Day 1 - Bahrain
There is a, immature I admit, side to me that reacts to people's caution with an equal and opposite force of recklessness. If they were to employ a bit of reverse psychology I'd probably become the voice of reason. Like I said, immature. So with a long international flight ahead and people feverishly outbidding each other with how early one should get to the airport, "2 hours is enough", "hmm, 3 at least", "I always go the day before just to be safe", I decide that a day watching the rugby in the pub and arriving an hour before the gate closes is the correct course of action. And I nearly miss the flight. Not because a day of watching the rugby in the pub and arriving an hour before the gate closes is foolhardy (it is but more on that later) but because the Gulf Air information boards switch between 'Please Wait' and 'Gate Closing' with no 'Boarding' in between. Several Guinness hadn't dimmed my alertness though (well they had but more on that later) and I notice the abrupt switch, crisis averted. My feet leave UK soil for the last time in an indeterminate amount of time and these months of waiting, these weeks of planning and this momentary, drastically un-drastic decision have all been drawn together into this sharp point of action. I can't take credit for the genesis of the idea, only my acquiescence to it. But as Einstein didn't say - "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". So, as the pilot offers the exciting but rarely fulfilled promise of turbulence I reflect on the turbulence left behind.
The family musical chairs in the row ahead eventually decides the father will take the seat in front of me. He, with grim inevitability, reclines it immediately. I contemplate being boxed in for the next seven hours and, those with a nervous disposition look away now, tap him on the shoulder and ask him to return his chair to the upright position (the tray table can stay where it is). He grudgingly does it. Am I even English anymore? Flushed with my success I put on a film in which Idris Elba battles a huge lion and is unhappy about it. I am unsympathetic to his complaints though, does he not appreciate that I have just slain social anxiety? It is soon interrupted by the other guy on my row taking his chance to initiate conversation. Ah, anxiety rises from the dead! His name is Ayesh and he is flying home to India from completing a masters course in logistics management in Aberdeen so he can work in the family business. He says his brother is the smart one and was allowed to choose his own career path without being dispatched to the edge of civilisation to prove his worth. I congratulate him on his achievement in graduation anyway but does he know that I have just...never mind. Gulf Air is dry so after the conversation reaches its natural conclusion I close my eyes. It's a 15 hour layover in Bahrain so I get a free bump to my country count. Free is not really the word though as Bahrain pegs its dinar to the dollar and so even a short taxi ride will cost you $20. The airline usually provides accommodation for this length of layover but the man at the desk politely informs me that every hotel is booked due to the grand prix. Ah. If you knew one thing about Bahrain it's that its petro-wealth had bought it a grand prix. But I hadn't realised and now I was annoyed. Not because I was deprived of a hotel room I'd have barely used but because I'd prepared a good joke about being in Bahrain while the grand prix was on that was ruined by the fact that the grand prix was on. Nevertheless the country was going on my list so I'd better see some of it.
I maintained the time-honoured tradition of travellers by getting scalped by the first person I talked to outside of the airport. I pay an extortionate amount, even by Bahraini standards, to take a taxi to the fort. It has been built up and on and around for a few thousand years by Kassites, Greeks, Persians and Portuguese and appears to be the only building in the capital more than 30 years old. I mooch around its bone-dry walls for half an hour or so and then sit with a coffee in the adjoining museum cafe. As the morning air warms up and the waters of the Persian gulf lap gently metres from my feet I get my first real feeling of having left.
There is the smell of something, ozone? melting tarmac? It feels quintessentially foreign and Kansas is far away. A Kansas with torched corn fields mind. I head over to the central mosque which is the other notable sight (there's also an old tree somewhere to be fair). I time it well and the minarets boom out the call of the muezzin. It is still quiet inside the building though and I pad around on the marble enjoying the cool air. Men drift in through the enormous doors and find a spot on the carpet in the main prayer hall. I linger at its threshold unwilling to place infidel feet inside. Spotting some nearby stairs I find myself on a balcony that goes round the hall on three sides. The individual prayers cease and the men draw themselves up into a long line. An old man all in white up to his skullcap stands at a microphone in front of the line. He begins to recite the Islamic prayer and the men stand, kneel and prostrate themselves in unison, murmuring their response to the leader's call at the appropriate moments. Even though I had little idea what was being said there was a serenity to the occasion that momentarily moved me from the unfamiliar surroundings and tapped into a universal understanding of human nature. Outside I decided my sight-seeing was done and that it would be rude to reject the country's relative liberality by not having a beer. Lo, Irish pubs. Most were uninvitingly empty but The Irish Village had a friendly Sri Lankan lady on the door who beckoned me in. Taking a seat in the beer garden with a Heineken (no Guinness to be seen, farcical) I went to retrieve my laptop from my bag. In a split-second, in that way the mind has of seeming to work at supernatural speed when disaster strikes, I knew where it was. I could picture it 7 hours and 3000 miles behind me in a grey plastic tray at Heathrow Terminal 4 security. A single stitch of my preparations had been unpicked and the whole enterprise threatened to unravel. Even losing my passport might have been preferable. There are people that know how to help you with that problem after all. But this problem was uniquely, irredeemably mine to deal with. After two lagers and no sleep I felt emotionally overloaded. I moved through the city adrift in time and space. I had gambled and lost. But, grasping what powers of reason the journey so far had left me, I saw there was nothing I could do in the moment and that maybe calamity was liberating me. Control was gone and all that was left was existence.
