Mike's Saudi (12) Flying home

One of our British friends in Saudi had married a girl from the Caribbean she was white skined and a friend of Syb’s they used to play tennis together and that sort of thing in fact they were our neighbours at Tabuk. They adopted two coloured children a girl and a boy who acted as ballboys when their mother played tennis much to their dislike.

One time when our neighbours were going home on leave they flew from Tabuk to Jiddah as the first leg of the flight home, then changed to the international flight where their visas were checked. John was first through the visa control and has his visa stamped but when his wife and the children tried to follow him they were stopped the athorities accusing her of stealing Saudi children. Not unnaturally John returned through the control to support her. There followed  a big discussion in which BAC and the Embassy were involved eventually it was sorted out to the satisfaction of the Saudi authorities but by this time John and his family had missed their plane and had to wait to the following day.

This time the wife and children passed through the control first John ensuring that there was no problem followed. “Ah” said the official “You went yesterday” of course his visa had been stamped on the previous day. This time it was sorted out and they caught that days flight to the UK.

Funny things happen at the airports once on our return from the UK Syb was stopped as her luggage contained some small bottles with colours and flavourings in for cooking. She was about to be taken to an airport jail when fortunately a senior Saudi customs man realized they were not minitures of alcohol and we passed through. At the time the shop floor officials only had limited experiance and often required referance to a higher official. I guess now with the increased security at airports throughout the world things will have changed drastically. But in the 1970s it was often a quite an exciting challenge flying  home.

In fact in the very early days of my life over there you could wait at Jiddah airport while your aircraft was commendeered by a Prince to fly his family to somewhere within the country a privilage withdrawn by King Fisal, and we all thanked him for that  as there were over a thousand Princes in the country at the time. How there came to be that number was part of the stratergy adopted by King Saud in creating Saudi Arabia but thats another story.