Kuwait? Ever been there? Me neither.
My “thing” is travel. If you called me up and said you’d be pulling into my driveway in 10 minutes to pick me up for a 10-day trip to Europe, I would be waiting for you at the front door after nine minutes.
To travel well you’re going to need good health, time, and money. At various stages in life, people have more of some of these things than others.
During my 30-year business career, I earned more than 6 million American Airlines frequent flyer miles. I also earned another 6 million frequent flyer miles on all other airlines. Back in the day, you could buy a round-trip coach ticket for about 25,000 miles. That meant that I earned around 500 frequent flyer airline tickets. With a family of five, we did a lot of traveling. I think traveling is a very broadening experience for families and their children especially when the kids are younger. They pick up a lot doing that.
In retirement, I estimate that I have traveled another 5 million miles or so. I commonly tell people that since I was 23 years of age I have flown on an average of three flights a week… every week. Of course, that’s an estimate, but I think it’s very close to being fully accurate.
For this trip, I will be heading to Kuwait in the Middle East to see an auto race. That’s part of my trackchasing hobby. I would be at the racetrack for only a few hours. Was I going to fly all that way from Los Angeles to Kuwait, see an auto race for a few hours, get on a plane, and fly back to SoCal? Nope. I was not. I don’t do it that way.
I planned to spend about 10 days on the trip. The actual time at the racetrack would probably be less than 2% timewise of the entire trip.
I take somewhere in the range of 30 or 40 of these trips every year. I’ve done that for more than 20 years in retirement. That’s a lot of trips, isn’t it? No, every trip isn’t to a faraway place like Kuwait. Sometimes the trip takes me to Oregon, Maine, or Mississippi. Sometimes the journey takes me to Argentina, Australia, or Japan, places I visited in 2023. Each one of these expeditions, no matter how far or how exotic is an adventure.
I invited everyone in our immediate family to join me in this exploit to Kuwait. Just so they had a little skin in the game my “invite” looked like this. I told everyone if they could get to Frankford, Germany, then I would pick up all of the expenses for airfare to Kuwait, 5-star hotels, food, and whatever else.
As you know by now I am an advocate of the “Die with Zero” philosophy. I first learned of Die with Zero while listening to one of my frequent traveler podcasts.
When most people hear that title, DWZ, they immediately jump to the WRONG conclusion. They think “Die with Zero” means spend all your money and die broke. Wrong!! Really wrong! Die with Zero means enjoy your money while you’re still able to enjoy it. Create memories. Use your financial means to generate those memories. Die with zero regrets. Don’t die with all kinds of money “in the bank” that you thought you would use for that blissful retirement…and never did.
Not everyone in our family has a lifestyle where they can pick up and go to Kuwait in early December. Most people who are still working have responsibilities to their families, their jobs, and their lifestyles. Me? I’m retired. Every night is Friday night and every day is Saturday. I have no responsibilities to anyone except Carol. Luckily for me, she lets me do whatever I want to do just like my grandmother did. Who spoiled me the most my grandma or Carol? They BOTH did. I blame it on them.
I got two acceptances for the trip to Kuwait. Our son, J.J. (left), and his great friend Dustin (right) are worldwide travelers. They were more than willing to spend a little bit of time in the Middle East. How often does one get an invitation to a big trip that reads like this…” As long as you can get to Frankfurt, Germany dad is picking up the tab from there”?
Of course, Carol was invited. She is invited on every trip. However, she doesn’t like to travel before Christmas because she has so many things going on that need to be handled for the holidays. I’m good with that. She is contracted for three big international trips each year (that’s about six weeks of international travel)…and anywhere else I can sweet talk her into. We’ll be heading to Europe next month.
My newsletter covering our adventure to Kuwait is going to be a two-part series. In part one, I’ll tell you a little bit about the planning and all of the things we were able to do before we went to the 24H Racing Series event at Kuwait Motor Town just outside of Kuwait City.
In part two I will talk about the race and how I was going to be seeing racing in my 87th different country. Then after the race, we did even more touring in Kuwait and Qatar.
