Bahrain by www.born2travel.it

if you want to see the photos or find out more, also visit my site:

And so we find ourselves waiting for yet another flight to yet another adventure.

Our journey is still long, at least mine, and full of unknowns... Ready for check-in, gate number 3 with Gulf Air...

Manama (BAHRAIN) 03.11.09

On the plane there are few of us: a few businessmen (I'd read that you only end up here for business because there's nothing to see)... and lots of Thai prostitutes (I'd also read that we'd find loads of them around).

An hour and twenty of flight and we land in the capital of this small kingdom... And yes indeed, after an Emirate and a Sultanate now it's the turn of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Nick is feeling terrible, his face is white but he tries to carry on...

[Nick]: "Let me start by saying that we're not staying in a hotel but in a real apartment. Living room, lounge, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, etc. Unlike other Gulf cities, Manama has a centre where you can stroll along the edge of Government Avenue. Just when we were starting to have fun I start feeling unwell and go back to the hotel... Mark continues the tour..."

On foot we reach yet another grand mosque (Al Fateh), which I'd read was the largest in the Gulf... But hadn't they said the same about the one in Muscat? And also the one in Abu Dhabi? Hmm... Everyone has delusions of grandeur... Hong Kong docet.

Chatting with a taxi driver we discover that along the way there was the National Museum of Bahrain... We stop. Nick starts to fade... I visit on my own a small part of what seems to be a very large museum... But nothing exceptional after visiting so many...

Nick is shaking and staggering... In a taxi he goes back to base and leaves me to write his postcards too... Reluctantly and worried, I let him go with the promise of joining him an hour later...

Meanwhile I take the chance to lose myself in the intricate souq of Manama and nearly succeed, given that it's made up of an endless series of little alleys all swarming with Indian stalls...

After a while I go back to my friend and luckily he's much better...

Reassured, I go out again, looking for an internet cafe to organise the next move to Abu Dhabi. I wanted to contact Ibrahim and Sofia....

I discover that in Manama it's very difficult to find an internet cafe since there's wireless internet everywhere...

A Pakistani gives me a lift to an "American neighbourhood"... There really everyone was American! Either sailors on a mission or relatives of Americans working in nearby Saudi Arabia, unliveable for Western women and children, as a New Zealand lady later told me at Starbucks...

Meanwhile I continue my search for the internet cafe, venturing into dark and silent little alleys, passing by a couple of mosques, and I'm struck by the dozens and dozens of pairs of flip-flops thrown in a jumble near the door... Finally I find it in a slightly seedy area inhabited only by Indians...

I let my Emirati friends know I'll arrive the following day and try to get back to the hotel safe and sound...

Along the way I think that maybe it's Afghanistan, maybe it's that we've been travelling on adventure in the Middle East for two weeks now, but I'm much sharper than usual and I venture, even alone, into situations I might once have avoided... I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing... But as I was thinking about it I felt prouder and prouder...

At the hotel I find Nick ready to go out again... I'm shattered after so many kilometres on foot but we go out all the same.

I take my friend to the "American neighbourhood" I discovered earlier and in front of a Majestic coffee smoothies at Starbucks we spend a few hours in complete relaxation!

Manama (BAHRAIN) 04.11.09

[Nick]: "We've done so much in two weeks... From skyscrapers to deserts... I liked Abu Dhabi much more than Dubai but as we'd said from the start: our trip was Oman and it didn't let us down. Truly fabulous both for the atmosphere and for the things we did and the places we visited and above all for having managed to enter the world of these Arabs with dishdasha and kuma; oh yes, they took us into their homes (and there's nothing better), they took us to the places they frequent and to play football with them! A hospitality and warmth I would never have expected!

It all began while, sitting at the Starbucks Cafe in Abu Dhabi airport, eating a terrible doughnut, I waited for my "mate" arriving from Doha. It all ends in the same place two weeks later... My beard is longer, my Afghan scarf more worn, my clothes dirtier and I feel ever bigger...

Nick has just boarded, he's going back to Italy... I have my flight tomorrow late morning from Al Bateen...

Never before has our teamwork worked like a Swiss watch...

I'm happy about the pit stop in Bahrain, I would have regretted it if we hadn't taken this opportunity, we dared and we did very well... Shame about Nick's stomach pains, pains that now I have instead... Lately we've eaten terribly and now our stomach is presenting the bill...

My thoughts begin to turn to Kabul. During the trip I kept monitoring the Afghan situation through the newspapers or the news, and with the fact that they have to repeat the elections because of Karzai's fraud, the situation risks worsening again...

As I approached Al Bateen military airport by taxi, the flashes of this umpteenth trip were already starting to take the shape of an old memory...

The tarantellas with Faisal in Muscat seem to have happened so long ago, while the awareness is born that the second part of my adventure in Afghanistan is about to begin...

continues on [ ]