Traversing a mountain slope at the crack of dawn.
You know.
Prior to our visit to Bahrain I had very limited knowledge about the kingdom — in fact all my prior knowledge was related to Formula 1 and the history of the circuit. I vividly remember that the Grand Prix was cancelled in 2011 because of the unrest and uprising that blossomed in the wake of the Arabic spring. But at least I knew of something.
I am just a stupid western tourist with western prejudice spoon-fed since the 1980s with western culture. My eyes deceived me when we looked up visas on the government website, I could have sworn the kings guard that posed so proudly on the website were mounted on camels. At a second glance I could clearly see that it was horses... In my head it was just desert, camels (or horses), a race track and the capital city, Manama.
"Move along, Rasmus, there's nothing else to see here" and looking at Google Street View confirmed my suspicions. We searched for the address of the hotel we were staying at and sure enough there was only desert visible from the roof-mounted Street View camera.
"The hotel has to be just past that dune over there" we told ourselves. Oh, well...
The essentials. Watch. Passport. Tobacco.
Copenhagen
We were due to arrive fifteen minutes past midnight after a long journey just shy of twelve hours that took off back in Copenhagen. One or two beers at the airport, stuff our face with a burger then board. Five hours on a flight then a three hour transfer window in Istanbul — one or two beers and another burger later it was time to board yet again. A couple of sleep deprived hours (although I desperately tried to get some shut-eye) later we could spot a bright, neon-lit metropolitan area through the airplane windows.
"Please fasten your seatbelts, we will arrive shortly. Local time is 00:15 and air temperature is 37°C."
Our hosts in Bahrain — the Racing Force Group, a conglomerate that consists of Bell Racing Helmets and OMP Racing — had offered to book us a transfer that would take us straight to the hotel. Any sane person would have accepted that offer but we weren't there to experience a five-star hotel with an air-conditioned room — and our sanity? The jury is still out. We had other plans.
We had a rental car booked, a sturdy Kia by the looks of what we had been automatically allocated to us by Hertz, and our plan was to explore the dunes, rocks, oil refineries and whatever else the Kingdom of Bahrain might put in our path.
Three months earlier our mailboxes chimed simultaneously when the invitation from Racing Force Group dropped in. In my peripheral vision I could glance the subject line from the notification pop-up and I immediately turned over and locked eyes with my colleague from across the room.
The e-mail read: "We invite you to the Racing Force Group World Meeting at the Bahrain International F1 Circuit [..] along with a guided tour of the Bell Racing Helmet Factory"
We responded to the RSVP before we even read the entire message. We were going.
After we got through the security checkpoints at the airport we stocked up on energy drinks, snacks and most importantly WATER and headed towards the car rental company. The incredibly bright airport was neatly tiled and was probably cleaned and polished once every few hours by an army of immigrant workers. Not a speck of dust anywhere and I could make out my facial features in the marble and it was not a sight for sore eyes at this point of the journey.
When we got out and drew our first breaths it was not the heat that knocked us off our feet. It was the humidity. The lens on my camera fogged up in an instant and the cars on the parking lot were covered in moisture and the best way I can describe it is drawing a comparison with how my car back home looks like when it has been sitting on the driveway over the weekend in temperatures well below 0°C.
Do you remember the Kia that we had booked? Turns out Bahrain was all out of Kias so we were escorted to a car of a brand we had never heard of. Make note that we work with motorsports and believe ourselves to be well versed in anything that concerns four wheels and a steering wheel, but... what the everliving fuck is a Cherry Tiggo 4 Pro? We were about to find out soon enough.
Already drenched in sweat by the time we had stuffed our bags in the car the GPS zeroed in on our position and the Google Gods presented a somewhat sketchy a route out of Manama. Bahrain, and Manama in particular, is like the old board game Labyrinth. A maze made up of tiles that morphs and changes every so often and entire neighborhoods gets erected seemingly overnight.
Google Maps was evidently having a hard time to keep up with the rapid urban development so we unknowingly ended up on a couple of exotic detours before we found our way into the wilderness. At one point we almost ended up in Saudi Arabia after taking a wrong turn and a couple of minutes later we had to park our car to get our bearings in a particularly rough looking neighborhood. Interestingly enough there were luxury cars parked and covered in layers of dust thick enough to hide the color of the paint-job. A sight to behold but I didn't muster up the bravery to get out of the car to take any photographs.