I hope you enjoy what I have to share. Part one will come to you before Christmas and part two after Christmas. If I don’t get a chance to talk to you, I hope you have the merriest of Christmases and the happiest of holidays.
Let’s get started. my plans can and do change at the drop of a hat. Sometimes the logistics of flying require an adjustment. Sometimes the weather and/or a myriad of other items almost too numerous to mention require an about-face.
The first plan had us flying from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, Germany. We wanted to spend a couple of days exploring the German Christmas markets. I had never done that. That sounded like a lot of fun.
However, just a couple of days before we were ready to depart for Frankfurt somewhat near Munich, Germany had the biggest snowstorm they had ever had in December. When the Munich flights started to cancel, because of the snow that impacted our coming to Frankfurt.
Both J.J. and Dustin work in the airline industry. They travel together and separately all over the world. As you know, I’m not a rookie with travel either. I consider each one of us “all stars” when it comes to travel.
It is important to note that when you get several all-stars on the same team, they can’t all be the leading scorer. When the German part of the trip was not going to work we put J.J. as our point man for arranging some of the travel options with our airfare, hotels, and even our destinations. Dustin and I provided background support. Then when we thought we had a plan, we all talked about it. It was always easy to come to a consensus on what new direction we might head. All of us were very flexible when it came to starting whatever new plan was going to be the NEXT plan.
With the stop in Germany fading fast, at the last minute, we used standby tickets to come up with Plan B. If I gave you 100 guesses I think there’s a good chance you would not be able to guess what the new plan would be. How does the country of Oman sound? When I first heard about this option I had to Google “Oman” to confirm it was a country!
While I was busy canceling our hotel reservations in Frankfurt, J.J. was busy getting our Oman travel visas lined up. Then he came up with a most unique and upscale hotel arrangement. Our plan was coming together, not for Germany but for Oman.
Our journey began with a 16-hour flight from Los Angeles to Doha, Qatar. We ended up flying in business class on Qatar Airways with their famous “Qsuite” business class product. This is what Qatar Airways says about their Qsuite offering.
“Your suite offers ambient mood lighting, fully lie-flat beds, and generous storage space, creating a new standard in comfort.
Our bespoke turn-down service complete with pillows, a quilted mattress, and a soft, plush duvet is now complemented by The White Company sleepwear and slippers to further enhance your quality of sleep. Our suites feature doors and a Do Not Disturb indicator, so your slumber is guaranteed to be uninterrupted.
Our seats have been thoughtfully dressed in the latest and finest fabrics, to optimize your comfort. The media panel also comes with an all-access power port, with USB, HDMI and NFC capabilities for your convenience.
Offering signature fragrances inside each amenity kit, premium passengers will receive signature body and face care products designed to elevate the senses, packaged beautifully in elegant Diptyque branded amenity bags and luxurious bespoke gift boxes.”
If you do any research about lay flat business class seating, you’ll see the Qatar Airways Qsuite product offering is at or near the top of every airline offering business class. I am not permitted by international law to share what the price of a roundtrip business class seat is from Los Angeles to Doha, Qatar. I guess that’s what Google is for, right?
Business class is a lot better than being in a middle seat in coach for 16 hours but it’s obviously not as good as a hotel bed.
The food offerings were 5-star. The service was great. The video screen featured a 24-inch monitor with hundreds of movie choices. I recommend the “Jeff Bezos” film and the “Last Interview with Burt Reynolds”. There was a first for me on this flight. Each business-class customer received their own pajamas. Nice.
We landed at the beautiful Doha International Airport (DOH) late in the evening. Our best flight option to get us to Oman would be catching a connecting flight from Doha to Muscat, Oman at 1:30 in the morning. Yes, we had just flown 16 hours and would add a couple more before we went to sleep. To pass the time for those few hours we stopped in the airport’s Priority Pass airline lounge. This was one of the nicer PP lounges, the Al Maha Lounge, I’ve seen. We didn’t necessarily want to be flying at 1:30 in the morning but it did provide an alternative to spending money on an extra night’s hotel!
