I’ve covered 1,100 kilometers up the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. The temperature once pinged 116 degrees. The walk overall has been an astonishment, which is to say deeply weird — like nothing I’ve encountered in my travels before.
Hundreds of kilometers of desert north of Jeddah was ravaged by construction spoil. There was cement factory after poultry farm after desalinization plant. There were beautiful, wild desert beaches of Beckettsian desolation. (With flamingos.) There were cookie-cutter coast guard stations. (Each equipped with a closet mosque.) There were emptied villages. There was a Starbucks. There was a Chinese laborer camp that looked like a medium-security prison. (Its inmates were about as friendly.) One day I walked 30 miles on canned corn. On another, I got a call on my cell from a chef at an elite university, asking if Norwegian salmon grilled in salted Irish butter was acceptable for lunch. The hospitality has been Arabic: total.
One day, my logistician disappeared from camp and returned in a van loaded with $900 worth of rented tents, rugs, cool drinks and two whole roasted sheep. I was upset about this unexpected expense. But shortly thereafter, and a hundred yards away, a Sikorsky executive helicopter landed. It was Prince Sultan bin Salman Abdulaziz al Saud, the son of the Crown Prince and a royal fan of the walk. He was dropping by for an hour, to say hello on a barren coastline where Lawrence of Arabia once bought the loyalty of the Bedouin tribes with saddlebags of British gold.
Digital Postcard: These micro-stories about the walk are designed to add narrative context to the project’s Twitter feed between Nov. 15 and Dec. 1. Ethan Zuckerman and Nate Matias at the MIT Center for Civic Media are curating @outofedenwalk during this time to test how to engage the public in storytelling using this medium.
