A friend indeed

Tuesday 29-June 2010 – Amman, Jordan

Jordanian border crossing procedures were completed by 8pm. We got ourselves a local Zain sim card and commenced an exhaustive operation calling all 5 star hotels in Amman; Marriott, Four Seasons, Movenpick, Sheraton, Meridian etc… After 30 minutes of calling, one call made the difference.

The call to my friend Khaled Abu Shamleh who is an acquaintance of the Business Development Manager at Holiday Inn and managed to get us a good promotional rate.








Though we arrived at 9:00pm and been driving for almost 18 hours, I wasn’t going to let my friend Khaled down. Especially after he had spent great deal of R&D efforts to find the best grill restaurants in Amman, where the lamb Carcass is dangled at the restaurant door, your choice of the cut to be lively turned into a variety of mouth watering kabab. Such restaurants can only be found in exotic and exclusive road side locations or refugees’ camp.




However, Khaled decided to upgrade due to the special occasion and took us to Amman Grand Restaurants.

same formula and concept but with a hygiene factor 10x the road side butcher.
Surprisingly, the family decided not to indulge in my glamorous eatery, and instead they settled for the tested and proven falafel Sandwich from Abu Jbara chain of restaurants.






Khaled and I spent good deal of time chatting over 1.5 kg of meat catching up on work and personal issues, we kissed and hugged to meet again in July in Abu Dhabi.





The true surprise came when I learnt next morning that that the two rooms have been prepaid. I called Khaled to object, but he insisted, exhibiting exemplary form of Arabic reception and hospitality.
رب أخ لم تلده أمك

Planning is everything, a plan is useless…

Monday 28-June 2010 – Riyadh/Ha’el, KSA

Original Plan was to spend three days in Saudi performing Umrah, driving through Riyadh, Taeif, Mecca and Al Wajh on the Red Sea. Then onto Al Aqaba, Wadi Mousa, Petra and Amman in Jordan for four days. We arrived Riyadh at 7pm on Sunday.

Our trusted Garmin 1410 GPS advised us that the nearest Hotel was Al Safeer 11KM. We soon found out that 11KM was the distance as the crow fly; actual driving distance was more like 30KM.

As we closed in to our target so did the streets becoming darker and narrower.
Al Safeer was in a car dealer district area filled with shady second hand car sales people.

We checked-in had a shower watched Argentina-Mexico and fell asleep like a baby.
We dparted 3:00am Mon just before sunrise, given that Mayssam had to fly out of Syria early, we decided to head straight to Jordan and perform Umrah on the way back.

We arrived Ha'el around lunch time, we stopped by the restaurant with the big golden arches, it was packed with crazed & zany young Saudies with their wild landcruiser pickups, doing donuts on the road. We drove straight through and stopped by a petrol station for a quick snack. A Saudi gentleman asked us

Are you heading to Jordan?

Yes, I replied

You are heading the wrong way. You should take the newly opened highway. It is 6 hrs to Jordan border divided road vs more than 10 hrs on a single lane two way roads.

But we are heading to Al Aqaba

No worries the new الطريق السريع will get you there.

We followed his instructions and true to his words we arrived at the border by 6pm, but at Al Omarie border crossing north east of Jordan, instead of south.
With Amman lying about 60 Km North vs Petra more than 200Km South West; we were at a fork.

Given that our strategy was developed to get us from A to B, A being Abu Dhabi & B is Beirut stopping at Petra was an initiative on the road map to ease the journey. Being closer to our final destination, the choice was simple continue north rather than add another 400Km detour to visit Petra. Petra & Umrah will be done on the way back.

Those who do not plan are destined to work for those who do.

Everyone needs protection

Sunday 27-June 2010 – Salwa, KSA
Please, do use protection before you do it.

Another key ingredient for a great journey is planning. Needless to say the immense amount of planning that went into our trip to take care of the essential things, such as online research and writing to distant friends to map out all the impressive authentic eateries from Sela’a at the UAE/KSA Border to Capadoccia in Central Turkey.

