| On the morning of 7 April 2009 during a cruise from Dubai to Athens Barbara and I joined a three-hour group tour of Jeddah while our ship, Silversea Cruises' 296-passenger Silver Wind, docked at Jeddah Islamic Port for six hours. We had been at sea for three and a half days sailing in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea since departing from Salalah, Oman; and our next port of call would be Safaga, Egypt one and a half days later. The commercial and industrial center of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's second-largest city with a population of 3.4 million, lies just south of and across the Red Sea from the Egypt/Sudan border. Thought to have been settled for about two and a half millenia, Jeddah grew in importance under the Ottomans and later fell under British sway. Finally Jeddah came under the control of the Al Saud dynasty in 1925. With a population of 10000 and an area of only one square kilometer in 1948, the area of Jeddah has exploded in recent decades to the extent that it now exceeds 1000 square km (384 square miles). Today some 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims transit Jeddah annually. Of that number, the city's port serves as the gateway to Mecca for some 80000 pilgrims from all over the world with the remainder arriving mostly by air. Because of its many pilgrim visitors and expatriate workers, Jeddah is considered to be more cosmopolitan than most other Saudi cities. Although we were not able to view it during our visit, Jeddah's most famous landmark is the King Fahd Fountain ... |
