Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  I left for Saudi Arabia well prepared, thanks to literary agent Steve Ross, who treated me to a lunch of bagels and lox with a schmear, not easily obtained in Riyadh. I’d selected Saudi Arabia to begin this final segment as the safest of the Nasty Nine. But events on the ground invariably trump careful planning and showed it was naive of me to assume, with the Arab Spring in full bloom on its every side—in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain—that the Desert Kingdom could remain immune, especially given its large and restive minority population of Shiites encouraged by Iran to foment trouble within its main challenger for regional supremacy.

  The day after I arrived, the police killed two protesters in Qatif in the heavily Shia Eastern Province, which I needed to drive through the following week to reach the causeway to Bahrain and my flight to Africa. Two days later, at the funeral of those protestors, unidentified assailants killed two police and wounded several bystanders as others burned tires and set up roadblocks.

  The next day the Saudi Interior Ministry (while scrupulously avoiding any mention of Sunni/Shia tensions) denounced the killings as “incited and dictated by foreign malicious plans using unknown criminal elements who have infiltrated among the citizens and are firing from residential areas and narrow streets.” It warned that “Whoever deludes himself about violating order will be deterred strongly. Those who cross the line will be dealt with severely and with maximum force. We are a country targeted by many plots.”

  So much for my peaceful start. As a result of this violence, my group of seven acquired an armed escort for most of each day. Police checkpoints had been set up every forty miles along the main highways, and as soon as our van stopped at the first to present our travel authorization papers, a patrol car with flashing lights took up station either in front of or behind us and escorted us for most of the rest of the day, most closely when we visited desolate archaeological sites. Personally, I’d have felt safer without the flashing lights, which do little to deter determined terrorists, but instead alert them to a high-value target.

  Our group proceeded unmolested, and the locals welcomed us. One of our group did break a couple of ribs while scrambling around, but we couldn’t blame that on any foreign criminal elements. The same day, two relatives of our driver were killed, but that occurred in Syria, which was starting to heat up and break down.

  Because it’s difficult to study on 196 nations, I didn’t have a deep understanding of Saudi Arabia before I arrived there. I knew it possessed, pumped, and sold more oil than any nation, banned women from driving, and was an absolute monarchy whose official religion was an ultraconservative form of Islam called Wahhabism. And I knew it forbade females from wearing revealing or provocative clothing, and that its sharia courts imposed the death penalty for adultery.

  I further knew, from personal experience, that it was a damn tough place for which to get a visa. I had tried, five years earlier, at both the Saudi Consulate in New York and the Saudi Embassy in Washington, but they just held my application for months and never gave me an answer. I then tried again, two years later, in Bahrain, and was again rebuffed. After I insisted on knowing the reason, an unusually candid consular officer took me aside and admitted, “Look, we have lots of oil money, so we don’t need your few tourist dollars. We have two million Muslim pilgrims visiting every year to do the Haj or make Umrah, and they are no trouble. Some of our conservative citizens do not want non-Islamic Westerners coming and stirring up our people with liberal ideas. And we certainly do not need the bad publicity if you are hurt or killed in our country by some radical. All together, it just makes no sense for us to allow in tourists.”

  Unable to refute his logic, I decided to go around it. I attempted, the next day, to saunter across the causeway from Bahrain into the Saudi city of Dammam to see if I got a warmer reception there. I was brusquely turned back midway.

  In September of 2010 several travel publications had reported that the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities had banned the issuance of any visas for tourists, except devout Muslims. Because I had to get in to complete my quest, I might have to “convert” to Islam for a while, read the Koran, study with a mullah, attend a mosque, and forget I was an oversexed Jewish atheist. Instead, I found a lead in International Travel News that enabled me to reach Saudi soil—albeit $9,000 poorer—dressed in desert gear and devoutly following an elderly archeologist/cultural anthropologist from the University of Texas who was the world’s authority on the minute clay counters utilized in the Middle East some 7,000 years ago to keep financial accounts, which, she had posited in her two-volume opus, gave rise to the first writing. My role? Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

  Because Saudi customs and etiquette are tightly structured and taken seriously, and their violation could give unintended offense, we had to learn the rules, among which, as set forth by our internal facilitator, were these:

  Don’t discuss unpleasant topics in social situations.