The traditional dress in Qatar, Oman and later Kuwait is different in each country. Women wear wide, long robes called abayas, usually associated with a Shayla hijab that shows some hair and a niqab. Even if men are wearing thawbs and women wear abayas and it seems as if everyone is wearing the same thing some small details allow others to understand whether you are talking to a Qatari, a Kuwaiti, or an Omani.
The dominant religion in these countries is Islam. Wearing a thawb looks pretty comfortable. During my first-ever visit to this part of the world, for whatever reason, I found this type of dress somewhat intimidating. Now, having been here many times I don’t. It is sort of amusing to me to see local folks in this type of dress wearing Nike footwear!
J.J., Dustin, and I had a lot of good-natured discussions about my wearing shorts. I wear short pants 99.56% of the time in my daily life. I don’t have a pair of dress shoes. I have in reality two pairs of long pants to my name. I brought one of those on this trip.
In written materials about the dress code in the Middle East shorts are frowned upon…with one exception. If your shorts fall just below your knees you’re O.K. most of the time. If you were to visit a mosque you couldn’t wear shorts but the folks at the mosque would be able to take care of you with some sort of cover-up. Each time we went to visit a mosque on this trip the mosque was closed. This was minorly disappointing. I have been to the famous Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. I’ve visited one of the most famous and well-known mosques in Indonesia, that being Istiqlal. As the trip went on J.J. and Dustin felt a bit more comfortable following the advice that I was giving…shorts are OK if they fall below the knee.
Muscat is the capital of the country of Oman. Muscat is known for its glittering marketplaces, also known as souks and delicious seafood. We would try their seafood later in the trip.
We arrived at the Muscat airport at 4 a.m. Oman’s time zone was exactly 12 hours ahead of the Pacific time zone in California. A 12-hour time zone change is the maximum you can get away from your local time body clockwise. We had a few things to take care of. Our Oman electronic travel visa worked just fine. We each paid about $50 for those visas. We would need a rental car as well. J.J. had made reservations for us at a 5-star hotel way up in the Al Hajar Mountains. The hotel’s elevation was 6,000 feet.
Local rules told us that the only way to drive up the mountain was to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. They made it sound like the roads were so bad that only a 4-wheel drive SUV could handle the situation. When Budget Rental Car didn’t have the vehicle available when we wanted we slipped over to National Car Rental and rented a huge Toyota Landcruiser.
We ended up paying $175 a day for a two-day rental car from National. It turned out the mountainous roads were just fine, although steep in places. We could have navigated the route in a Volkswagen Beetle I suspect. Along the way, there was one police check which confirmed by government rule a four-wheel-drive vehicle was required.
Along the way, we stopped at an Omanian gas station. We paid 0.239 Oman rials per liter. At an exchange rate of somewhere around one U.S. dollar for 0.38 Omani rials that came out to about $2.36 U.S. per gallon. They even pumped the gas!
It was interesting to see the residential architecture in the Middle East. Most of their residential structures were built with square lines and small windows. I would have loved to have seen the interiors of these huge homes. The homes were surrounded by security walls. I don’t think I saw a patch of what I would call grass during the entire time we were in Oman.
Staying at the Alila Jabal Akhdar Hotel was pure luxury. This was likely the most expensive hotel in Oman. At the 6,000-foot elevation temperatures were cool. The bathroom fixtures, including the sink and tub, were most unusual. First class all the way!
The food at the resort was simply outstanding. Everything was gourmet and served and presented most attractively. Breakfast was pretty much like upscale cruise ship dining. Servings were on the smaller side but we could have as many breakfast entrées, and I did, as we wanted.
We hiked all over the property. Much of the scenery was like walking on the moon. We spent one afternoon at the archery range.
We enjoyed Happy Hour and watched the sunset. Our view was as close to visiting the Grand Canyon this side of the Grand Canyon itself.
