Bahrain Diary - 1

I groaned while I lay on the back seat, feeling bored and tired. The traffic crawled, moving 3 inches in every 10 minutes. My Mom had adjusted her seat so that it leaned back. Her eyes were closed and had her hands folded on her lap. My Dad rested his hands on the steering wheel.

We were on our way to Bahrain. We had started out early in the morning and had been going for 4 hours. We left Khobar and reached the middle island though King Fahd causeway.

Finally, when we got past all the traffic and visa checks after 2 hours and reached Bahrain, I became more relieved. We reached Hotel Ramada. It was a really grand hotel, with a swimming pool and breakfast every day. We would stay there for 4 days.

Mom was tired and asked me and Dad to have lunch and get a take-out for her. But that was where the trouble started.

I and Dad went out, ready to go to ‘Saravana Bhavan’. Ajay Valyachan lives in Bahrain, so he had told us about this restaurant. He gave us directions.

We were ready to embark on our mysterious adventure of finding the way there. My tab lost internet, I could not help Dad find the location. We drove around and asked the way to someone, but still found no sign of it. And then we realized a shocking thing that we had been going around in circles, as we found we reached our hotel again in less than 15 minutes.

 We were losing hope and deciding to drop the whole idea. I told my Dad there was a restaurant in the hotel; we could have lunch from there. But then Dad suggested we take a taxi instead, and so we parked our car at the hotel and waited for a taxi.

We waited for 10 minutes and saw 0 taxis. I was starting to feel hungry now, but then we soon saw one and successfully reached our destination.

We visited Ajay Valyachan, Subha Valyamma and Abhiram (Ramu) in the evening. Ramu is very playful and chubby. He would sometimes cling to me and kiss my cheek.

After dinner, we had made plans with them to start sightseeing in the morning.

We reached hotel late night, plopped on our beds and fell asleep.