The Best American Travel Writing 2011

by Sloane Crosley

  Once out of your room, you can stroll through the malls with your girlfriends for some Bluetooth flirting, where Rashid and Khalid detect your cell phone network as you walk by and send text messages that range from chatty to creepy. One of my young married minders said he regularly gets hassled by the mutawa when he's out flirting with female friends: "They say, 'Can I ask who you are with?' and I tell them, 'Oh, she's my sister.' And they say, ''Your sister? Do you laugh like that with your sister?'" There's no date night in Saudi Arabia. The romance strictures here—a few virginal meetings, a peek under the veil, a marriage contract, an all-female wedding reception, and a check of the bloody sheets—make The Rules look like the Kama Sutra. In Jidda, there's a Chinese restaurant called Toki, where unmarried girls can show themselves off in front of likely prospects on a fifty-eight-meter catwalk. The prospects are not young men, however, but their mothers, who traditionally made the match with help from the khatabah, or yenta, who was sometimes sent over to surreptitiously look under the hood and kick the tires of the bride-to-be. She would give the girl a hug to check the firmness of her breasts and then drop something on the floor to watch the girl pick it up. When the young lady would bend over and her abaya lifted ever so slightly, the khatabah could see her ankles and infer the shape of the legs and derrière.

  "The Time of Ignorance"

  Back in the 1940s, when the oil began gushing, Saudi Arabia was the sort of place where the country's first king, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, traveled in a Ford convertible with his falcons and shot gazelles from the car. The king knew the name of every visitor to Riyadh. Travelers could not move around the Kingdom without the king's express consent, and he personally tracked each one's odyssey. Some Saudis, who had rarely seen airplanes, assumed they were cars that simply drove off into the sky. Prince Sultan bin Salman is a natural choice for tourism czar, given that he was the first Muslim in space. In 1985 he went up as part of an international crew on the Discovery shuttle. Trying to find Mecca from space—imagine gravity-free kneeling—was nothing compared with persuading other royals (thanks to polygamy, there are now thousands of them) to consider the desirability of making Saudi Arabia tourist-ready. For one thing, Saudis don't have that fondness for their own history that the British and Italians do. Many pious Muslims look askance at civilizations that predate Islam ("the time of ignorance," as they call it), and they have reservations about archaeological digs that may turn up Christian sites. Archaeology was not fully recognized until the last few years as a field of study in Saudi universities. In other countries, many of the famed tourist sites are what you might call "big broken things"—Machu Picchu, the Colosseum. Saudis don't go for broken, or even slightly worn. You will never see a Melrose Avenue-style vintage store; it would be considered shameful to buy or sell old clothes. It's all about the new and shiny.

  Prince Sultan was traveling through Tuscany a few years back, snapping pictures of big broken things and talking to preservation experts, when it hit him: maybe there was a way to get Saudis to appreciate their own ancient heritage. He gathered forty or so mayors and governors who liked nothing better than to tear down their cultural heritage, and showed them that they could develop historic sites where local crafts and fresh produce are sold in a "joyous" setting. The cultural education did not begin well. The prince had wanted the officials to see Siena. "And I get a phone call at four A.M. that woke me, and the pilot was calling. He said, 'I'm in Vienna.'" Eventually, the Saudi mayors and governors began to acquire a taste for old stuff. They've done five more trips, and one to Seville was coming up, though maybe they'd end up in Savile Row. (Saudis certainly know the way.)

  Prince Sultan is now training native Saudis—who have always left the heavy lifting as waiters, maids, and drivers to a servant class of Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Pakistanis, and Indians—to work as tour guides, tour operators, and hotel operators. He hopes that Saudis will get better at sightseeing as they travel elsewhere. "Saudis are not trained as good tourists," he told me over tea one night. "They didn't know how to respect the sites, not throw Kleenex at places."

