Hofuf

After living in Saudi for 3 years, we still had not done much exploring.  There are multiple reasons for this including: Micah working 6-7 days a week, not having a car to drive ourself, Saudi not really being an exploring type country, and our company restricts the places we can go.  So when I realized our time in Saudi was coming to an end I decided we needed to do SOMETHING in Saudi besides eat and shop.  Many people we know have gone to a city called Hofuf where they have some caves, and old fort, and interesting souqs so thats where we decided to go.  In order to do this trip I had to get permission from our security advisor saying that it was safe to go and then permission from the higher ups to give our driver permission to drive us there.  Hofuf is about a 2.5 hour drive from where we live and everyone I talked to talked about getting lost.  For days I prepared Micah for the possibility of getting lost and that we just had to think of it as an adventure.  We borrowed our friends GPS which made life a lot easier. At last everything was planned and we left at 6:00am headed for Hofuf.

On our drive, I was fascinated to see how the scenery changed.  Typically on our drives all we see is really flat desert with lots of trash.  Once we were south of dammam everything started to evolve.  There were hills, sand dunes, and even occasional areas with a ton of trees from oasis'.

Our first stop was on old fort.  There was no one there but a couple workers and a guy nice enough to go around and un-lock stuff for us.  We were able to go inside a mosque which in Saudi is rare for a non-muslim much less a woman!!  We also saw the armory, a underground room (maybe an old prison?), and the old barracks which housed a museum.  They even still had the old toilet area to view or maybe use.

Up next we stopped at the souqs.  This area in Hofuf recently burnt down and they rebuilt it to be much nicer but in the old style.  A very nice man decided to stop and talk to us about the area.  He informed us that many of the shops were not filled since the fire but they hoped to have them all filled very soon.  These were the best looking souqs I've seen in Saudi.

After the souqs at about 10:30 we thought we were going to the Intercon for lunch but it turned out they didn't start serving lunch until 12:30.  Instead of waisting that much time waiting, we called our driver back and drove to the mall and had a food court lunch.  I was a little sad to not get a nicer sit down meal but it turned out the mall had a DQ and I was able to get a blizzard! Needless to say, I was no longer sad (well, I guess Jacob was still sad).

Once we were fully refreshed and fueled we headed out to the caves.  This was a really fun experience for me since it was so different from anything we have ever done in Saudi.  We hiked and climbed and explored.  Let me just tell you this is not easy to do in an abaya.

Jacob hadn't napped all morning so about 5 minutes into our hike he was OUT.  So out that I checked a couple times to make sure he was still breathing.  He woke up for the very end.

Up until this point we hadn't really ever been lost but that changed as we tried to leave the city.  All the roads the GPS wanted us to get on were under construction so we drove around for a while trying to figure out where to go.  This gave us some time to get some random pictures of the city.

It was a great trip and I'm really happy we decided to do it!