On the flight, there was the usual, casual consumption of adult beverage engaged in by all on board. As we entered Saudi airspace, the flight attendants gathered up all evidence of alcoholic beverages, whether consumed or awaiting consumption. Being from the midwest and of German heritage (I like an occasional beer, and sometimes a beer on occasion, any occasion, BEER ME!) I thought this odd, but acceptable. Then the mad rush for the lavatories began. All the Saudi nationals, I far as I could tell, began changing from their western garb to their traditional get-up (especially the ladies). A couple of Brit engineers and myself got quite a kick out of the fashion parade that went on in the plane's aisle before we landed.
That night, after running the gauntlet that is the taxi stand at Jeddah Internatioal, I stayed at a Bechtel guest house on Embassy Row along the waterfront. I was wide-awake just before dawn and decided a few pictures of the sea front would be nice. As I walked out the front door into the still dark morning, I didn't get 3 steps from it and a Jeep containing two armed military types came screeching to a halt in front of me. As the militia confronted me with weapons drawn, I hollered back for the resident interpeter and house host to come help me. Apparently, Jeddah at that time was under a dusk to dawn curfew and that a prince or some relation to the King was also ensconsed in a home on the same street. Silly me, I was informed that as an obvious American, the State Militia (as I found out my antagonists were) immediately thought to teach me a lesson on Saudi rules for living in their country and confront me with a show of deadly force (9-mm automatic weaponage, one stuck in my gut, the other on the back of my head as I was convinced to assume a position laying on the ground). Welcome to King Faud's Fantasy Land!
Nothing else memorable occurred to me as I progressed up the coast to my destination, Yanbu.
At Yanbu, I was segregated from the locals and stayed at a construction camp for Americans and Europeans. On our quad (Four trailers split into four living quarters each, arranged in a square), we had an adopted cat named Abdul that someone had found outside the wire. 15 of us helped to support this flea-bitten, sorry excuse for a relative of the African Lion by bringing him scraps from the mess after breakfast and dinner. The 16th guy thought that Abdul had it in for him as the frisky feline usually lay in ambush for the sucker and as he walked by, jumped out of his hiding place and attacked the poor guy's trouser leg. I think Abdul didn't like the guy's shoes. Anyway, Abdul would disappear once a week for a couple of days and the speculation was that he had a girlfriend in town, or was smuggling the pseudo-sausage we gave him after breakfast mess to his cronies on the outside. Abdul was a somewhat good cat, as cats go, but he definitely had a pesonality (or is that a cat-ality?) all his own. He provided us with some good comic relief.
Life at the camp was good. We had an olympic sized pool, a rec-room and a small library nobody used as it's contents was censored and contained not one good book with a romantic paragraph. Zane Grey is not my cup of tea. A bus was provided to take any who wanted to town every night. I partook of this distraction on numerous occasions, especially after I found a liquor source in town (even though it was the local rot-gut "sediki"). One thing I could never figure out was why there never was any canned fruit and only a limited supply of fresh fruit in the mess. Later on in my stay/adventure, a couple of field walkie-talkies came up missing after work. The local extension of the Saudi Federales were making the rounds of the local construction camps in a sweep to locate these units and apprehend the culprit that would defy the rules in an obvious atttempt to defile all things Islamic ( that night I remember hearing that Jell-O had been banned from the Kingdom because they finally figured out that even though Jell-O tasted good, it was indeed a pork-based product). Our camp was alerted by someone that the gendarmes were enroute and to prepare for inspection. This was when I discovered the truth about the abcense of fruit from our tables as a mad rush ensued with large containers for the storm sewer drainage grate. As one Canadian of Scottish descent looked on shaking his head, he told me that "that is a shameful waste of perfectly good pre-alcoholic wine and brandy" as gallons of the goods were dumped to avoid arrest and deportation, thus eliminating oneself from leaving the country in dignity at the end of your contract with scads of cash (in those days, a good contract awarded a bonus only on conclusion of your term and contract). The inspection that eventually came on reminded me of "tossing a cell" in Alcatraz-based movies. The walkie-talkies were found, but on-site, left in vehicles by accident instead of being turned in and placed in chargers for the evening. But, our camped smelled the best for a day, then stank to high heaven for a week as the remains of the fixin's decomposed in the storm sewer.
On one of my surveys to town and wandering in the souks, I met and was befriended by an Egyptian shopkeeper and purveyour of rugs and brass. I spent quite a few hours in his family's quarters behind his shop schlepping sweet, thick Arabian tea with him, his father and his eldest son as he slyly tried to convince me that I would be the best to sponsor his immigration to the US and what an honor to my family it would be if that were to come to past. I demurred this invitation as best as I could over the course of several weeks, while slurping his tea, sometimes served by his daughter, the enticing and shapely 'Fatimah'. Lovely girl, dark eyes, dark hair, cute as a button and 16. It took all my willpower not to ogle as my real quest was to obtain rugs at a less than going rate when I finally left the country. In this, I was sucessful. At least in my opinion, the Egyptian probably screwed me royally. Sneaking the goods through Customs at O'Hare was a snap, thanks to the State Dept. guy coming back from the then S. African province of Southwest Africa I was talking to when our baggage came around. we continued talking as we walked to the inspection station, laid our bags on the table, said 'Hello' to the inspector and he whips out the State Department Passport and gets us both waved through with a cursory look at my lowly, common, every-day standard passport and a final 'thump' of approval for having required entry and exit stamps on the correct pages of my book that matched my printed itenerary and not a glance at my luggage, even though I did offer to open one bag for the guy. From there I was able to unload my rugs at a decent profit to my unsuspecting friends. Getting my gold jewelry through was easier, as I looked like a rednecks mocking idea of a white guy imitating Mr. T with all of the gold chains, rings and even a pair of earrings on. (Honest, sir, I had all this on when I left the country at the beginning of my trip!).
