Of Drakes & Kings

There was a park behind the house I grew up in. It was an area of open land, split into three fields. Closest to my home, there was a field that two local schools shared as a sports ground. Cricket pitches, football pitches and a 400 meter running track overlapped and competed for space. The second field had more footie pitches, landscaped borders and a kids’ play area. The third was an open field that was waterlogged by a stream most of the time. It wasn’t impressive but was a fair, adventure playground for a kid growing up in the suburbs.

The park was accessed by three or four formal entrances from local streets but the local kids had decided to cut through the chain link fences that lined service alleyways along three sides. As a kid, I always took the informal, vandalised short cuts. It’s just what you did.

But what got me thinking about Drake Park and my childhood?

Let me explain.

It started at a desk in Khobar.

Mel dropped a pair of tourist brochures on my desk. He says he found them while not working at a local shopping mall. One featured iconic and historic buildings in the Eastern Province, the other was a vivid green, highlighting all kinds of places that you can visit to explore the great outdoors. I chuckled. I’d been through this before. Look back in my past entries and you’ll find my dismay at finding a fenced off castle and yet to be built museum being advertised. I flick through the brochures and – sure enough – both places are still there, encouraging others to be disappointed.

Flicking through the list of “sights”, I ignore the obvious disappointments; the archaeological remains that are listed as being vaguely close to an ill defined main road in South Dhahran and a natural hot water spring that is clearly housed in a building surrounded by barbed wire. But I am drawn to a sight/site that I had read about in other sources. King Fahd Park in Dammam.

Before I set foot on a plane to Saudi, I’d researched things to do in the area. In part to allay the fears of my mother who was convinced that “there would be nothing to do” and partly my own identical fears.

Google it. King Fahd Park is there in full glory. Much of it is just like the green tourist pamphlet dropped on my desk. Cafes, green space, lakes, cafes, a theme park, cafes and coffee shops.

I’d been meaning to go for over a year but never got around to it until last Saturday.

And the curse of Saudi Tourism strikes again.

You see, King Fahd Park is being redeveloped. Much of the once beautifully landscaped grounds around the edges have been ripped up by diggers ready to build new 21^st Century facilities like Paintball Centres and football pitches. A drive around a wasteland and a quick chat with a gate keeper in a ramshackle entrance to the deserted Cobra Theme Park – where rollercoasters sit idle and rust – we established that there is only one entrance remaining open to the public, way back in the direction that we had already come. Retracing our steps, we found a massive car park alongside a 500 meter square children’s play area that is protected by a wire fence that blocks it off from the apparently, once beautifully landscaped park.

Which is how I got to thinking about Drake Park in Rayners Lane.

Back in my teenage years, I would sometimes while away the evenings watching joy riders racing and trashing their hot-wired cars around Drake Park from my bedroom window. Naming no names, I recall discovering one of my class mates had almost flipped a car when he misjudged where a concrete platform for tennis courts used to be in the dark. I’d watched it live. It was the talk of the school for a few days. The occupants boasting of their near death experience and of the excellent driving skills averting disaster. All I recalled watching was a car getting stuck in a rut and the occupants bailing out, trying yet failing to push the car back onto smoother ground before running away.  Another time I watched the same kid, again, abandon his stolen car after forgetting how physics works when you plough a large, heavy item at speed into a static post buried deep in the ground. The second incident I found strange because Roger Christopher (damn!) always seemed quite good at the science subjects at school.

Anyway, before I saw the chain link fence separating the kid’s area from the former park, I was already thinking about Drake Park based of the number of apparently abandoned cars parked at jaunty angles with their doors left wide open in the car park and on the access road. It seems that this, too is a place for the end of a joy ride.

Saudi Tourism really excels. Perhaps they misinterpreted UK news footage of kids joy riding in Cowley, Oxford in the 1990’s as a travel guide.

But, like Drake Park, King Fahd Park has the same myriad of informal entry points. Within minutes of my arrival, I had found a hole in the fence and started to explore the old park.

You may recall my visit to the old castle on Tarout Island that I wrote about last year. It seems that Saudi isn’t big on visitor centres and entry gates when a simple vandalised chain link fence will do. And who am I to argue. Informal works. It discourages the civic minded and makes the place more interesting to me.

Camera in hand I started to explore.

And I liked what I found.