  Accept the first cup of coffee as an acknowledgment of the host’s hospitality (even if you don’t drink it). But do not accept more than three cups.

  Eat and pass food and things only with the right hand.

  Handle food with the first three fingers of the right hand only.

  Don’t let your fingers touch your mouth or tongue when eating from a communal dish.

  Leave a portion of the meal uneaten.

  Depart after the presentation of incense.

  Do not show too much admiration for a Saudi’s possessions because he may feel obligated to offer you the item under consideration.

  Do not prematurely withdraw if a Saudi man holds your hand.

  Men and women should avoid physical contact in public.

  Do not beckon or point with the fingers.

  Do not photograph people, particularly women, without first asking permission.

  Do not expose the soles of your feet to Saudis or make idiomatic references to shoes.

  No alcohol, pork products, pornography, or religious books and artifacts not related to Islam are permitted in the country.

  Homosexual behavior and adultery are illegal and can carry the death penalty.

  Public criticism of the King, the royal family, or the government is not tolerated.

  Saudis are very conscious of personal and family honor and can easily be offended by any perceived insult to that honor.

  Islam is the only legally and officially recognized religion.

  In addition, we had to comply with the dress code for foreigners issued by the Society for the Encourage [sic] of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice, which decreed that men cannot wear any type of shorts, tight trousers, or fitted shirts (which left no wiggle room for a guy who’d gained 15 pounds in the past year).

  You think all this is easy? Try sitting on a carpet in outgrown pants with your bare feet tucked underneath you for two hours while fetching fried rice from a communal bowl with the first three fingers of the right hand and trying to ingest it without touching your mouth or tongue while simultaneously passing the pita bread to the guy next to you with the same right hand and desperately trying to get the pepper dish without pointing at it as you praise the weather for the tenth time while taking care not to praise the furniture and longing for the incense to be presented although you are eager (without giving offense, of course) to find out exactly who is killing whom and why in the Eastern Province, all this while still absorbing your first contact with Saudi culture—the bold caption atop the entry form distributed on the arriving flight: DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS.

  Our experiences were more relaxed and pleasant than what we’d anticipated from the instructions.

  Almost every male Saudi we encountered shook our (right) hand warmly (but not uncomfortably long) and told us “America is good.” The police who enforced religious discipline ignored my belly-stretched T-shirts. When the call to prayer sounded, as it did five times a day, all businesses closed promptly—but not quite; in the open-air markets, you could usually find a shopkeeper in the
back of one of the stalls who was keeping watch over his neighbors’ stalls and willing to surreptitiously transact business. The netiquette in computer cafes was to lock the door until prayers were over, but let you stay and continue messaging. Traffic did not stop. And the few people who loitered on the street were not rounded up and forced to attend services. Although non-Muslims were forbidden to enter the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, our group’s van took an unauthorized “shortcut” through the heart of Medina and didn’t get stopped.

  I got a pleasant surprise in Jeddah when we ran into a group of 14 teenage Saudi girls from a private school taking a tour with their teacher to study old buildings. Only three kept their faces covered; all the others were eager to chat, in excellent English, take photos of us, pose for photos with us, and generally behave like typical American teenagers. Nothing like this was repeated for the rest of the trip, and we never again had the opportunity to speak to a Saudi female. It was a fascinating glimpse behind the veil, and I wondered how these girls would fare in their strict society when the time came for them to marry and conform.