Some stories are not complete without a hair-raising escape scene at the end. Upon completion of my first assignment at "Yan-Pet", I took the bus from Yanbu to Jeddah. A long, boring mistake of a trip I'll never make again. I amused myself by trying to count all of the burned out hulks of the remains of autos along the coast highway during this journey of discovery (where I discovered why Saudi Arabia wasn't on the top of anyone's sight-seeing list of places to go). I lost count within an hour at around fifty and fell asleep. There's just so much sand one can look at between roadblocks set up by the local militia to snag this year's crop of stay-behinds from the Hadj. I was dropped off in care of the same guest house host who had saved my life months before at the hands of the prince's guards. He remembered me and warned me that a greater evil was now housed by Bechtel than that which I had encountered previously. British engineers! Going up-country to take over the positions being vacated by the Americans. They work a lot cheaper than any of us will in that place, and they were eager to belittle and intimidate as many of us as possible while they still had their pride. (More on their come-uppance and their weak-assed attempts to make American friends that I witnessed on my second trip to the Kingdom when I feel like sharing that with you, later). They, there were at least six of them there that night, had a rollicking good time with me, the only American at the house, making fun of the videos of American TV shows they were watching. As they saw that my goat wasn't being got to (I left my livestock at the goat market in Yanbu. Yes, they really had a goat market on the square in Yanbu, except on Fridays, when the "shar'ri" punishments were doled out. Trust me, don't go to town on Friday), the conversation switched tracks to how America was inferior to the British Empire, both islands, and how they'd show Mobil's Texans how to build a petro-chemical complex. I didn't tell them the complex was all but finished and would receive oil products from the adjacent refinery within weeks. Rightly so, they later found out that the Saudi's bringing their sorry butts in to take over was a cost-cutting budget decision, not a technology driven decision, hence the reason for my emergency return within a year. When asked if the tap water was any good, I blissfully recalled my first encounter with the water commission of Jeddah, and how the parasite had made my belly swell and the pain-racked retching for two days had cramped my style and embarrassed me in front of my peers, not to mention the projects doctor and his Filopino guy-nurse. But they got a kick out me and my groaning as I begged to be relieved of the agony, and I promptly encouraged the Limey to drink all he wanted (legal dislaimer, as I didn't want any and, left unsaid, he shouldn't either.) as Jeddah was civilized and Yanbu wasn't. Hope he got over it.
Anyway, the next morning I was taken to the airport for my departure. If I thought that my arrival experience months before was a culture shock, getting out of Saudi wasn't as easy as getting in. First, I had to wait in line for the single clerk to stamp my exit visa. As i did so, another uniformed guy strolled along the line of maybe twenty people and calmly took one aside and into a separate room for about five minutes. I, however, had been crypticly informed to watch for this and find out the 'count' before getting in line. You see, the uniformed guy was extracting every fifth person in line for a strip search, probably just to annoy the Americans. The game was to find out the 'count' and get in line so you weren't the pigeon the guy got his jollies from in the closet. After sucessfully avoiding having my person and dignity violated by this 'guy', who's only qualification was that he was probably from one of the three clans directly related to the king or one of his wives, I proceeded to my departure gate. As my final revenge for all of the indignities and inconveniences I had put up with for months, I loaded up on cheap electronics from the shops in the International Concourse. I had no problem getting on the plane and finding my seat. As the plane lifted off, one of the flight attendants, probably on her first trip to Saudi, foolishly asked the group of us in the back of the plane for our drink orders. Poor girl, she was last seen cowering in the galley, cringing when we hardily laughed and at the sound of our voices as we lustily called for liquor, bring us more liquor! I went through Frankfort on my return. Got so sh*t-faced on the flight I had to ask the wandering military patrol on the concourse to escort me to my gate and see to it I got poured onto the plane. Sobered up on the way to Chicago (thought I had the first recordable case of terminal headache) and had to think quickly how I was gonna get my rugs and stuff past customs as I had spent all but a couple of hundred "rats" and had forgotten to get the pretty Saudi money exchanged for the real deal, cold hard cash in greenbacks, and wouldn't be able to pay the duty if I got caught. Living in the hinterlands of the Red Sea coastal town of Yanbu had made me one risk-taking fool.
In my next installment, "I fall overboard and am eaten alive by sharks" I'll tell you about my second trip and how the camped changed from mostly American to all European with a smattering of Saudi nationals and me plus a handfull of Americans.
Regards