Trip to Bahrain

This past weekend we went to Bahrain, we can only stay inside Saudi Arabia 28 days, after that we have to go out of the country. It’s very good because, it´s an excellent opportunity to go to Bahrain.

We have a friend that we knew here in Riyadh that was going there (we knew him through Sergio’s sister) so we planned to go with him and instead of going by plane we would go with him by car, only 400 Km it didn't look a very hard trip, and it would be different because it would be 400 Km in the desert. But it turn out to be a very long trip, it took us 13h to get to Bahrain.. It wasn't very easy, the beginning went well we got to Dammah, at 22:00, then we got lost in the city trying to find a friend of Alex that was in a Japanese restaurant. At 23:00 we were having dinner, always in Bahrain on our minds because we knew that crossing over the border normally takes 2 to 4 hours, and that the night in Bahrain ends at 2 AM. After dinner we had to go and get the permit to cross the border with the car.

Of course as you can imagine, we got lost again, and to make things worse, on the telephone the rent a car were saying that they didn’t had the papers… I’m telling you we were all tired and angry because nothing was going right.

Finally we made it to the rent a car and after many phone call’s we got the papers at 1:30 AM, even with the papers in our hands we weren’t very happy, we still had to cross the border…

Crossing the border was something crazy we had to stop in 5 check point’s and always with a lot of traffic even at that our but we made it, well of course we could have crossed the border without happening something we had troubles on the border with the passport, Alex had been once in Bahrain and when he came back to Riyadh they forgot to put the stamp on the passport, for them Alex was still in Bahrain.. After much discussion we finally crossed and got to the hotel at 3:30 AM.

At that hour we were frustrated and tired so we went to do the check in but… The hotel didn´t had our reservation, what else could go wrong… once again after a lot of discussion with the receptionist, we got a room.

This was our long and tiring journey to Bahrain.

Probably you are thinking, and… did the night ended at 2 AM, did you go to sleep, or was there something open? Well I can´t tell you everything or else you would know more than me ;P

Qal`at al-Bahrain

Or in Arabic ( قلعة البحرين‎ meaning Bahrain Castle)

It's funny to go to a place and see written "Portuguese Fort", of course when we came to Bahrain we weren´t expecting to see anything from the portuguese and somehow we found traces from Portuguese People. Portugal it's a small country but we are all over :)

This fort it´s in a as archeological site that was an ancient capital of the Dilmun civilization around 2300 BC.

This site in Bahrain was occupied by the Portuguese in 1521, because this was an estartegical position to secure the route to India, that was important to bring spices to Portugal.
In 1561 the site was improved with wall forming a fort.

The Portuguese were expeled from Bahrain in 1602, but we left this landmark.