  With Prince Sultan's assistance we flew to an attraction we'd never heard of before: the spectacular Madain Saleh, sister city to Jordan's renowned Petra, three hundred miles to the northwest. After flying across the desert for hours, you suddenly come upon strange and wonderful classical structures. Today they're in the middle of nowhere. Eons ago, at the time of ancient Rome, they stood athwart the Incense Route, controlled by the Nabataean kingdom. An airport is only just being built, so we bumped down in our puddle jumper on what was essentially a cleared track. Our guide barely spoke English, but he was giddy with pleasure at finally having someone to show around. There are more than a hundred sumptuous sandstone tombs here, many of them cavernous, sculpted into solid rock between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. Only in recent years have the Saudis come to appreciate Madain Saleh's value, registering it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.

  They're also restoring the old train station in Madain Saleh to its former glory, with a shiny black engine from the Hejaz railway, like the one Peter O'Toole blew up in Lawrence of Arabia. Don't bother asking about T. E. Lawrence here—he's remembered for selling the Saudis out. (Saudis love the movie, though, and spout lines from it like "Thy mother mated with a scorpion.") The guides in Saudi Arabia have a hard time staying on message, veering wistfully toward memories of time spent in the United States, studying in Palo Alto, San Diego, or Boulder. They still obsess about their college sports teams—staying up until all hours to watch games via satellite. At the Masmak Fortress, in Riyadh—the scene of a critical battle for Abdul Aziz ibn Saud—the guide soon lost interest in leading us among displays labeled "Some Old Guns" and "Cover for the Udder of the She-Camel" and began to wax nostalgic about a married woman named Liz in Grand Rapids.

  In Abha, a cool, green, mountainous area to the south, near Yemen, we had our sole encounter with an actual Saudi tourist. He was checking out the Hanging Village, where some people of yore had settled on the side of a sheer cliff to get away from the Ottomans. Supplies were lowered down by rope. The Saudi was a paunchy man from Riyadh named Fahad, who liked to be called Jack. Jack, wearing a stained tracksuit, volunteered that he had once lived in Fort Worth. "I enjoy it," he said, taking a drag on his cigarette and giving Ashley and me an appreciative look, "when I see these girls with the smell of the United States."

  Peeping Abdul

  The charm of Riyadh is that it has no charm. The only visual icon, the one captured in snow globes at souvenir shops, is the city's tallest building, Kingdom Centre, the home of the Four Seasons Hotel and the Kingdom Centre mall. It is owned by Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, the billionaire nephew of King Abdullah who has been called "the Arabian Warren Buffett" by Time magazine. (Rudy Giuliani turned down a $10 million donation to New York from al-Waleed after 9/11 when al-Waleed suggested that U.S. policies contributed to the attacks.) The skyscraper features a V-fhaped hole at the top, and Saudis tastelessly joke that it's "the Hijacker Training Academy."

  A Jordanian staffer at the Riyadh Four Seasons complained to me that the only things Saudis do are "shop and eat, shop and eat." Or subject you to "ordeal by tea," as I've heard it called. At the ubiquitous malls, women covered in black robes and gloves, with only their eyes showing, shop for La Perla lingerie, Versace gowns, Dior handbags, and Bulgari jewelry. Beauty is a drug for Saudi women, even though they're stuck at home most of the time—or maybe because of that. Saudi Arabia is more than three times the size of Texas and glitters with three times as many Swarovski crystals. "Bling H2O" water is imported from Tennessee. The shopaholism pauses only at prayer time, when metal grates come down over the stores. Men, who carry more of the burden of the five-times-a-day obligation, head off to the prayer rooms. The women wander zombie-like among the shuttered shop fronts. The atmosphere is watchful. Once, when Ashley tried to snap some pictures of Saudi women shopping at a lingerie store, a female security guard came run
ning up to confiscate the camera. "Just walk away," a Western woman advised us. "She's a woman—she has no power over you." At last: a fringe benefit of misogyny.

