Jeddah: Hello Saudi Arabia

First, Jake and I would both like to address the elephant in the room: yes, it has been 12 days since our last blog post. Our inboxes have been inundated with complaints from our readership about this. We are sorry. We will be better. In our defense, we have been in Northern Pakistan with little to no WiFi for the past 10 days. So there is a lot of content heading your way.

In other exciting news, the mountains of Northern Pakistan were so majestic Jake and I decided we don't need to do a second bout of Himalayan hiking in Nepal. Especially since I (CJ) am planning on returning to Nepal for three months of working on a farm. So the new plan was to go straight to India. If any of our readers are up to date (as of around 1947) it turns out India and Pakistan do not have the best relationship. So we could not get an Indian visa while in Pakistan let alone try to enter India from any Pakistani border crossing. Alas. We pivot again. Now we are going to Thailand! And Jake will be heading home after Thailand in early November (the 3rd!) with a stop in London to see some Dartmouth friends before continuing on to Boston. He is in the home stretch and will be dearly missed. Ok now on to the actual blog post...

After our week in Lebanon, Jake and I stepped off the plane in Jeddah and were immediately greeted with this fifty foot fish tank (complete with multiple sharks). Welcome to The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This excessive airport feature was indicative of the opulence and absurdity that would follow over the next seven days in Saudi.

Emboldened by the Jeddah airport we arrived at our AirBnB to find 1) no fish tank with sharks and 2) this view out of our bedroom window:

Yes that is a house being actively demolished.

Jeddah is a city of over 3 million situated on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Being seasoned wanderers at this point we decided to see what Jeddah had in store. Undeterred by the triple digit temperatures we set out for some food. At this point veteran readers will know that Jake and I cannot resist prominently displayed cooking meat, so naturally one glimpse of rotisserie chickens (and slightly awkward eye contact) was all it took to draw us into this restaurant.

Our first dance with Saudi Arabian food was a resounding success. Two types of grilled chicken atop spiced rice mixed with yogurt and various sauces. Topped off with some bread. Delicious. We decided it was a top five meal of the trip.

Our next stop was Jeddah's corniche - a long waterfront promenade complete with parks, beaches, cafes, sculptures, and viewpoints.

It turns out that very few people explore the Jeddah corniche in the afternoon heat. In fact no one explores the corniche. We wandered around, puzzled by the abandoned shops and carnival games.

Our confusion only grew when we found ourselves dodging construction site after construction site. At this point our curiosity bloomed into some online research (asking ChatGPT wtf was going on) and that is when we learned about Vision 2030. For those of you who do not follow the Saudi Arabian domestic development agenda, Vision 2030 is the plan laid out by the crown prince of Saudi, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), to reduce the nation's dependence on oil by shifting the focus towards tourism, technology, and entertainment. What that meant for us, visitors in 2025, was a lot of construction.

Eventually we found a waterfront mosque and, of course, the Jeddah Yacht Club.

We finished our day with a dinner at Al Baik - the Saudi equivalent of KFC.

On our first full day we slept in and decided to recover from our fried chicken dinner with a McDonalds breakfast. We both sampled the McArabia - a successful fast food take on a lamb kofta sandwich. Well done McDonalds.

Next, again undeterred by the mid-day heat, we set out for Jeddah's old town. What we found was an architecturally beautiful neighborhood with probably one out of every four buildings under construction. And again, no people. After asking around, we learned that Saudi locals wait until the cooler evening and nighttime hours to go outside. Good to know.

We did however find this kiosk displaying an augmented reality ancient vase. Why the Saudi government paid some team to convert this incredibly mediocre object to the digital world escaped us. But that is just one of Saudi Arabia's many oddities. Vision 2030 baby.

On our Uber ride back we asked our driver about the abrupt patches of empty land scattered throughout the otherwise heavily developed area. He explained that these were former neighborhoods, predominantly immigrant neighborhoods, that had been entirely demolished to make room for new Jeddah development projects. We later learned that multiple humanitarian organizations have criticized this removal process for involving forced evictions, insufficient compensation, and lack of proper notice to residents. More than 60 neighborhoods are slated for demolition, affecting over 550,000 residents. There are allegations that residents’ access to basic utilities (water, electricity) was cut off before or soon after eviction notices. This is the dark side of Vision 2030 that left us morally conflicted about being tourists in Saudi Arabia.

The next day, undeterred by the heat, we set out for a late morning run. After Jake almost passed out from heat exhaustion and I scampered into the Sheraton hotel with a legitimate fear of losing control of my bowels, we decided that maybe the locals were on to something with this hunker down and emerge at night strategy.

On the bright side, I did find this lovely Sheraton pool on my panicked speed walk to the bathroom. Jake and I indulged in a brief post-run dip.

After some mid-day rest, that night we set out again for Old Jeddah. Our first stop however was the Ritz Carlton, an 8+ acre 220 room behemoth of a hotel.

Along the way we also saw the tallest fountain in the world - King Fahd’s Fountain. Yes that is the closest we could get. Yes this is about all there is. Just a constant flow of water 312 meters (1,024 feet) into the air. Maybe Vision 2030 will install a gondola or some more lights or something.

After an hour of walking on what appeared to be an interstate, we arrived at Old Jeddah and what was previously a shuttered ghost town was now lively and bustling. We walked around, got some pomegranate juice, and called it a night.

The next day Jeddah's departures terminal gave us one final treat of modern Saudi architecture:

And just like that our time in Jeddah came to a close. Our final consensus on Jeddah: we came five years early but also at just the right time. Saudi Arabia is one of the fastest changing countries on the planet. The scale of construction in Jeddah was just a taste of what is possible (for better or for worse) in a country with an absolute monarchy and a sovereign wealth fund of over 900 billion dollars. We were left slightly underwhelmed and morally conflicted. We did not realize what awaited us in Riyadh: Vision 2030 on steroids.

On a lighter note, here are some other highlights:

Our Uber driver using two phones to simultaneously FaceTime his friend and watch Tik Toks. All while driving of course.