Marmara, Bahrain
We didn't see much of the city, dealing mainly with jet lag but also a bit of apathy. The main reason for our trip was Europe - anything else along the way was not really what we were after this time.
That said, we can offer some observations. It is a primarily muslim country, with the call to prayer broadcast across the city. Although compared to Turkey it was much more consolidated than every mosque doing its own thing.
Their attitude to women was mostly westernised, although that said we didn't see nearly as many as we did men. Much of the rest of the way the place works is very westernised also, I guess due to the foreign interest in the oil and that the Grand Prix has brought.
Here's how to drive in Bahrain, as learnt from our shuttle bus drivers and observing traffic around us:
- Start with a big American or Australian car (Commodores and Statesmans aplenty) so as to guzzle as much fuel as possible. That way you actually create jobs in your country!
- Although you did order the car with that optional extra "blinkers", certainly don't make any use of them.
- Drive in third gear, no higher. That way you can easily swerve to avoid people following rule 2.
- If the place you want to park in is already full with double-parking, then you'll have to be the one to start the row of triple-parkers.
- Use no other controls than steering wheel, pedals, gear stick (although subject to rule 3) and plenty of horn (works well against people following the law).
- If you find yourself in heavy traffic in the wrong lane approaching a turn, don't worry! Just move across to where you want to be, paying careful attention to rule 2.
Perhaps this is where some Sydney drivers have been getting lessons.
So after nice baths and plenty of sleep, a call came through to our room asking is to come down to the lobby for our lift back to the airport.
Once there, we didn't need boarding passes but attempted to check our big packs into the hold luggage, only to be told we could do that later. This sounded a little odd, but the next people at security told us the same thing so we decided to believe them.
However the third group of people were the scanners scanning our cabin luggage, and we put everything we had onto the conveyor belt, only to bring it to a grinding halt. Not sure whether it was the tent pegs, swiss army knife or various other non-cabin-baggage items which set the scanner buzzing, but the upshot of it all was that there
wasn't a magic place further down the chain to check our bags in, that should have happened earlier. Aaah fun!
The strangest part of this was when the solution to this conundrum was to just let us take them with us and tell the boarding staff that the bags needed to be put under the plane! So much for security - could have had a tent-peg massacre had we been so inclined.
A change of departure gate, a few bumps and six hours and a bit later we had finally made it to Paris!