Saudi Diaries — Part 6: Yallah - Let's Hit The Road

​A coffee cup with my name on it. Three scoops of ice cream and a white thobe that paid the price. The highway north, with the Red Sea on my left and the desert on my right. This is not just a road trip. This is the chapter where Saudi Arabia stopped being a place I was visiting and started becoming a place I belonged.

Thursday Evening: The Corniche After Al Balad
We had spent the afternoon lost — happily, gratefully lost — in the ancient coral alleyways of Al Balad. The old city has a way of pressing itself into your memory: the latticed wooden windows filtering golden light, the smell of bakhoor (incense) drifting from open doorways, the silence of centuries pressing gently against your shoulders. We walked out of there quieter than we walked in.
Then Abdulaziz said, "Yallah. Let's go to the Corniche. The sunset is something else here."
He was not wrong.
The Corniche on a Thursday evening — the start of the Saudi weekend — is an entirely different world from the meditative stillness of Al Balad. The waterfront was alive. Families had claimed every patch of grass, spreading out picnic mats loaded with food. Children were everywhere: racing each other along the promenade, shrieking with laughter, chasing each other around. Groups of friends walked slowly, phones out, stealing the sunset for their camera rolls. Old men sat on benches, watching all of it with the satisfied calm of people who have seen many good evenings and know this is one of them.
The Red Sea was doing what it does best at that hour — turning entirely gold. Then orange. Then a deep, bruised rose. The sea wall reflected the colours back at us, and the whole Corniche shimmered with it.
I stood there and thought: nobody is performing anything here. There are no tourists to impress. This is just Jeddah and Jeddawees, enjoying their weekend in all its warm, beautiful ordinariness. After days of trying to absorb grand sights and ancient wonders, this felt like the most honest thing I had seen.

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And then the Adhan came.
The call to Maghrib prayer rose from somewhere nearby — from a mosque I could not see but could suddenly feel the presence of — and it moved across the Corniche like a tide. Low and melodic at first, then joined by another call from further away, then another, overlapping and harmonising in that way that is not quite music but is not quite not music either. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, from above the city and inside it simultaneously.
What happened next is the thing I keep coming back to.
The Corniche did not stop. But in the next few minutes, it shifted. It rearranged itself, quietly and without drama, the way a room rearranges itself when something important is about to happen. The picnic families — fathers, mothers, teenage kids — stood and oriented themselves. Friends mid-conversation paused, then found a patch of grass or a clear stretch of pavement and stood together, shoulder to shoulder. An older man who had been sitting alone on a bench rose slowly, steadied himself, and faced the direction of Mecca. A group of young men who had been kicking a football around a few minutes earlier set it aside and formed a neat, spontaneous row.
No one announced it. No one organised it. It simply occurred — a hundred private acts of prayer becoming, in their simultaneity, something communal and vast.
I watched a group of strangers — men who, as far as I could tell, had not known each other ten minutes ago — align themselves side by side on the little square-like area, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. They bowed together. They rose together. They pressed their foreheads to the earth together, with a unity that was entirely unrehearsed and entirely complete.
I have not witnessed religion in this way before. I have stood in cathedrals and felt something. I have sat in mosques and felt something. And I felt something here too, standing on a busy waterfront promenade in Jeddah with ice cream in my hand, watching an entire community pause the evening to remember something larger than us all.
It lasted perhaps ten to fifteen minutes. Then, as naturally as it had begun, it ended. The football reappeared. The conversations resumed. The children, who had observed all of this with the matter-of-fact acceptance of children for whom this is simply how evenings work, went back to their games.
The Corniche breathed out. And the sunset, if anything, was more beautiful for it.

