Hester's Head

We had a brief two-day stop in Bahrain for the Task Force change of command ceremony. A German Rear Admiral handed over command to a British Commodore in a ceremony on a Canadian frigate. I had the pleasure of carrying (holding it in my right hand and coming to attention and standing at ease a few times) the New Zealand flag for the ceremony. I was duty the first day so I had one afternoon to check out the little Kingdom of Bahrain. At least I had the first evening to come up with a plan of attack. We had some tourist pamphlets and I figured that I needed to see the Tree of Life and Oil Well Number 1. And I hoped to pass the Grand Mosque and the King's palace on the way. I mentioned my plan to a couple people and suddenly there were four of us making the trip.
There is a 400-year-old tree in the middle of the Bahrainian desert fed by an underground aquifer that no one knows the origin of. Mike told me that he had seen something about Bahrain on the Discovery Channel investigating whether it was the home of the Garden of Eden. Something about forests, plants, etc, whatever, that hints at it. Maybe I should've Googled it for you first. Nah. I'll leave that to you and I'll Google it at my leisure. Suffice to say that we hired a taxi to help us find a tree.
Taxi drivers are notorious rip-off artists in Bahrain. One Bahrain Dinar is three Canadian dollars - 1 BD should get you anywhere in the city, 5 BD should get you anywhere on the island. By my calculation that meant about 10 BD to get to the tree and back. The driver wanted 30, and it took some effort to get him down to 20. And off we went. 20 ended up feeling like a deal because we ended up in the cab for close to three hours. We had to drive all the way through Manama, past the Grand Mosque and the King's Palace. But the King doesn't stay there anymore. Then we drove through the desert countryside. The King's new digs are in a huge compound south of the city, we couldn't even see the building. The countryside was all sand and a spider's web of pipelines. Pipelines, pipelines, pipelines.

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Campgrounds with large canvas tents, quad/go cart tracks, camel rides and other fun things in the middle of the pipelines in the middle of the desert.

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And a surprising number of trees.

Is that the Tree of Life?
No.
That one?
NO! I saw it on a postcard, that's not it.
Ok.
That one?
No.

The exit off the freeway to take us across a LOOOONG bridge to Saudi Arabia was a little bit tempting. But I don't drive and I wasn't driving. I mentioned I was tempted, but no one said anything. I suppose no one else was tempted. There were new highways being built, with roundabouts that led to almost nowhere. Well, they did lead to an Air Force base, which is where we ended up. We headed back and came to a prison, turned around and almost made it back to the air base again. Damn roundabout. Abdullah, our taxi driver, finally called for help, I think, and we made it to the tree.

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And what a lovely tree it was.

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Abdullah took some group pictures of us in front of the tree. I think I've mentioned before that my camera doesn't seem to be intuitive and my instructions might be somewhat lacking. This is the picture that Abdullah took of the four of us in front of the tree.

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One last picture as we were leaving.

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On the way back I asked if we could stop to see the spot where oil was discovered in the Middle East. Oil was discovered in Bahrain in 1932 and this is a picture of the first oil well.

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After that we headed back to Manama for some coffee, some dinner and some shopping. Mike seemed to be everywhere all at once.


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I bought myself a funky lunch bucket and an even funkier Mosque shaped alarm clock. The alarm is sure to get you up. Trust me on this one. I stopped for another coffee and took this picture while I was waiting. What was that BLEEP number for the ice place again?

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