And just like any good strategy you don’t have to take care of every small detail. Lack of detailed analysis is what spices up the journey, details such as Visas to Syria, Booking a hotel in advance, spraying the car with anti-sand coat or taking enough cash with you just in case plastic cards are not accepted in one of those rusty Petrol stations in the middle of nowhere.

The plan was to depart on Friday before Fajr to avoid July heat in the Gulf. Actual departure date was Sunday 10:00am crossing UAE/KSA Border around 1:00PM on yet another sunny day with 47 Deg.

Crossing the border went very smooth as if we were the only passengers crossing. The Saudi Customs said that the peak was usually on Friday early morning! This was a first sign of how sound our strategy was.

Not having sprayed the car with proper anti-sand coat to prevent paint erasure by an expected strong sand wind on the open Saudi roads, we stopped by Musafah and got a 10Dh spray can and paid the attendant another 5 Dh to spray it. By the time we got to our first stop at Salwa KSA, 125KM from the border, the car had two tones of whites, a pearl white and a flat white and no trace of the 10Dh powder we sprayed. Looking shamefully at my sandblasted Land Cruiser front grill that has acquired new rough steel colour where it was once shining proudly in glittering gold, a young Bangali offered to soak the car with what looked like the remnants of an old beaten sponge drenched in a murky brownish liquid, coupled with overwhelming assurances that his مغبرة solution will stand the strongest of winds. With the choice between DIY Fairy liquid and the Bangali’s “No Frills” offer, I chose to go for the latter.

Suffice to say that the car has now three-tone colours with a fine earthy colour band around the bonnet and the front guards…

The right size protection, Don’t leave home without it

The trip to “Trip Ticket”

Saturday 26-June 2010 – Abu Dhabi, UAE
A great road journey starts with a trip to the “Trip Ticket”

“Carnet de Passages en Douane”, or “Trip Ticket” (TT) for those non Francophone oriented people, is a French log book to facilitate vehicle entry into a foreign country. TT has been made obsolete in France shortly after World War II but is still required by Syria & Lebanon, being the upholders of tradition and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures.

First stop was at AD Tourism & Automobile Club, Nasr St, the not so friendly staff asked for 20,000AED deposit to guarantee the safe return of my car to Abu Dhabi. Second stop was our friendly, highly efficient local “Arab Association for Tourism & Automobile Clubs” (AATAC) at Madinat Zayed behind central mail next to AD Municipality vegetable market. AATAC also demanded a guarantee, but were happy to substitute the 20K AED for a gullible friend who is willing to under sign my trip …


A quick call to my trusted friend and travel partner Hussam, and he was there next to me backing me up not only as a guarantor but also with 600Dh for the TT Cost since I had reached my daily cash limit from NBAD ATM.

AATAC staff member greeted us with a big smile and even a bigger quote for TT, but managed to negotiate him down to 600Dh, knowing that actual price is 550Dh.

The employee reached out to a dusty plastic cover to unearth a 1960 typewriter in pristine condition. He inserted a thick blue Cardboard and typed my details.

He then turned on his AT 80286 IBM tower desktop, complete with 5 1/4“ floppy disk drive and 20MB Hard Disk, and started “Lotus 123” to type the car details in predetermined cells and printed on a plane A4 paper using a clunky Epson dot matrix printer. The A4 was then copied 20 times using a 1980 B&W Xerox copier on a preprinted French text paper.

The lot were turned into a book by using a heavy duty stapler and stamped no less than 4 different stamps utilising three different colours, red, black & blue.

And when you thought it was all said and done, the hot off the press TT was passed to the clerk behind him and the details were entered into the great registry book that measured 1.2 meters end to end.


This whole experience was simply fascinating… just like walking into a time machine taking you back 100 years into the golden days of road travel and those men with their magnificent machines.


the “Trip Ticket” a step back in time