Today was Jeddah, infamous onboard due to our visa uncertainty. It turns out the Saudis are quite flexible in letting people ashore. Initially they only let those with a printed visa come, but an hour later they were actually selling visas at reception for those who didn’t have one. All our collective stress for nothing.

My tour didn’t start till 10:30a so after my morning routine I ended up on the treadmill for 45 mins listening to an audiobook, awaiting my disembarkation. By 9am it was already too warm to walk the outside decks.

We gathered in the theatre, to sort ourselves out for our tour. It’s rather amazing that so many people didn’t read the instructions in our Daily Planner as to having the visa (and not just the application) and the dress code. Many passengers got sent back to their room like naughty children to change for having their knees showing. Of course this meant that we were 20 minutes late leaving for our tour. That wouldn’t be tragic if our tour started at 8am, but when it’s going to be 90° out a 3-hour tour starting at 11a is going to be sauna-like.

A bus took us to the Port Terminal to clear immigration and I must say it was big, modern, thoroughly efficient and all the staff pleasant and fluent in English. Our tour bus was gorgeous, I had to take pictures of the inside! At 11:45a we finally left the port for our tour.

Interestingly our had a female tour guide, Manal, so, so much for some of the strict sharia laws we were told about. Less interesting was our tour, poor girl just read out a printed script and told us things like: this building is the Marriott hotel, that building is a shopping center, that building is the Department for Blah Blah.

I did make some notes: Jeddah is the 2nd busiest port in Middle East. It has 4 million people, and is Saudi’s 2nd largest city. It’s the economic & touristic center of country. It was first settled 3000 years ago as a fishing village.

Our tour consisted of seeing the Corniche – the waterfront. Unfortunately they had a tremendous rainstorm 5 days ago with serious flooding and our scheduled route was blocked so we saw the northern corniche. We saw the once-largest flag in the world, the world’s largest fountain, lots and lots of cool sculptures and a mosque.

Next we had a walking tour of the Old Town. Most of the buildings are over 100 years old and the area was declared an Unesco World Heritage site in 2014. Consequently, almost all the buildings were emptied and are or will soon be reconstructed. We saw no sign of life but cats and construction workers….

We then passed through several streets of fabric shops and taken to a souvenir shop and that was the tour. Of course a few streets over there were plenty of other souvenir shops but I was hot & dusty & had my magnet so I was content to return to the ship.