The roses of Taif

The weekend gone by was possibly the last one we had to squeeze an extra few hours out of before work would demand that Robert would have to spend at least some weekends...Well...Working.  We both came down with a mysterious bug that floored us totally for 36hrs on the Wednesday night before our Thursday (Saudi Friday) weekend kicks off. The worst fever, headache, lungs shutting down and muscle spasms you could imagine. Just when we thought it might be a good idea to see a doctor before we croak, it disappeared just as miraculously as it arrived. It left us battered and bruised.  Mind over matter, pack the Cruiser and let's just keep moving, we decided.
  As usual, it is up to me to select a route and get all our stuff ready while Robert does a bit of work. When he gets home, we can just pop everything into the car and off we go. Without fail, I remember everything and always study the history, facts, sites to see, best route options for us and pitfalls along the way that we might encounter. Done, dusted.   Except, this time i was weak and sick and slept most of the morning and Robert came home earlier than expected so that we can do the long route i selected before the great sickness. So the homework part was not done as well as usual...
We went to Taif, which is the nearest city to Mecca, for 2 reasons:  we wanted to visit the famous rose farms and we wanted to do the spaghetti road down Mount Arafat.  Because of our battered bodies we decided to stick to the tar roads, which meant the main drag from Jubail, via Riyadh, straight down to Taif (road 40). This is a distance of a mere 1200 km.  Half way to Riyadh, Robert comments that for some reason the car seems a bit more empty than usual. It turns out we forgot the duvet at home. No problem, it is seriously hot out there, so we should be fine. Except that we still had the remains of some cold fevers going and in the desert, after about midnight, it still gets quite chilly.  We bought the most phycadilic throw- thing at a roadside fuel station shop the next morning.
Taif is something to behold. It has a very strong old European feel to it.  The City is huge and it covers probably about 7 very high very rocky mountainous hills. It is also a surprising 2000m above sea level.   When you reach the outskirts of town on the way to Mecca, the most astounding piece of road engineering awaits you.  The Mountain is huge, high, rock soon  a steely coloured sheer rock. This is a place for tourists and should be visited by far more people than the pilgrims that go to Mecca. It should be one of the top holiday destinations in Saudi.  Every type of amusement, hotel, restaurant and museum, mountain climbing, green parks, everything is there.  To try and describe it is a bit hectic and if you were interested, one would be able to learn much more if you simply Google it.
The part where i failed and where Saudi as a whole is lacking, is in getting directions to the rose farms (or any sites for that matter) that was the main purpose of our visit before we set off.  Try as you might, there is no information available in English on where to find these farms in the City itself.  Even though we set off early the previous day, having one afternoon in the City is simply too little time to discover all the wonders of Taif.  We also discovered that 'non-religious' people have a separate road that goes around Mecca, a place that cannot be seen from this road at all.  There is a type of border post arrangement where your Iqama is scanned to make sure that you are a Muslim with the correct permit to go to Mecca, otherwise sorry for you, take the 'non-religious' option please and thank you.  The mountain pass is in itself worth a visit. It is simply spectacular.  All we could think of was how nice a road that would be for a Top Gear show!
There are many YouTube feeds and clips available about the rose farms of Taif, we discovered after coming back.  Sadly, this time around we did not get to see them.
Our next story will be about our route returning to Jubail (as you will see, by then we were feeling much better!)