Around the World in 80 Minutes…
After a random but generous offer of “overlander overnight facilitie”s on Facebook we made contact with Nara and Amin. They offered overlanders showering, sleeping and laundry facilities out of the blue in a Facebook post. Turns out we were the first ones to go even though the invite was over a month before. They really excelled with their generous hospitality and they took us to places we would have never have gone to in Riyadh.
Nara and Armin are Saudi Arabian overlanders and quite possibly one of the pioneers within the country and have already been as far as Scotland in the beloved Toyota FJ cruiser.
If you’d like to follow them on Instagram they are @aminonara
https://www.instagram.com/aminonara?igsh=eHd0b2xvbXVtcXFs
One of the places they took us, which is in the photos below, was called Boulevard World. It was a limited time festival / amusement park which had been on for a while and was about to end. They had never been so they decided to pay for us to go. We really appreciate that this as it was quite expensive it seems and completely amazing.
Within the park there was section dedicated to regions of the world and as you can see one of them was Egypt. There was even one for the United Kingdom which we didn’t take any pictures of as we had already seen everything there before. ????
Another example of the massive LED screens that they have nowadays which featured in my recent YouTube video of Dubai mall and in fact some of these were about the same size.
Inside the giant ball covered in LEDs, rather like the one in las Vegas, there is a cinema although it’s not quite as big as the one in las Vegas I suspect as that one has an IMAX inside it. It was nonetheless very impressive with the changing external images showing all sorts of things although they didn’t have the 🙂 and it looking up into the sky like they do in las Vegas. I wanted to see the smiley yellow face. No doubt there’s copyright….
The ever-changing colourful patterns on the outside of the Ball were mesmerizing and you just stood there waiting to see what came up next.
Of course no exhibition featuring the world would be complete without China.
The water taxis were driven by an employee as I’m absolutely certain they would not let a Saudi Arabian driver loose on the lake in one of those cars.