The Ice Cream Incident (Or: How a White Thobe Met Its End)
Abdulaziz suggested ice cream. Specifically, Baskin-Robbins and a deal that sounded perfectly reasonable until it wasn't.
"Buy two, get one free," the ice cream guy said.
We ordered. Mint chocolate chip, vanilla, cherry and some other delicious combo. Then, as the logic of the promotion demanded, one more cup that neither of us had planned for, could finish, or, in retrospect, needed.
We were standing there with three large cups of ice cream for two, looking at each other with the particular expression of people who have been outsmarted by a promotional offer.
Then Abdulaziz spotted a group of children nearby. They were probably seven or eight years old, orbiting each other in the restless way children do when the evening is warm, and there is nothing specific to do but to enjoy life.
Without a moment's hesitation — without calculation, without procedure — Abdulaziz waved them over and held out the extra cup.
I need to describe what happened inside me in that second, because it matters.
My first instinct, trained by a lifetime of European city living, was a mild, irrational alarm. We don't give food to strangers. We especially don't approach children we don't know. It was not a moral objection. It was just... conditioning. The quiet, slightly sad defensiveness of modern urban life, where community has been replaced by privacy and generosity has become something you do officially, through channels, with consent forms.
The children did not have this problem. They descended on the ice cream with the pure, uncomplicated joy of children receiving ice cream, which is one of the most genuinely happy things a human face can do. They looked up at Abdulaziz with big eyes. He laughed. They laughed and thanked the stranger for the ice cream. It was over in 15 seconds.
In Saudi sharing is not something you think about. It just happens.
I stood there turning it over in my mind for a bit. There is something quietly radical about a culture that has held onto that reflex, that instinct toward the other, in an age that has taught the rest of us to hold everything a little tighter.
And then I sat down on the bench.
I should mention that my cup of mint chocolate chip had been suffering. I had been gesturing while I talked — a bad habit — and at some point, with a confidence that was entirely unjustified, I had placed the cup on the bench beside me. Where, in some combination of gravity and distraction, it tipped.
I did not notice immediately.
I noticed when Abdulaziz's expression changed into something caught between concern and the desperate effort not to laugh. I looked down. There, on my beautiful white thobe — the one I had been so careful with, the one I had worn with such quiet pride — was a smear of cherry and chocolate. Spreading. Committed. Permanent (at least for the evening).
Abdulaziz lost the battle with laughter. I joined him. The children, still nearby, looked over and laughed too, apparently at nothing specific, just because laughter is contagious and the evening was good.
I spent the rest of the night at the Corniche wearing the evidence of my own carelessness. It was, honestly, a perfect metaphor for travel: the moment you stop being careful is usually the moment something memorable happens.

The Evening Continues
Two of Abdulaziz's friends happened to be nearby — in the way that things always seem to happen in Jeddah, with an ease that makes you suspect the city itself is conspiring to make you feel welcome. They joined us without fuss, folding me into the conversation with the natural grace of people who understand that a guest is simply a friend who hasn't arrived yet.
I cannot remember exactly what we talked about. The evening had that quality where the specific content of the conversation matters less than the warmth of it — the easy laughter, the gentle teasing between old friends, the way they kept turning to include me, making sure I was with them, not just beside them.

Wallah, I don't sound like Kim K. :-)
​my accent is better, my pronounciation is good! :-D

When we met, I tried out my Arabic.
"Salam. Keifak?"
The reaction was not what I expected. There was a beat — a genuine beat of surprise, eyes widening slightly — and then both of the guys lit up with what I can only describe as delight. Not the polite, slightly patronising approval you sometimes get when you attempt a foreign language badly. This was real. They cheered. They repeated my words back to me with encouragement and compliments. 

They pushed for more.
"Shukran," I followed up.
More cheering. :-)
"Keifak?" came from one of the guys.
"Alhamdulillah," I said, and they looked at each other like I had just pulled off a magic trick.
It is a small thing, trying a few words in someone's language. But the effort communicates something that no translation can: I see you. I want to meet you where you are, not where it's convenient for me. That message landed. I could feel it.
The Red Sea glittered under the stars. Families were still out, because the Saudi night does not end early. Children were still running. The sound of the city was all around us — gentle, warm, human — and I sat there in my stained white thobe, surrounded by people I had known for less than an hour, feeling inexplicably at home.

