There are certain things that one needs to get from one week to the next in Saudi Arabia. First and foremost you have to have good, supportive friends. Without a network of folk around you keeping you on your toes and encouraging you to get out and do things, even if it is something as simple as firing up the BBQ and sitting round together with a few glasses of watered down home brew.

It is so easy here, where the only distraction from the heat and distance from home is a shopping mall, to fall into an irreparable rut that leads inevitably to a mild depression of sorts. I’m lucky to live with and be married to my best friend, but outside of the house both of us are blessed with a wide array of ex-pats from all over the globe that support us and let us into their lives.

After you have established this necessary support network you will need a reliable Internet connection. In the humid sweat of the Middle East you can really feel cut off from the ‘real world’. Things get done at a different pace here and expectations and life in general are completely different to the West. For instance, you regularly see Saudi’s driving at three times the speed limit down a busy highway with their pre-school children standing in their laps, hanging out of windows or climbing out of sun roofs. This is standard practice, and there’s no real concern for the safety of their child because should their child be killed it is out of their hands anyway – it is Allah’s will. Should Allah decide to bless them with another child so be it.

This kind of attitude is utterly mind boggling to most ex-pats and is just one of the many things that contributes to the feeling of alienation from ‘reality’. A good Internet connection keeps you constantly in touch with what is normal, what is real. From friends and family, to news events in our home countries and towns.

To complete your Saudi survival package you need one other key ingredient – something to look forward to. For most ex-pats here that constitutes travelling away from this great Kingdom. For example, the two key things on the horizon for me this year that I am looking forward to, that get me out of bed and through the work week, are my honeymoon to Phuket, Thailand in July and my mom’s visit to Saudi (with a trip to Dubai or somewhere close thrown in) in November. Both of those things are on Geraint’s ‘look forward to’ list as well. Anything that breaks the monotony of a season-less existence.

We try to spread our breaks out so that we don’t use all our allotted holiday time at once and have to go a whole 12 months before we can leave again. However, next year we have an epic trip planned that I am looking forward to more than anything I have since our wedding. We’ve found a spectacular volunteering safari in Zimbabwe that we are both aching to do next year. The only problem with that is that it will take up all of our vacation time for next year all in one go. But who cares?!

We’re so excited about it already that we know it is more than enough to keep us energized and focused. Geraint has already safaried in Africa, but I have never been. So to give me, and you, an insight into they wonder awaiting me he has begun to re-post his Africa journal here.

It’s a series he has posted on another blog site in the past, but reading it now for the first time I fully appreciate him posting it here for everyone to read again. For an glance at what will be making the best part of 14 months in Saudi livable for both of us you should read his journal:

Day 1 – Wet and Wild

Day 2 – Galloping towards the Zambezi

Day 3 – Meeting a Pachydermatologist

Day 4 – Stuffed to the Point of Needing More Food

Day 5 – The Gang’s all Here