Curses!!!

When I woke up this morning in Tabuk, I was only eight flights from home. I hadn’t been so far away since I found myself in remote northern Afghanistan. No helicopter rides will be required to facilitate my return, but it will take six different airlines – seven if you count United Express, and eight overall. Add to that seven cities in two countries, ten different beds and four different rental cars over four or five weeks, and it’s no wonder my brain is hanging upside down.

So far, so fun, though, except for our reentry into Riyadh a week ago. We had spent a few days in a rundown western compound within a large Saudi military –industrial complex in the north and needed to head back to the capital to drop off most of the traveling circus and to spend a couple days to catch up with the work before heading into the field again. Our client was driving the lead vehicle, our US Army major had the second, and I took the rear.

The drive was scheduled to take five or six hours, and would have, but we tended to stop every hour or so at a truck stop for snacks and biologics. This slowed us down, as did the sometimes heavy rain, so we had only made it to the outskirts of the city in five and a half hours, with the sun close to set and afternoon traffic in full swing.

In Riyadh, afternoon traffic is hardly distinguishable from morning, noontime, or evening traffic. It’s awful. It’s crowded. It’s manic. Now, it would be one thing to simply drive through town to our hotel, have the valet park the cars, and retire to a nice Japanese meal at the Radisson. Yeah, that would be nice. In reality, we drove to the city center, then down some minor avenue to the Sheraton, where we dropped off three of our crew. They needed to be downtown to facilitate some meetings the next day.

I would have liked to have made a left turn out of the hotel and headed back to the highway. Yeah, I would have liked that, too. Left turns at the time were not going to happen. The four lane road was hosting six lanes, and none of them had any gaps in the traffic large enough to fit three large left turning SUVs. So we turned right, into the heart of it. Somehow, the traffic got thicker, so it quickly became a chore to keep behind the leading vehicle, then it became a struggle to keep only a single local car between our convoy components, and then I turned on the offensive.

Being a nice driver would have been a recipe for disaster. One local car slipping between us would have turned to two, three, or ten, and before you know it, the lead vehicle would have been out of sight. Maybe this wouldn’t have been so bad, except that it was dark, sort of raining, we had no maps or GPS, and we really weren’t sure where we were headed. Our lead car did, sort of, know where we were going, but he had never got there from the Sheraton, so dead reckoning was the call.

We found the Sheraton after crawling for an hour. We found our intended accommodations at Eskan Village three and a half hours later, a distance of no more than 16 crow flying kilometers. It didn’t help that numerous highway underpasses were flooded and/or closed. It didn’t help that our Major driver was an Army aviator, who was more used to flying over obstacles than driving through them.

At one point, the lead vehicle was making another u-turn, and the trailing two vehicles were forced to make the maneuver after the signal turned red, scoring us a couple of flashes from the traffic control cameras (I’ll include my 500 Riyal ticket on my expense report). At one of the underpasses, floodwaters were over the floorboards, and we had to pass through that one twice. At another point, it was very dark, still raining, and I swear we were driving through a landfill.

I eventually lost interest in the task, and was about ten minutes from taking charge when we finally reached our destination, where we spent an hour getting through security and finding our hooches.

Totally worth it.

The final hour, I mean, not the three and half that preceded it. I’m not particularly subject to flashbacks, but the endless drive around Riyadh reminded me too much of crossing the wire in the sandbox, except for the lack of weapons. Driving a single vehicle would have been no problem, but keeping the convoy together when there was an unclear plan of attack was no less than stressful.

Someone said that Mark Twain said that "I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." When I first heard this, I didn’t know if the subject was people in general, like you would travel with on a plane or shared highway, or people in specific, like those you would have in your vehicle or tour group.

Now, I’m pretty sure he meant both.