At the airport, the fueler is already waiting for us and Jet Aviation does the handling. Custom’s comes onboard: they are only looking for alcohol. It is all is fairly quick. We have to hand in the passports and get a kind of crew certificate for them. We get them back when we leave - pretty effective controls here. About half hour ride to the hotel and everything looks a bit „triste“.
At the hotel we get confirmation that we as unbelievers cannot leave the compound. The hotel itself is not that pretty either; kind of a strange feeling. So we have a great club sandwich for lunch and during the waiting we have some of the local beers to shorten the time. The service is lousy and all the local people in their night gowns never smile; nobody seems to be happy in this place! We actually understand this...
After a buffet dinner there is Spain-Holland game on TV - at least one highlight here! Not really a place you want to got back to. And sorry: therefore not too many pictures...

Saudi Arabia is not only the homeland of the Arab peoples—it is thought that the first Arabs originated on the Arabian Peninsula—but also the homeland of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. Muhammad founded Islam there, and it is the location of the two holy pilgrimage cities of Mecca and Medina. The Islamic calendar begins in 622, the year of the hegira, or Muhammad's flight from Mecca. A succession of invaders attempted to control the peninsula, but by 1517 the Ottoman Empire dominated, and in the middle of the 18th century, it was divided into separate principalities. In 1745 Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab began calling for the purification and reform of Islam, and the Wahhabi movement swept across Arabia. By 1811, Wahhabi leaders had waged a jihad—a holy war—against other forms of Islam on the peninsula and succeeded in uniting much of it. By 1818, however, the Wahhabis had been driven out of power again by the Ottomans and their Egyptian allies.
Abdul al-Aziz Ibn SAUD captured Riyadh and set out on a 30-year campaign to unify the Arabian peninsula. In the 1930s, the discovery of oil transformed the country from an underdeveloped desert kingdom to one of the wealthiest nations in the region. Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saudi Arabia accepted the Kuwaiti royal family and 400,000 refugees while allowing Western and Arab troops to deploy on its soil for the liberation of Kuwait the following year.
A burgeoning population, aquifer depletion, and an economy largely dependent on petroleum output and prices are all major governmental concerns.