After some machboos, a local dish of spiced chicken and rice I had a final beer in the city. Audrey Hepburn looked coquettishly down from the wall as I sipped my can of vitalsberg in a dingy backroom in a bar that was startlingly reminiscent of a dingy backroom in an old English pub. I head for the airport several hours early partly through lack of other diversions, partly through the now-chastening experience of the last airport I was in. There is a terrace bar where I watch 200 planes take off and land and toy with the idea of buying 200 cigarettes and smoking them all to pass the time. I drag my deflated body to the gate and pray fervently that this is the last flight I'll board for quite some time. But what conclusions of Bahrain I hear nobody ask? Well, don't come here unless you have to and if you do have to then it's not a bad place to come.
There is a, immature I admit, side to me that reacts to people's caution with an equal and opposite force of recklessness. If they were to employ a bit of reverse psychology I'd probably become the voice of reason. Like I said, immature. So with a long international flight ahead and people feverishly outbidding each other with how early one should get to the airport, "2 hours is enough", "hmm, 3 at least", "I always go the day before just to be safe", I decide that a day watching the rugby in the pub and arriving an hour before the gate closes is the correct course of action. And I nearly miss the flight. Not because a day of watching the rugby in the pub and arriving an hour before the gate closes is foolhardy (it is but more on that later) but because the Gulf Air information boards switch between 'Please Wait' and 'Gate Closing' with no 'Boarding' in between. Several Guinness hadn't dimmed my alertness though (well they had but more on that later) and I notice the abrupt switch, crisis averted. My feet leave UK soil for the last time in an indeterminate amount of time and these months of waiting, these weeks of planning and this momentary, drastically un-drastic decision have all been drawn together into this sharp point of action. I can't take credit for the genesis of the idea, only my acquiescence to it. But as Einstein didn't say - "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". So, as the pilot offers the exciting but rarely fulfilled promise of turbulence I reflect on the turbulence left behind.
The family musical chairs in the row ahead eventually decides the father will take the seat in front of me. He, with grim inevitability, reclines it immediately. I contemplate being boxed in for the next seven hours and, those with a nervous disposition look away now, tap him on the shoulder and ask him to return his chair to the upright position (the tray table can stay where it is). He grudgingly does it. Am I even English anymore? Flushed with my success I put on a film in which Idris Elba battles a huge lion and is unhappy about it. I am unsympathetic to his complaints though, does he not appreciate that I have just slain social anxiety? It is soon interrupted by the other guy on my row taking his chance to initiate conversation. Ah, anxiety rises from the dead! His name is Ayesh and he is flying home to India from completing a masters course in logistics management in Aberdeen so he can work in the family business. He says his brother is the smart one and was allowed to choose his own career path without being dispatched to the edge of civilisation to prove his worth. I congratulate him on his achievement in graduation anyway but does he know that I have just...never mind. Gulf Air is dry so after the conversation reaches its natural conclusion I close my eyes. It's a 15 hour layover in Bahrain so I get a free bump to my country count. Free is not really the word though as Bahrain pegs its dinar to the dollar and so even a short taxi ride will cost you $20. The airline usually provides accommodation for this length of layover but the man at the desk politely informs me that every hotel is booked due to the grand prix. Ah. If you knew one thing about Bahrain it's that its petro-wealth had bought it a grand prix. But I hadn't realised and now I was annoyed. Not because I was deprived of a hotel room I'd have barely used but because I'd prepared a good joke about being in Bahrain while the grand prix was on that was ruined by the fact that the grand prix was on. Nevertheless the country was going on my list so I'd better see some of it.
I maintained the time-honoured tradition of travellers by getting scalped by the first person I talked to outside of the airport. I pay an extortionate amount, even by Bahraini standards, to take a taxi to the fort. It has been built up and on and around for a few thousand years by Kassites, Greeks, Persians and Portuguese and appears to be the only building in the capital more than 30 years old. I mooch around its bone-dry walls for half an hour or so and then sit with a coffee in the adjoining museum cafe. As the morning air warms up and the waters of the Persian gulf lap gently metres from my feet I get my first real feeling of having left.
After some machboos, a local dish of spiced chicken and rice I had a final beer in the city. Audrey Hepburn looked coquettishly down from the wall as I sipped my can of vitalsberg in a dingy backroom in a bar that was startlingly reminiscent of a dingy backroom in an old English pub. I head for the airport several hours early partly through lack of other diversions, partly through the now-chastening experience of the last airport I was in. There is a terrace bar where I watch 200 planes take off and land and toy with the idea of buying 200 cigarettes and smoking them all to pass the time. I drag my deflated body to the gate and pray fervently that this is the last flight I'll board for quite some time. But what conclusions of Bahrain I hear nobody ask? Well, don't come here unless you have to and if you do have to then it's not a bad place to come.
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