  The Kingdom Centre mall has a ladies' floor on top shielded by high, wavy frosted glass, so that men—with all the maturity of Catholic schoolboys in stairwells—can't peer up from below. Signs on the ladies' floor tell women, once inside, to take off their head coverings: that way, a Peeping Abdul can't disguise himself in female garb and wander lustfully among them. On the ladies' floor, you're actually allowed to try on clothes. On floors where the sexes mingle, you often have to buy whatever you want in different sizes and take it all home to try on. The mere thought of a disrobed woman behind a dressing room door is apparently too much for men to handle. There's something profoundly poignant about seeing little girls running around the malls in normal clothes, playing with little boys in normal ways—you know what's in store for them in just a few years. When I reached puberty, my mother gave me a book called On Becoming a Woman. When these girls reach puberty, they'll have a black tarp thrown over their heads.

  In recent years, Riyadh has gotten a dash of sophistication. "Oh, my!" says Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the lovely Riyadh businesswoman who is a daughter of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former longtime Saudi ambassador to the U.S. "There's a new restaurant almost every week, and I assure you, the way they look, the way the food is, is on a par with—I wouldn't say the top 10 restaurants in New York or London, but definitely 11 to 50." There's a two-week wait to get a table at B & F Burger Boutique, even though it's just high-end fast food served in a hip decor. The concrete walls and dim lights evoke SoHo, and gender segregation is more subtle. The women wear abayas with fashionable trim, and the guys trade their white thobes for blue jeans. The religious police showed up on opening night; they wanted the music eliminated and the women screened off by bigger partitions. The restaurant obliged only on the music.

  Going from Riyadh to the Red Sea is like going from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz. The main port of entry for hajj pilgrims, Jidda is Saudi Arabia's business capital. "The bride of the Red Sea" is home to many female entrepreneurs, and residents say they are trying to tell the rest of the country to relax. Women leave their abayas open in front, or wear nighties or tight jeans underneath. But the enticing blue mosaic pool at the Jidda Hilton is still only for men. I watched a Saudi man swim while a woman in "full ninja," as American businessmen here call it, tiptoed around the edge, chatting with him.

  When I asked the concierge about the hotel mosque, he said I couldn't go in unless I was a Muslim. Later, Prince Saud told me that I could simply have asked the emir of the region for permission. (Like the emir's listed?) Men in the Kingdom often reflexively say, "No, no, no"—"La, la, la!"—to women because it's the safer answer. But an essential point about Saudi Arabia is that everything operates on a sliding scale, depending on who you are, whom you know, whom you ask, whom you're with, and where you are. Drinking is not allowed, but many affluent Saudis keep fully stocked bars. "Take off your abaya when you drink your whiskey," instructed one Saudi mogul as his bartender handed us cocktails in his home. Some Saudi men glean the future from coffee grounds, and many Saudi women love horoscopes, but police here snatched a Lebanese TV host and clairvoyant from a pilgrimage and sentenced him to death by beheading for sorcery. (After international media pressure, the execution has for now been postponed.) Non-Muslims are not allowed to enter the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But Leslie McLoughlin led a tour near Medina prior to 9/11, where he could view the city and the Prophet's Mosque from his hotel.

  Saudi Arabia may now be in semi–Open Sesame mode (and it's funny to see how many people have named their camels "Barack"), but the holy sites won't be officially open to non-Muslims anytime soon. On the highway to Mecca, a "Christian bypass" tells the rest of us when to turn off the road: heathens exit here. Perhaps from a distance you'll one day be able to glimpse what is expected to be the second-tallest building in the world, now being constructed by the bin Laden family real estate company. It is a hotel complex that will be topped by a clock six times larger than London's Big Ben. (The Saudis harbor a hope that Mecca Time will dislodge Greenwich Mean Time from its current prominence.) For now, even planes must avoid violating the holy cities, keeping safely away from sacred airspace lest infidels spy from above. There has been talk of building an Islamic, Disneyland-style park on the road between Mecca and Jidda. The Saudis find monkeys and parrots far funnier than mice and ducks, so watch out, Mickey and Daffy. And Qatar recently pushed the Gulf states to create a common Gulf Cooperation Council tourist visa, in order to make the region more attractive to cruise ships.

