An epic journey: Riyadh to Makkah

My diary entry on the 18th of September begins with: On the way to Makkah inshallah. I'll leave the diary and describe the journey myself now. As usual, we started off much later than when we intended, at nearer 2:00 am instead of 11:00 pm, and then immediately decided that we needed refreshments for the journey, so stopped no further from our house than the local grocery. Having stockpiled enough junk food to feed an elephant, we then navigated our way onto the Makkah highway and left Riyadh behind.

The air outside was refreshingly cool, and the stars in the sky shone down like distant ceiling lights in a concert. This tranquil night atmosphere in the desert was matched by the peaceful

snoring in our car, and the approaching and fading rumble of cars and trucks as they overtook us. ( as they invariably do ).

It was dawn a few hours later, and we stopped at a service station to pray fajr ( the morning prayer ). ( by the way, I said 'WE' because we were travelling in a two car convoy, us and

Abu Mahdi ). At the end of this article are some photos I took of the place, which could be very picturesque when viewed through the lens of a camera as dishonest as mine.

Resuming our frequently interrupted journey, we followed the highway through rocky desert where the sun had risen and blasted everything with a brilliant light, also turning the road ahead into a perpetual mirage. With the car stuffy and hot, tempers naturally flared, and I had a very mature argument with Khadijah about whether I had chucked a plastic bag of chocolates on her foot directly, or whether I hit the dashboard with it first and then it fell on her foot.

Anyways, we stopped so often on the way there that we only covered 330 km in the first 6 hours, which although a reasonable speed for a sea slug, can hardly be called speeding. Alhamdulillah, we reached Makkah after around 13 hours on the road, the last 1 or 2 hours of which we drove through the large black scenic mountains surrounding Makkah, occasionally silhouetted misty grey in the distance.

Alhamdulillah we made U'mrah, I'm back in Riyadh now, and Eid mubarak everybody.

Here are some of the photos.

not very clean, but at least the tree reflection and sky look nice.

those lumps in the trees are birds' nests.

the light from different sources gave this station quite a special morning look.

these are some of us boys' shadows, thrown by the rising sun.

scenes on the way.

some of the black mountains around Makkah.