The lakes have drained and are now shallow remnants of what they clearly once were. Brown water with stubborn plants cracking the concrete retaining walls and floors. Street lights, smashed and dirty. Old benches rotting from concrete cancer, exposing their rusty steel frames. Once manicured lawns yellowing with age and reverting to desert as the winds do their erosive best or worst. Picnic tables – empty - stretch away in all directions, many having had their shades removed, I assume to keep them safe(r). The entrance gate houses now stand empty with smashed windows. The gates are wired shut. The many, many coffee shops now stand idle with faded Coca-Cola signs atop and the windows shuttered with wire; inside their shelves lie barren save pigeon shit and the fuse boxes are ripped open.

The only place that still seemed to be maintained was the mosque at the centre of the park. It was the sole building that continued to look cared for – albeit that it was closed – and up to standard, surrounded by colourful plants and shrubs.

Thirty minutes into my exploration, I realised that I was finding it heavenly.

No surprise. I am a sucker for that type of stuff. I’m a loner and love large spaces where I can get away from everyone, the sounds of the outside and leave the civilised world are far away. Many of my adventures and trips, if you were to see them in isolation at the start of a horror movie would cry out either:

“OK. This is the bloke who will be first to cop it”

Or: 

“OK. He’s gonna find the dismembered body and become possessed by its evil spirit”. 

I like it that way and – to date – I have neither “copped it” nor (aside for a flamingo, a small deer and a cat) ever stumbled over a dead body.

But in King Fahd, I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only visitor on the wrong side of the fence.

A few hardy souls were there before me. A family had chosen a decaying slide to play on rather than the well maintained equipment in the “official” site down the hill. A couple of older guys chilled out on a beaten up a concrete bench in the shade of an over grown and badly manicured tree. And we all, politely, ignored each other. It was as if we all knew we shouldn’t be there and were all worried that we’d have to kick each other out.

The park, with its shabby abandonment, reminded me of my all too brief visit to Pripyat near Chenobyl (a whole different story for another time) ten years ago. Ghost like, sure, but with a character and a charm all to itself. Far from the character that the municipal authorities envisaged of a large happy go lucky, clean living, family friendly open space full of happy go lucky, clean living families; but a character all the same. It was a little like walking into a time capsule. It felt as if all the park’s inhabitants had left with the intention of returning a short period later. It is just that they never have and each passing day, week, month and year make the amount of polish and elbow grease required to make it shine again increase exponentially.

But the park still feels lived in, wanted, needed and desired. The hole in the fence shows that people still crave the space. Recent tin cans and gaudy coloured footballs discarded in the lakes show that despite attempts to exclude, people – like me – are still visiting. And that is good. It makes me happy.

Khobar and Dammam both possess beautiful formal parks along their sea fronts, but they are just narrow strips of land that encourage people to stroll back and forth in straight lines. Neither city has enough space where you can wander and become momentarily lost. King Fahd Park still holds a bit of that.

Fenced off or not, King Fahd Park has become one of my favourite places in Saudi Arabia.

A Gatehouse and a Roller Coaster

The Tourist Leaflet

Official Entertainment

Abandoned Car

Once There Was Light

Drained

Coca-Cola

Hardy Souls In a Wilderness

Landscape

Rubbish

Seats

Towers

A Drained Pool & The Mosque

Informal Entrance

I spoke with colleagues and friends about the park. No-one seemed to know anything about it. Where it is? How big it is? What you can do there? 

While it may not be Brigadoon, it is certainly an enigma.

I have no idea how long it has lain in decay. With hindsight, I guess I first read about it on my favoured bird watching website. Looking again, although it is listed, I can find few references in the site to suggest that its contributors visit on a regular basis or have visited recently. I am guessing that the park has been closed for years.

And I am left astonished at how wrong Saudi Tourism seems to get it. How can you promote and push somewhere that is so clearly out of bounds?

I’m sure that something will rise in the parks place. It will have a second shot at being a public place that people want to go to. The hoardings around the edges promise all sorts of family based entertainment. Football pitches and a gym have already been opened. Shiny and new. With heart and hope. In time, I expect that the cash will be found to revisit the gardens and to clean the lakes, tidy the trees and grass and replace the dying concrete. And King Fahd’s Park will rise again. But not for a while…

But before that. Before I get on a plane bound to Europe for the last time, I think I may go back and find a shaded bench one more time to watch the world go by for a little while. But when I am there, as with most of my strolls into isolated places, I will be hoping that I don't stumble over Roger Christopher’s dismembered body in an abandoned car.