28 May 2009

6000 bottles of Jack Daniels

On Monday 27 April 2009 I left Qatar on two wheels. Qatar is small, so it only takes a 45 minute ride to the border post at Salwa. Through the help of a family member and his old business contacts in the Kingdom (that is how Saudi Arabia is reffered to by expats and Saudis) I was able to arrange a 1 month visa for Saudi Arabia.

Getting out of Qatar wasn't too hard, a couple of papers and stamps and before I knew it I was driving through no man's land to the Saudi border. Getting into Saudi was a different story. First customs was convinced that I was importing the bike into Saudi, so they wanted to give me Saudi registration plates. Finally I managed to explain I was only transitting, so the sent me to a different office and a different queue. Before I knew it I ended up between huge trucks, which were all transitting to Jordan, the UAE or Syria. Again I explained to the custom officers that I needed transit papers for the bike. They asked me where I would go and what route I would take, how many days I would stay in Saudi and so on and so on. After six hours of drinking tea, handing out cigarettes, a private tour of a water tanker truck in which, a day earlier, they found an illegal cargo of 6000 bottles of Jack Daniels and endless repetitions of the same answers the
manager of the custom office explained to me that they could only issue me a 3-day transit visa, in spite of the numerous attempts I took to explain him that I could not cross the kingdom in three days riding the bike, after all it is a vast country. I ended up with a three day transit visa for the Kingdom (for my bike, my visa was absolutely fine). The Customs at Salwa assured me
it was no problem if I stayed longer: 'Just make up a story about a breakdown when you are leaving the Kingdom.' What could I do? By then it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon everybody wanted to go home and I wanted to go on, so I agreed and half an hour later I was officially in the Kingdom, that mystical country everybody warned me of.

A short ride in the twilight and my first sandstorm later I arrived in the oasis town of Al Hofuf.

1 comment:

  1. That's 4.5 thousand litres of booze!! What'd they do with all that whisky? Not the easiest thing to dispose of. I'm imagining a small river running from the customs office out into the desert--like the lake of vodka in Poland. http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=55110

    ReplyDelete