Egypt 08: Bahrain

We had an overnight transit in Bahrain.

At the immigration at the airport, it seemed to take the officers forever to clear the passengers because we were ‘overnight’ transit passengers. Day in day out, they have ‘overnight’ transit passengers, day in day out, they seem to face the same ‘problem’ (That was what our tour leader told us), whatever the problem is.

Finally, we were out of the immigration only to be told that the hotel vans which were waiting for us had left with passengers of other tour group! Another round of waiting. By the time we left the airport, it was a good two hours from the time we first landed (at 2:30pm). Even then, not all of us (23 of us including the tour leader) could get onto the two mini vans! Few were ‘left behind’ and arrived at the hotel an hour after us.

The weather was very much like that of Malaysia and temperature at the time was 33 degree Celsius.

Bahrain (or Kingdom of Bahrain as it is officially known) is made up of 36 islands and is located in the heart of the Arabian Gulf. It is slightly bigger than Singapore in size (706sq km) but with the population of only 15.5% of that of Singapore (700,000).

The airport is located on one of the small islands on the north east of the biggest island where the capital city, Manama, is located.

The country is so flat and barren that as the plane started to descend towards the airport, it appeared to me like chapatti placed against a big sheet of blue-coloured paper. Pockets of palm and date trees could be seen here and there and high rise buildings were far and few. The three most prominent ones are shown below here.

We did not have much time and opportunity to explore the country, except for a walk round Manama in the evening.

Much to my surprise, their currency, Bahrain Dinar is about 9.5 times Malaysian Ringgit!