Getting lost

I was bored on Friday night and needed to get out of the hotel, so I figured I would start driving and see where I ended up. Bahrain is not that big of a place, so one really can't get too far off the beaten path or really get "lost" since there are so many signs around to point you back to Manama or the airport or some other area I could find on my pocket map. My general plan was to head south since I had not seen the lower 80% of the island at all.

I figured there wasn't much down there in the south, but all the same I was a little surprised by the emptiness of it. For some reason, I kind of pictured Bahrain as a small, but crowded country. Not so, small it may be, but it has plenty of wide open space in the southern 2/3 of the country. I distractedly noticed the pock-marked landscape while driving (Did I mention that this country, even out in the "hinterland" is very well lit by electric lights everywhere?). I didn't pay much attention to them at the time, being more concerned with watching the road and keeping some idea of my general whereabouts, but learned today at the Bahrain National Museum that those little hills are actually thousands upon thousands of burial mounds...people having inhabited this place for at least 7000 years.

The southern half of the island is very empty and industrial. I passed a military air base and some refineries as I drove down a beautiful smooth highway with virtually no cars on either side. The highway went nearly to the southern tip of the island. From what I could tell nothing much was down there, other than some resort housing on man-made islands. The development or lack thereof in the south didn't really seem to justify such a nice road, but maybe the road comes before development. At any rate, I headed back to Manama without having seen much on the way down. On the way back, I managed to take a few detours into little neighborhoods, with streets barely wide enough for my small car. It was not the most comfortable feeling - driving down those streets at night, not knowing the way out of the maze, and wishing I had a co-pilot with me, but it all worked out fine. Situations like that where I'm making every effort to avoid other human beings and being as inconspicuous (if that's possible for someone like me, even at night and in a car) as possible, really make me think what a shame it is that there's such distrust among people. My job keeps me well informed as to threat levels in various places, so I'm fully cognizant of what can happen (though Bahrain is very safe), and I guess that knowledge, while keeping you on your toes, also makes it tougher to trust anyone, especially at night in an unknown place. And so you end up making every effort to avoid everyone. Too bad really.

I made it back to the hotel around 1 am after being gone a couple of hours. The next day I got up and headed over to the Bahrain National Museum, which was interesting for the digital overhead imagery of the entire country of Bahrain painted on the floor of the main room. Not being sure where I had really gone the night before, I was able to walk along my route and figure out where I had been, which for someone like me that loves maps and exploration seemed serendipitous. The museum itself was certainly worth a visit, though not a long one.

After leaving, I tried to get directions to a gas station, which failed as usual. I am utterly unable to receive directions from people in foreign countries. In Latin America I thought this was due to a deficiency in my Spanish, but even when the person speaks passable English, I just can't seem to upload directions properly. No one gives you street names though...it's just turn here, turn there...doesn't work for me. I need directions laid out for me in a linear fashion - descriptions each step of the way. You don't get that often in other cultures it seems. Not sure if this is due to some different way of conceptualizing things on their part or something simpler, but at any rate, when I'm overseas I never get where I'm going by following my interpretation of the directions I just received.

And so I ended up just asking him to point me in the direction and give me a rough distance...forget about how to get there...just give me a direction and distance. This didn't work that well, and I ended up driving around for quite awhile before I found a gas station; by the time I found one I really was scared I was going to run out of gas...the gas light having been on since I got to the southern part of the island the night before. I'll mention that gas stations in Bahrain are few and far between, and the one station that I knew of was closed due to the pumps being broken. When have you ever been to a gas station in the States where all the pumps were broken? Thankfully, at least the gas was cheap...under $1 a gallon.