Our gourmet dinner was delicious, expensive, and served in some pretty cool temperatures. The dining room was outside under the star-lit sky with glass fencing to keep the wind away. Our servers wore heavy winter coats. The heater at our table didn’t work well. I didn’t get that a luxury hotel would want to serve their evening meals in a 60° or less environment. Guests were provided blankets to stay warm. That was beyond strange.
After two days at the mountaintop resort, we drove back down to Muscat. Along the way, we randomly stopped in one of the smaller villages at what appeared to be a dollar store. I sensed when we walked in the front door that the general reaction from the locals was “These boys aren’t from around here!”. The first thing I saw was a huge display of Tide detergent a top brand from my former employer Procter & Gamble.
It was interesting to see that virtually everywhere we went sellers were accepting wireless payments from our watches or phones. By the way with all of us being AT&T cellular subscribers our phones, for $10 U.S. per day, worked just as well as if we were in sunny southern California.
One of the plusses and one of the minuses of this kind of travel is that with technology the travel experience isn’t all that much different than from where we came from. That has some advantages but the huge minus is that we don’t WANT Oman to be nearly identical to California!
Despite visiting three different countries, Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait with three different currencies, we never used any of these currencies to buy anything. Not once. At the souk in Doha, we did buy an item or two with Euros. We were given Qatari Rival as change.
There is a lot of money in these oil-rich countries. The airport in Muscat, Oman, for its size, with as nice as I have ever seen. The terminal opened in 2018. What surprised me was that with tall ceilings that measured six or eight stories, the airport was as quiet as any place I’ve been. The Muscat airport ranks sixth for best airports in the Middle East. The Doha Hamad airport, where we started this trip, ranks #1!
We had some time before our flight from Muscat to Kuwait City would be leaving. We paid to store our baggage in lockers at the airport outside of security. We traded all of our laptops and iPads for three orange stickers!
We took the first of many Uber-like ride shares. The rideshare company in Oman is called Otaxi.
We wanted to eat at an authentic Omani restaurant. We did just that. It turned out that the owner who was a native of Oman had lived in Southern California. He knew as much about SoCal as we did. That was most helpful when it came to explaining the menu.
Pork is not served or eaten in these Middle Eastern countries. Alcohol is almost always limited to major hotels. They serve a lot of lamb. Today at our lunch, J.J. and Dustin dined on lamb and tuna. I don’t like either of those choices. I explained this to the owner. He was more than happy to come up with a special “Randy menu”. Of course, we ate some camel meat (above bottom). As a matter of fact, a camel cheeseburger was on the menu! What does camel meat taste like? Chicken. No! Everyone says a mystery meat tastes like chicken. Camel meat tastes like…beef.
Our next flight would take us from Muscat, Oman to Kuwait City, Kuwait. That flight was about two hours long. Again, we passed the time with a visit to the Priority Pass lounge, the Primeclass Lounge in the Musca airport. All three of us have Priority Pass memberships. We get them as a benefit from the various credit cards we use. I’ve probably been to a couple of hundred of these lounges. I’m going to tell you that the Primeclass Lounge in Muscat was my best ever.
We landed late at night in Kuwait City. I noticed their airport was older than both Doha and Muscat. The airport was also dramatically louder and much more crowded than either Doha or Muscat. The Kuwait City airport is NOT in the Middle East’s top ten airports.
J.J. had been to Kuwait one other time with my son-in-law, James. They had a stopover for about eight hours. This previous experience helped with our getting our travel visas tonight. If we hadn’t had J.J.’s Kuwait visa expertise on arrival at the airport we might still be trying to get in the country!
I am a Marriott guy. J.J. is a Hyatt guy. He came across the Grand Hyatt Kuwait Residences property. They had opened just three days ago. This was essentially a huge condominium that offered us four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and a huge living area. We even had servant’s quarters but we didn’t have a servant. This would allow J.J., Dustin, and me to stay in the same place. Plus, the price was less than half of what I had previously reserved at the Sheridan in Kuwait for two rooms.