  Jidda has many charms. The median strip on the corniche has a magical open-air museum, with huge, whimsical sculptures by Miró, Henry Moore, and other artists who created works consistent with Islamic values—that is, no representations of the human form. The neon-lit boardwalk is lined with snack shacks, toy shops, and mini amusement parks. But it's missing the sexy, seedy elements that make shore vacations fun. Instead of teenagers necking or kids splashing in the water, there are men spreading out prayer rugs on the seawall.

  Libertarian Zone

  I had bought a Burqini on-line from an Australian company, figuring I'd need one to go swimming. A Burqini—a burka bikini—is a full-body suit that resembles Apolo Ohno's Olympic outfit or the getup Woody Allen wore to play a sperm in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex... But as it turned out I didn't have to swaddle myself in one, because I discovered a place called Durat al-Arus.

  Sarah Bennett, a stunning thirty-two-year-old, blue-eyed California Mormon who converted to Islam and blackened her blond hair, now works in Jidda for a conglomerate. She wears Chanel abayas. Bennett took us to Durat al-Arus, a marina and tourist village where wealthy Saudis and royals have homes and boats. The architecture is 1970s, the colors are Miami Vice, and the mood is downright hedonistic compared with that of the rest of the country. It's a rare libertarian zone. Women can drive and wear what they want, and men and women can mingle without fear. I quickly commandeered a BMW from a cute sheikh so I could tool around for a few minutes in a meaningless spurt of emancipation. Then the sheikh, who wore a Jack Sparrow bandana and called himself "the Pirate," took Sarah, Ashley, and me out on his yacht, with a motorboat trailing behind, for some snorkeling in the turquoise Red Sea. He was a Muslim and served us only soft drinks as we made our way to a desolate desert island. But other than that you could wear a real bikini and live the high life: listening to club music booming from an iPod, eating melting butter-pecan ice cream and fresh berries, sipping flutes of sparkling pomegranate juice. With a small shock, I was struck by the sensuality of the scene—it was hard to believe this was Saudi Arabia. My thoughts drifted to the silent movie The Sheik, and the moment when Rudolph Valentino drags Agnes Ayres onto his horse in the desert and says, "Lie still, you little fool."

  And that, I guess, is why they have the mutawa.

  The Last Stand of Free Town

  Porter Fox

  FROM The Believer

  THE CONCENTRIC BOULEVARDS and tidy row houses of downtown Copenhagen instill an overwhelming sense of order in Denmark's capital city. There are no beggars lurking in alleyways or vendors hawking trinkets on the sidewalk. At night, blaze-orange street cleaners buff cobblestones to a dull sheen while workers blast graffiti off walls with an environmentally friendly jet of pressurized ice crystals. The effect is so striking that on a spring morning with the sun reflecting off the spires of Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen appears more like a fairytale kingdom than the largest metropolis in Scandinavia.

  So it was with some surprise that Danes turned on their television sets on May 14, 2007, to see fires burning in their capital's streets and gangs of police officers beating their countrymen with billy clubs. The worst of the fighting flared up along Prinsessegade Road in the Christianshavn neighborhood. A column of black transport vans filed into the street as residents hu
rled Molotov cocktails, rocks, and fireworks at police. Officers retaliated with batons and tear gas, and by that afternoon, the seventeenth-century streets had disappeared under a thick cloud of smoke.

  The site was an ironic flashpoint for violence. Prinsessegade Road marks the northern border of a pacifist commune that has existed in Christianshavn since 1971. That year, a group of squatters overtook an abandoned army base east of Prinsessegade, barricaded the roads, outlawed cars and guns, and created a self-ruling micro-nation in the heart of Copenhagen. They called the eighty-five-acre district Christiania Free Town, drew up a constitution, printed their own currency, banished property ownership, legalized marijuana, and essentially seceded from Denmark. The traditionally liberal Danish government allowed the settlement at first, dubbing Christiania a "social experiment." Then it spent the next three decades trying to reclaim the area. Thirty-nine years and a dozen eviction notices later, the nine hundred residents of Free Town represent one of the longest-lasting social experiments in modern history.