A late-night check-In in Saudi Arabia
My heart was still racing from the customs interrogation as we drove off the King Fahd Causeway and into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I let out a sigh of relief.
We made it.
Or had we?
The nighttime view was unfamiliar. We passed drab concrete office buildings, walled private compounds, and what appeared to be a grand palace.
The next day, I would learn it wasn’t a palace at all. It was a hypermarket—part supermarket, part department store. Don’t ask me how I missed the giant shopping cart at the entrance. Apparently, the metal monstrosity holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest shopping cart sculpture.
A five-star leap of faith
Our driver swung hard into the driveway of the Al-Gosaibi Hotel. Its Middle Eastern-style façade, with graceful arches and colonnades, glowed warmly in the night. Stately date palms swayed in the slight breeze.
I hadn’t been entirely sure about the Al-Gosaibi when I chose it from a list of hotels provided by our Saudi Aramco hosts. It sounded too good to be true: a five-star hotel at an inexplicably reasonable rate.
I chalked it up to the favorable exchange rate. After all, the photos online were warm and inviting.
If only I had paid more attention to the small disclaimer:
"Currently under construction, but still in operation."
The Al-Gosaibi was one of Al-Khobar’s first hotels, named for the prominent Saudi family behind a sprawling business empire. Somehow that pedigree made it feel reassuring at a time when al-Qaeda attacks in the Kingdom were still a recent memory. Little did we know that within months, the family name would be splashed across international business headlines amid a massive debt crisis and corporate feud.
We were relieved to find a night manager still on duty. He confirmed our reservation for the next ten days and handed the room key to Chris.
“The porter will bring your bags to your room.”
The elevator doors opened.
With a faint smile, he gestured toward an elevator in the far corner of the empty lobby.
“We wish you a nice stay.”
“That was fairly painless,” I whispered to Chris as the elevator began its ascent.
The doors chimed and slid open…into darkness.
The starry night sky poked through gaping holes where windows should have been. A gentle breeze greeted us. As our eyes adjusted to the moonlight, exposed pipes and raw ceiling joists emerged from the gloom. The smell of plaster dust hung in the air.
Our jet-lagged brains struggled to make sense of the devastation.
Mine, being mine, quickly settled on the worst possible explanation:
Al-Qaeda had bombed the hotel.
I spun around and punched the elevator button.
“What the…” Chris squinted down the corridor.
“Wait. There’s light over there.”
At the far end of what remained of the hallway, a thin seam of brightness glowed beneath a door.
“Let’s tell them we don’t want to stay here,” I spluttered. “We’ll go to the InterContinental.”
I was suddenly prepared to mortgage our future for a hotel with walls.
Ding.
The elevator doors opened behind us.
I spun around, ready to dive in, only to find my escape blocked by a diminutive porter who seemed to have fallen straight from the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
He rushed past us, rattling off something in a language we didn’t understand. He was heading toward the distant sliver of light. His composure suggested he saw nothing remotely unusual about escorting five-star hotel guests through a construction zone in near-total darkness.
Our brains numb, we followed.
Again, blindly.
Just as we’d followed our taxi driver through the dilapidated border-control offices on the Causeway, we reflexively followed this tiny stranger into the darkness.
We ducked beneath dangling cables and sidestepped debris we could sense more than see, trying not to lose sight of our fast-moving guide.
At last, the porter reached the distant door and pushed it open.
On the other side was…
A perfectly normal, carpeted hotel corridor.
Our bags were waiting there on a large brass trolley. The porter had apparently taken a different route upstairs, deposited them, then come looking for us.
So much for a terrorist attack.
Relief washed over me as we hurried to catch up. The porter, for reasons known only to him, seemed determined to set a land-speed record for luggage delivery.
We rounded a corner.
Two bearded men in immaculate white thobes and red-and-white checked ghutras approached from the opposite direction, deep in conversation. They may have been religious scholars or clerics—or merely two men returning to their rooms—but suddenly I felt conspicuously visible: my uncovered head, my Western clothes.
They didn’t acknowledge us as they passed.
I lowered my eyes anyway.
Moments later, the porter stopped abruptly before a heavily scuffed door.
Five-star aspirations notwithstanding, this was looking more Motel 6 than St. Regis San Francisco.
He kicked it open.
The room wasn’t much bigger than my closet—and the door wouldn’t lock.
The room was spartan. In fact, it wasn’t much bigger than my closet back home. Chris tipped him a few riyals we’d had the foresight to order before leaving California, and we quickly closed the door behind him.
Or tried to.
It didn’t sit squarely in the jamb.
Worse, the hollow-core door wouldn’t latch, much less lock. We shoved and wedged it until it held, hoping no one outside would discover what little effort it would take to get in.
For a moment, we considered going back downstairs and asking for another room.
That would mean retracing the dark corridor. Explaining the problem. Making decisions.
At that late hour, with our adrenaline still surging from the frightening causeway and customs experience, not to mention the bomb (construction-zone) scare, it all seemed beyond us.
We could move to another hotel tomorrow.
Exhaustion won. The moment our heads hit the pillows, we were asleep.
A familiar sound before dawn
At the crack of dawn, the Islamic call to prayer awakened us.
The voices of muezzins from mosques across Al-Khobar poured through the room from competing loudspeakers. Apparently, the walls were as substantial as the door.
We definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore.
I told Chris this was Fajr, the first of the five daily prayers that begin before sunrise.
But as I lay there listening, something unexpected happened.
For the first time since we’d crossed the causeway, Saudi Arabia felt familiar.
I was transported back to Rahima, the little village beside the Aramco compound where I’d grown up. How many times had I stood near the chain-link fence as a little girl, looking toward the village mosque and wondering about the unseen muezzin whose sonorous voice floated above the rooftops?
For a few minutes, lying in that shabby hotel room in Al-Khobar, the decades between then and now seemed to disappear.
خلاص Khalas. Finished.
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