In the weeks leading up to our trip we decided to pull an all-nighter and explore the desert when we arrived. So I decided that I wouldn't go to bed the night prior to our departure hoping to catch some sleep on the flights, but you know how it goes. I stocked up on a seemingly boring podcasts about Aztec Warriors and old generals from the American Civil War but I couldn't find it in me to get comfortable enough to fall asleep.
On a positive note: I am a walking encyclopedia on Aztec warfare these days.
We had two planned stops for the night and first up was the Tree of Life which according to local legend is situated at the heart of what once was the Garden of Eden — in other words we should be on the lookout for fig leaves and treacherous snakes when we got there. Legends aside; it is a bit of a scientific mystery how the tree can survive the harsh desert environments without an obvious water source, and year by year it still grows taller. Interesting place, for sure, but still... it's a fucking tree.
On our way to the Tree of Life we had time to really get familiarized with our weird car. The automatic transmission was indecisive about which gear to settle for on the freeway and constantly switched between 4th and 5th gear even though we kept at a constant speed. It wasn't until the following night that the radio and dashboard would reboot itself at random making LOUD chime each and every time.
Oh, and I accidentally discovered that I was able to activate cruise control with the buttons that normally would raise and lower the passenger side windows. The car was brand new and only had a couple of miles on it so I guess it was still trying to figure itself out.
Eventually, our navigator politely asked us to get off the smoothly paved and nicely lit freeway. All hands on deck; Pitch black darkness and narrow, unmaintained roads ahead, ahoy. This was when I internally started to question all decisions we had made over the past few months that put us right where we were at this moment in time. The unmanned military roadblocks every couple of hundred meters and razor-wire fencing I could just about make out through my fogged up window didn't instill me with any confidence, just a dreadful and equally delightful sense of... adventure and adrenaline?
The headlights on our Cherry Tiggo Pro 4 barely lit the way through the fog and the texture of the road grew more faint as we went along — soon enough we could no longer make out any road ahead of us and we had unknowingly entered: The Dunes. We were living proof of what happens when you blindly put more trust on navigational systems than your own senses.
Since there were no road (at all) we were "guesstimating" the depth and which spots of sand was compact enough for us to drive on so we could only proceed a couple of meters at a time. Our destination was just 200 meters ahead and we could have just parked the car and walked over to that goddamn tree, but we were too stubborn for that. Much like one of those Top Gear episodes when you as the audience curse Clarkson & Co. about "what are those idiots doing" we had turned the tables and assumed the roles of those fools ourselves.
Whatever the Chinese engineers had in mind when they created the blueprint for the Cherry Tiggo Pro 4 I'm certain that off-road action wasn't the among the first few boxes they ticked off. If ever. But we had assumed the roles of pioneers determined to bring a car that was probably imported from AliExpress over the dunes. A worlds first, no doubt and an achievement worthy of our own Top Gear episode.
A few of heart-in-mouth and stomach-falling-through-your-ass moments later where we could feel the tyres digging into the sand we finally arrived and could switch off the engine. Tranquil, peaceful and endless darkness surrounded us and the faint lights from oil refineries scattered across the horizon made for a beautiful backdrop. The fog had eased up a bit and we could make out the outline of the tree against the clear sky littered with stars.
I was so tired and numb at that moment I could have fallen asleep standing, but then...
A sequence of loud, crackling noises pierced through the desert and a couple more noises in quick succession followed. We spotted flashes from afar. What we spotted were muzzle flashes.
And what we heard was the sound of firearms
We turned off the lights in the car, hunkered down and rolled down the window so we could listen in more closely. Apart from the humming sound coming from the distant generators and oil refineries it had turned dead silent. Whoever had their fun with the kalashnikov they received for their name day was either out of ammunition or shot dead by now.
Oscar came to Bahrain prepared with head-mounted flashlights that we strapped on to our faces that made us look like a couple of interplanetary cyclops. Just like when we stepped out of the airport the heat and insane amount of humidity caught us off guard for a moment. Sweating it out was literally the only way through.
Just imagining taking a stroll through the desert at night is all kinds of stupid since we had no idea about what kind of hell-spawn that could be hiding under each stone and bush we passed. Spiders? Snakes? Scorpions? Raiders with automatic rifles seemed likely. Naivety truly is a bliss.
The Tree of Life was spectacularly unspectacular. The bark was dry and lifeless even though leaves grew and sprouted in every direction from its branches, it was a paradox in of itself. We snapped some tourist photos of ourselves looking like idiots under the tree and with that we had completed our first quest for the night.