  All in all, we had a great ten days visiting digs at Al-Ukhdood, Yathrib (Madinah), Al Via, Al Jout, Za’abal fortress, Hail, and the Zubaida Route, trotting around to look at (and try to interpret) rock carvings and inscriptions from 2,000 years ago, poking about in scores of tombs carved into sandstone cliffs in the desert behind elegant facades adorned with snakes and eagles and the five steps to Heaven, and picking over bleached bones around the ruins of ancient caravansaries. These last were situated along the routes by which spices and incense had made the land transit from Yemen to the Mediterranean, before Arab sailors learned how to put the seasonal monsoon winds to their advantage and sail up and down the narrow, coral-reef-fringed Red Sea, an innovation that wrecked the overland caravan trade around C.E. 75. We had fun, but were beyond hopeless when it came to semiotics and distinguishing among recondite inscriptions carved in Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabatean, and early Arabic, as our professor gently noted.

  During this time, the president of Yemen agreed to leave office (again), which mollified the protesters a mite, but the state still lacked a functioning government to issue visas, which put me in a dilemma. I always try to enter a country legally, with visas and passport stamps and all such folderol, and had only once departed from this procedure, in exigent circumstances, but I realized I could well be doddering or dead by the time Yemen resumed issuing visas. When our group reached the Saudi city of Najran on the edge of the Empty Quarter, to poke around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Al-Ukhdood in Wadi Najran, only two uninhabited miles from the Yemeni border, the temptation proved overpowering.

  I offered our guide $200 to take me up to the border, but he told me it was too risky because the Saudis were on the alert to prevent jihadis from slipping across from Yemen. He said the Saudi military had cleared a wide stretch of land on the border, had installed heat sensors, were erecting a fence (not yet completed), and had 4 × 4s with searchlights patrolling the area—all of which presented an irresistible challenge to me.

  Aided by a visibility diminishing dust storm that night, and abetted by a local with an SUV who succumbed to my offer of $200, and with my absence from our motel covered for by two members of my group, we drove about two miles past the airport to a dark and deserted area, hung a hard right, and headed up the sandy slopes for several hours, until we crossed into an unguarded part of Yemen.

  * * *

  Yemen was like traveling back in time. I stayed in the Old City part of its capital, Sana’a, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is a maze of narrow, winding old alleys lined by the world’s first skyscrapers, six to seven stories tall, built of large stone blocks many hundreds of years ago, originally illuminated inside through window holes covered with thin sheets of alabaster polished to transparency.

  The people were remarkably friendly. The countryside was like Arizona on steroids: The mountains, which soar from 6,000 to 11,000 feet (the highest in the Middle East), were often topped with an enchanting ancient village reached by a breath-stoppingly serpentine road and surrounded by a high, thick wall, entered through a gate out of the Arabian nights. The food was varied and delicious, albeit too spicy for most Westerners. And there were more signs on the walls proclaiming—in an artistic combination of black, green, and red paint—DEATH TO AMERICA than I have ever seen. The full translation was even more disturbing: “God is great. Death to America! Death to Israel! Damn the Jews! Power to Islam.”

  I chanced upon a wedding at a remote village on a high plateau where most of the fierce-looking tribal guests had walked in from the hills for the festivities dressed in their newest automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They vied to have their photos taken with this rare Western visitor and insisted I hold their weapons as they entwined their arms over my shoulders. Lucky for me I’m from Poland.

  On a barren hill overlooking Wadi Bahr in Yemen, 15 km north of Sana’a, I provided a perch for a young falcon. The birds are carefully trained, highly prized, and heftily priced status symbols throughout the Middle East, where they are used for hunting small animals. Debbie Ricci

  My long background evaluating female bodies provided me with vital sociopolitical insight as to why Yemeni women average a svelte and inviting 115 pounds while Saudi women tip the scales over 210, why these lithe ladies glide by in shimmering black silk robes while the similarly attired Saudi women plod by like oxcarts whose wheels are out of line. I respectfully submit five reasons for this telling and informative difference, ones you will not find in any World Bank analysis.