I might point out that when our plans changed it sometimes cost us money. Then…many times the replacement hotels and such saved us money compared to the original plan. We don’t pay retail for anything. We got 5-star treatment virtually everywhere we went but at a cost that was too reasonable to publicize.
Alcohol is expressly forbidden in Kuwait. Importing alcohol into Kuwait carries a penalty of up to ten years in prison. When I began to unpack my luggage, I discovered I had a small airline-sized bottle of Jim Beam whiskey. I shared my discovery with the guys. You would have thought I had confessed to bringing a dozen AK-47 automatic weapons into the country! Later during our trip, our Kuwait guide told us there is a black market for alcohol in Kuwait.
We were staying in Kuwait City for three nights. We looked at the “things to do” list for Kuwait City. What was the #1 attraction in all of Kuwait City? The Avenues Shopping Mall! The Avenues is one of the largest shopping malls in the world with more than 1,400 stores and parking for 17,000 cars. It’s the second-largest shopping mall in the Middle East behind the Dubai Mall. I’ve now been to both and from a luxury view, the Avenues is much better than the mall in Dubai. Of course, a young lady did a video showing The Avenues Mall. If you like, check it out. Avenues Mall video.
Malls are huge in the Middle East and all over Asia. Lots of Asian countries with extremely hot weather attract locals just wanting to get some air-conditioning. The Muscat airport was as nice as any I’ve seen. The Muscat Priority Pass airport lounge was the “best-ever”. After visiting the Avenues Mall, we were all in agreement it was best-ever as well. The mall had all of the most exclusive stores. One of the first over-the-top items we saw was a circular escalator. Later we came across an elevator with no roof. This was quite the place.
We ate really well on this trip. Virtually everywhere we stopped there was gourmet dining. Dustin and J.J. like the finer things in life. That skewed our choices to the upper end. That was fine with me.
I was amazed, surprised, and grateful that all of our Uber-type ride shares seemed to arrive within a minute or two of our placing the order. This was a much faster service than anything I’ve experienced in the United States.
I rode in the front passenger seat for our trips. My neck doesn’t bend as well as it did when I was 25 years old. I guess that’s not surprising. At my height of 6‘3″ it was a major challenge getting into the front passenger seat of these generally smaller automobiles.
During the afternoon we took a rideshare car out to Kuwait Motor Town a newly built auto racing complex. I’ll tell you more about Kuwait Motor Town in part 2 of this newsletter on our visit to the Middle East.
I had made advance arrangements with Peter Freij. Peter (second from left), from the Netherlands, works with the 24H Racing Series. Peter was most helpful in getting me media credentials for the racing in Kuwait. This afternoon I had a chance to meet up with Peter and the race announcers. The next day I ended up doing a 30-minute televised interview during the 12-hour race.
He couldn’t have been a nicer host. Soon J.J., Dustin, and I had our “credentials”. This gave us a full run of the facility. Today the series was holding practice sessions and qualifying. It was fun to get our feet wet at the track. The real “counting” of Kuwait as my 87th track country wouldn’t come until tomorrow.
For dinner, we got a recommendation for a restaurant called “Babel”. If you go to Kuwait City and you’re looking for a nice place to have a local meal Babel should be your choice.
J.J. met a fellow in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel. This guy worked as a personal assistant for a Kuwaiti billionaire. That’s where we got the tip for tonight’s visit to Babel and a few other things in Kuwait.
The food was top-of-the-line cruise ship quality with outstanding service and reasonable prices. They must have had a capacity for 200 diners or more.
I always tell Carol when we take one of these international trackchasing trips that there isn’t a lot of “track” in the trip. Trackchasing is about adventure. It is about visiting places far away both geographically and lifestyle-wise. Some think trackchasing is only about racing. That is very far from reality.
The first half of our trip had gotten off to a splendid start. Whenever you can fly business class for 16 hours and stay at a 5-stop mountaintop resort, eat the finest of foods, and visit the very best attractions you’re likely to have a very good vacation.