The Next Morning: A Cup with My Name On It
The next day arrived with the particular brightness that only coastal mornings have — that quality of light off water that makes everything feel slightly more real than it should.
We had breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and loaded the car. The road north was waiting. Before we left Jeddah, though, Abdulaziz suggested we stop for coffee. One of last night's friends worked at a café nearby, he said. We should say goodbye properly.
I ordered my coffee. A cold Spanish latte. I waited at the table, still slightly slow with sleepiness and the previous evening's pleasures, thinking about the drive ahead.
Then the cup arrived.
I looked down at it. Written on the side, in careful letters:
"Welcome Marijo :-)"
I sat there longer than was probably dignified, holding this cup of coffee and smiling at it. Probably looking like an idiot.
Here is the thing: the barista did not know me. I was a stranger who had walked in with his friend, who happened to be from Croatia, who was passing through Jeddah for a few days and would almost certainly never come back to this specific coffee shop. There was no practical reason to write that on the cup. It accomplished nothing useful. It was simply kindness. Deliberate, small, and completely unnecessary, which is the best kind.
I remember that cup every now and then. It was a single line of ink on a paper sticker, and it told me more about Saudi hospitality than anything I had read or been told. The welcome here is not reserved for important people. It is not switched on for occasions. It is just... on. All the time. For everyone. Even the stranger in the cherry-stained thobe who can barely say salam without concentrating.
I took a photo and a video of it. Then I drank the coffee. It was very good.

​The Open Road
We pulled out of Jeddah and headed north on the coastal highway, and Saudi Arabia did what it does best: it opened up.
On my left, the Red Sea. I had been looking at it for days from the Corniche, from my hotel window, from a distance. But out here, on the highway, with nothing between us, it was different. The water was that improbable shade of turquoise that looks photoshopped until you are actually standing next to it — vivid, restless, catching the morning sun in a thousand places at once. Boats sat motionless in the distance. The horizon was a clean, unbroken line.
On my right, the desert. It did not begin dramatically. It simply was there, suddenly, as if it had always been there and the city had been the interruption. Sand and rock and silence, stretching away to the east with a patience that made the highway feel like a very recent imposition.
Ahead of us, the road. Wide, smooth, impossibly straight. The kind of road that invites thinking.
In the distance, I spotted the Haramain high-speed train — the line that connects Jeddah to Medina — gliding along its elevated track, fast, silent, and startlingly modern against the ancient landscape. Saudi Arabia keeps doing this to you: placing the ultra-contemporary directly beside the eternal, as if to say we contain multitudes, and we know it.
​

The biggest flagpole in the Kingdom (171m)

And then — the camels.
Abdulaziz had warned me this would happen. I had not entirely pictured it like this, because "camels on the highway" sounds like the kind of thing that happens in stories, not on actual highways with actual speed limits. But there they were: a not-so-small group, big and magnificent, picking their way across the road with the absolute confidence of creatures who know that the road is, in the grand scheme of things, a very recent development and thus their problem to solve rather than a rule to obey.
I made Abdulaziz slow down. I took photographs and videos. I may have said something embarrassing like "oh my God" several times.

Abdulaziz found this funny. He finds many things funny, which is one of his best qualities.
The highway unspooled ahead of us, and Abdulaziz talked. He pointed out landmarks — a particular stretch of coastline, a town visible from the road, a hill that has a story. We talked about growing up in this region, about what Saudi Arabia was like before and what it is becoming now. I listened and looked, and slowly, kilometre by kilometre, the traveller who had landed at King Abdulaziz International Airport a few days ago — a bit tense, slightly anxious person clutching his carry-on and wondering what he'd gotten himself into — felt very far away.
I realised, somewhere on that highway, that I had stopped translating the experience. Stopped holding it at arm's length and analysing it. I was simply in it. Moving through it. Part of it, in some small temporary way.
That is what a good road trip does. It metabolises everything that came before it.

First Glimpse of KAEC
The city announced itself before it arrived. There were signs first, then infrastructure, and then, on the horizon, something unexpected: geometry. Clean lines and deliberate forms rising from the flat coastal land — a city that did not grow organically from a settlement or a trading post or a water source, but was designed, conceived entire, called into existence by an act of will.
King Abdullah Economic City. Planned from scratch on an empty stretch of coastline. Intended to be a new model for how a city can work — an economic zone, a port, a place where something new is supposed to happen.
From a distance, it looked almost speculative. Like an architect's rendering that had somehow become real.
After the ancient coral towers of Al Balad, this was a complete inversion: a city with no past yet, only a future. And between those two places — the 1,000-year-old alleyways and this gleaming, half-built ambition — lay a coastal highway, a cup of ice cream, a stained white thobe, three words in Arabic, and a coffee cup with my name on it.
As we stepped out of the car in KAEC, the air smelled of salt and concrete and open possibility. I looked around at this strange, purposeful place rising from the desert edge, and I thought: this country keeps surprising me. Every time I think I understand what it is, it shows me another facet.
I could not wait to see what came next.

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