  1. The Yemen women stride about briskly, freely, independently on their own, comprising fully half of the pedestrian population. The Saudi women are rarely allowed to walk about, and on the rare occasions when they do, must keep a respectful three paces behind the hulking, slow-moving male relative who is chaperoning them.

  2. Yemen is far poorer, and consequently has fewer cars, so walking is a way of life. In Saudi Arabia, as in the other wealthy Gulf states, foreign guest workers drive the overweight denizens almost everywhere in luxurious, air-conditioned cars, severely limiting exercise opportunities.

  3. The Yemenis, being poorer, are more restricted in, and conscious of, food consumption, while the Saudis just pile it on.

  4. Although times may be changing a little in Saudi Arabia, it is still a bastion of arranged marriages, where the parents pick the mates and the parties take whatever is offered. In Yemen, the teenagers are more independent, and often conduct lengthy courting interviews before marrying, interviews in which looking like an oxcart would not be advantageous—unless the prospective husband is primarily seeking someone capable of heavy hauling.

  5. The climate of the most populated parts of Yemen, which are mountainous, is brisk and cool, encouraging aerobic walking, while that of sea-level Saudi is so torpid and enervating that not even mad dogs or Englishmen try it.

  After several days in Sana’a, I grew weary—and somewhat wary—of all the DEATH TO AMERICA signs, and all the pamphlets I was handed informing me that “None has the right to be worshiped but Allah.” I opted to fly to a remote part of Yemen where there were no active jihadis—the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, about 500 miles south of Aden. I can’t say it was a brilliant move, because I’d forgotten that Socotra was near that part of the Somali coast where the pirates had their lairs. Thwarted by convoys of European warships from snatching the easy maritime pickings as they had done several years before, the pirates had turned to looting and kidnapping in the surrounding land areas, including the three sister islands west of Socotra. So far they’d left Socotra alone, perhaps because none of its towns appear to have been rebuilt since they were devastated in a war with Egypt more than 50 years ago. It looks too poor for any self-respecting pirate to waste his time.

  If they did come, they’d meet little resistance because the populace is too stoned to care, totally trashed around the clock. It’s a long-standing part
of Yemeni culture to chew qat, the mildly narcotic leaves of an evergreen shrub (Catha edulis) that is Yemen’s biggest cash crop, fetching its farmers five times more per acre than fruit. Surveys show that 70 to 80 percent of the male residents chew qat at least three times a week, for four to five hours a day, causing qat cultivation to soar from 8,000 hectares in 1970 to 107,000 today, and sucking up 55 percent of the country’s daily water consumption. A national average of 20 percent of family income is spent on qat, with many families closer to 50 percent. The locals further deplete their budgets and health by smoking cigarettes while chewing qat and by washing down the sticky green mess with two-liter bottles of Coke or Fanta.

  Although I seldom put any raw foreign greens into my mouth without peeling or disinfecting them, curiosity overcame caution and I chewed two leaves of qat. They were so bitter I spit them out in less than a minute. I then added some chewing gum as a sweetener, and that enabled me to chew four qát leaves for five minutes, but to no effect. To get any sort of a buzz, you need to wad up both cheeks with 50 to 60 leaves, which is why the island looks as if it’s suffering from a severe mumps epidemic.

  But Socotra is not without its charms and is hailed as the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean. Its plateaus are a UNESCO World Heritage site, a Global 200 Ecosystem, and the world’s only home to the dragon’s blood trees, stately arboreals shaped liked upright umbrellas. They supposedly grew from the blood of a dragon who’d been gored in a titanic battle with an elephant, notwithstanding that evidence of the existence of either species has never been found on the island. For more than a thousand years the islanders have tapped the trees for their sap, which hardens into the dense crimson resin they call cinnabar. It became a staple of the ancient caravans, which traded it across Asia Minor for use as a paint pigment, medicine, stain for glass and Italian violins, wool dye, pottery glaze, ornament, cosmetic, breath freshener, and adhesive for false teeth. I bought home a baggie for those of my friends who needed some of these repairs.