Following the Hejaz Railway

Navigational tiff

We left packed up from our home of three days at Al Ula and departed at 1000, first filling up with petrol.

Things went downhill soon after with some navigational disagreements between E and myself.

I had the route planned towards Medina (Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah) on the most direct route.  For a number of reasons, E thought that my route went through Khaybar which would make it further.  We actually wanted the same route but kept thinking that I wanted something different.

Reasons that led to this situation included:

• Having done the route in reverse last year and somehow getting wires crossed with selectively remembering certain parts of the journey.
• Mistrust of me using Google blindly without looking at the journey holistically.

The situation was aggravated by an exploratory detour to Mogayra and the airport area.

Eventually, we saw eye-to-eye.  E is such a gentleman.  He apologised saying “I was wrong, you were right, please forgive me”.  It’s not the first time he’s said that and it takes a big man to do that.

Following the Hejaz Railway

Around 1145 I took the wheel for an hour before stopping for a pitstop in the desert, after which E took us on some detours in search of abandoned Hejaz Railway stations.

The first detour was at Hadiyah where we saw buildings from the station, engines and carriages, and an old railway bridge.

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We followed the route of the old railway line as much as possible (not that it was possible to see it), driving past Antar station before stopping again at Al Buwair station where there was a museum that was closed.

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Getting to Medina

We wanted to take a look at two significant mosques, at least from the outside.  These were Masjid Qiblatayn and Masjid Manaratain.  Both have been seriously restored and expanded to reflect very little of its original form.  The former, literally means two qiblas, as it was believed to be where Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) received the command to change the qibla from Jerusalem to Mecca.

We stopped at Medina’s Hejaz railway station which we had visited earlier in the trip.  But this time, we ended up at a different part of the yard.  It seemed a nice thought to have followed the historic line from Al Ula down to the Hejaz Railway’s destination.

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We needed more cash and it made sense for E to cash up some Jordanian Dinars at near the Prophet’s Mosque.  He parked illegally while I went to the money changer.  Fortunately, I knew how much to expect.  The teller had accepted the Dinars but punched in Euros on his keypad and gave me a significantly lesser amount.  I picked up the error as soon as I received the cash an checked the receipt.  The error was remedied without question.

It’s a pity we couldn’t park in the area easily as I had noticed plenty of street food, which we had trouble finding last time.

We reached the W Platinum Hotel for our second stay around 1800.  The journey time had been around 8h whereas it was meant to have been around 3h40.  We had done over 4h of detours, explorations, sightseeing and errands during the journey.

Exploring the hotel’s neighbourhood on foot for restaurants that we saw on Google Maps, they didn’t seem to exist.  We hopped in the car and drove to a Pakistani restaurant which turned out to be a very tasty choice.  We even had a free takeaway dessert for being first-time customers.