The Kingdom is not the King. Some things are required or experienced because of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is not the same as preparing to meet the King. The king is my metaphor for the preparation for the hajj, or maybe even the hajj itself. It should also not to be mistaken here for the name of Allah, al-Malik, the King.
Okay, so our entry into Saudi Arabia for the hajj was not all that seamless. But everyone says this is the beginning of what one has to do in order to do the hajj. So it is still part of the process. It took us from arrival time at around 7 p.m. until nearly midnight to get out of the airport. For the tour company, it is most cost efficient to take a full busload of people, so these are the steps:
Once I was in touch with our Jeddah contact person, I was taken to the cafeteria area to join our “group”. Then I was given a meal with half a pound of rice and half a chicken. (try to keep count how many times food offerings will be made this evening, okay?). From that point forward, my brain or my wits were no longer on demand. So I let somebody else took care of everything, in their own way, but hey, it’s hajj.
We left the cafeteria area as a “group.” “Follow me,” Mr. Mansour said. Our next stop was to a more general baggage area, because at least half of them did not know where their bags were. The rest of us, well, we just waited. I finally dozed off until the next “Follow me” round. This was only to point out our bags, in addition to the newly retrieved ones. All of them were piled on a huge cart that was pulled to the next “Follow me” destination. About midway we are divided into a men’s “follow me” line and a women’s “follow me” line. The women’s line was allowed to load the bus first. No, we were not sent to the back, in case you’re wondering; so personally, I’m not sure this was entirely necessary. Most women sat in a row alone until their husband boarded and joined them in the same row.
I already knew from my friend from Saudi, that the normal drive from Jeddah to Makkah is one hour. It was 1:10 a.m. So in my head, I start calculating the possibility of going straight to the Kaabah to perform my umrah. I figured if I got started, then I might be done by fajr salah. Then I could sleep and be ihram-free. Mr. Mansour said that fajr was at 5:10 a.m. He also said we would be required to make one check point stop, where we would “pick” our mu’allim. Well, I guess he meant have one picked for us, because nobody on the bus had any input on this point. This stop lasted maybe 40 minutes and fortunately, some of us also used it as a restroom stop. They passed us another boxed meal this time, with our first zam- zam water.
One woman introduced herself and said she too was traveling alone, so maybe we could hang out. In fact she said, I think we’ll be in the room together, since we are both unaccompanied. She made wudu’ there, but, in my mind, we’d be able to shower and change before fajr prayer, so I erred on the side of the simple hand wash. I say erred because before we would reach our rooms, there were still many stations to go.
For example, our bus contained 31 people from our tour group all headed towards the same hotel. The other persons on the bus had to unloaded first. Apparently, neither they nor the bus driver knew where to unload them. Where we stopped was not yet into the city limits for Makkah. Even when they got to this nice, quiet (or creepy empty?) spot outside the city, there were a lot of negotiations. This was followed by the inconvenience that since they had boarded first, their bags were somewhere under our bags, tied under tarp on the roof of the bus. Yes, I did say on the roof of the bus and under tarp. But don’t get me started on the conditions of the bus, because at least no one was standing and the AC was kicking. Just because the windows had not possibly been washed for 8 or 9 years does not count, yet.
Next two stops were at local offices for the tour company and at one of them we got a few young African guys (baggage handlers apparently) and at another one, we got a guide who drove in front of the bus in his black BMW. We also received a third boxed meal. By the time we hit the city limits of Makkah and negotiated all of this, it was already after 4 a.m. Hope for completing umrah before fajr was out. Still, we wound our way through the city. Most of the time we followed a sign that said “Masjid al-Haram” in Arabic and English, so it was pretty clear we were going in the right direction.
Well, that is until we did a few U-turns and went through a few tunnels. First U-turn was forced by a police by a blockade. It seemed, we were nearing the mosque, because droves of people started to walk beside us on the road, on the sidewalk, or in the streets. “They’re heading to pray in the mosque!” I said to no one in particular. I cannot explain what the sensation is like with these people all headed in the pre-dawn darkness, purposefully towards something you cannot see, something in the distance but clearly the goal. So of course I thought we must be nearly there. Later I learned that people came from however much distance, including a few kilometers, towards the mosque for prayers. So we plodded along beside them in our bus. Once we were stopped at a traffic bottleneck just before one of the tunnels by a policeman. We parked on the side of the road.
The news was finally translated, we are not allowed to pass with our vehicle during the salah. This was about the point when I start to lose it. Oh yeah? well we want to pray too you know. But, while the driver said we could walk and then get our bags at the hotel, the man in the BMW said we might get lost. Get lost, how? We just follow the river of people, right to Bayt-Allah. No, not lost to the haram silly, how do you find the hotel? You know, the one no one has given any address to. Oh, now, that is a possibility.
After the crowds dissipated, we tried again to get permission to pass. The guy in the BMW did all the talking and I did all the praying, Oh Allah, please, please please, let us pass. You know what? It worked, and the policeman let us pass. My heart was pounding at the possibility that I would make it to the Ka’abah for prayer: the first time I prayed in Makkah! Alas, there was still an impasse. The best we could do by the time the final call for prayer was made was get out and join the prayer lines right along the side of the street. Yep, right along the side of the street, people put down their rugs and formed prayer lines!
These lines would stretch further back from the kaabah and get thicker over the next week. By the time we got to our rooms it was past 7 a.m., only 12 hours after landing, for what is normally a one hour trip.
