ll never know if it’s true or if they were simply being kind to the person who’d cooked for them in a foreign apartment on a trip none of us had planned. But I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. The kindness was the point. Sharing a meal we hadn’t planned to eat, in a country we hadn't planned to visit, made from whatever we happened to have — that was the real flavor of that breakfast

The Drive Back
Eventually, it was time to go. We packed the same small backpack, checked out, and pointed the car back toward the causeway.
The border crossing in reverse felt familiar now — the stamps, the formalities, the small rituals of leaving one country and entering another. But this time, as the bridge stretched out ahead of us over the water, something shifted in me that I have not expected.
A quiet sadness. Small, but unmistakable, settling into my chest somewhere around the midpoint of the causeway.
This was the turn. Not just back into Saudi Arabia, but back toward the end of the whole journey. I had been so fully inside the adventure — the desert, the food, the friends, the endless unplanned turns — that I had somehow forgotten it would eventually end.
I looked out at the water on either side, the same turquoise that had felt so exciting on the way in, and thought: I have crossed the Kingdom. I have seen the desert. I have eaten more than I can count. I have made friends I did not expect to meet. And somewhere on my phone, quietly, online check-in for my flight home had already opened.