|
Has anyone been to Saudi Arabia since it opened up and became a relatively normal country a few years ago? The only post in this forum about it is from 2014, back when it was still a closed cultural blackhole, but since they have massively opened up and invested in tourism, and I'm seeing more and more instagram travellers posting about their trips there. The entire west coast looks pretty neat, with a lot of natural beauty and also historical places like Al Ula and Medina. I was thinking maybe it would be a nice early springtime destination, like mid-March, for a roadtrip of like 10-15 days, before Ramadan starts on March 22. As far as I can tell, it looks like all the repressive anti-women stuff no longer affects tourists in any way, and travel in KSA is now more or less the same as travelling in Jordan or wherever? I checked TripAdvisor and there are a handful of threads there, but the vast majority of posts are religious travellers or business travellers. I don't personally know anyone who's been there except a female friend who went to Riyadh earlier this year for work, and my college gf who grew up near Dhahran. The east coast looks like pretty boring featureless desert and modern concrete construction, but the west looks like there's a lot of pretty interesting sites for basically the entire stretch of coast. Surprisingly I can't find any guidebook about Saudi Arabia, not even a Bradt or Lonely Planet (except a worthless 2004 edition, also LP guidebooks suck imo). You'd think that getting someone to write a Bradt or DK or whatever would have been one of their top priorities when opening up the country and investing a ton into tourism, but anyway. The Wikivoyage is okay, but not the best source. I found a handful of decent blogs, like this one was the best bookmarked one: https://www.lostwithpurpose.com/month-saudi-itinerary/ We're big into history, mountains, food, photography, and driving through interesting landscapes. We're a straight couple, married, and speak Arabic. Alternately Oman has been on my "interested in" list for a long time, but KSA might be a little more unique, plus it would be nice to see it before it changes too much, even though at least from my point of view, the changes ongoing in KSA are overwhelmingly a good trend. Like I see that much of Jeddah was completely destroyed and it looks -- no exaggeration -- like Aleppo*. *https://www.google.com/maps/place/J...11!4d39.1925048 Southern and eastern Jeddah actually looks better now than the last time I looked; now it is just fields of empty sand. The last time I looked at the images, it was rubble-strewn fields of blown-up apartment blocks that literally looked on par with the most war-torn parts of Syria.
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2022 12:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 3, 2024 11:11 |
|