Extraction 9: Reaching Escape Velocity

Warning: long post.

I almost didn't make it out of here.

I started Saturday morning by meeting the taxi driver at 7am. We headed off for the Ministry of Agriculture in Dammam. Even though I had to wait an hour and a half for the document I needed (the manager simply couldn't be bothered to show up for work that morning), a document that in any other country would take 15 minutes, no, that in any other country wouldn't even be required, we were still on schedule.

I should mention that I was doing all of this in a borrowed abaya as I realized the weekend before that mine had been packed with my shipment. A woman simply wouldn't be allowed into government offices without an abaya.

The driver and I headed off to the Dammam airport, a good hour's drive away. There I met with the airport veterinarian. I handed him the form I got from the MoA and he made a couple of new documents. The airport veterinarian is a MoA employee but in a typical backwards-land fashion, his office is nowhere near the MoA.

I was operating off a set of notes that I had made back in November when I accompanied a friend on this same journey as he was preparing to leave with three of his cats (his wife had already departed with three cats and a dog a couple of weeks earlier). He had the GPS coordinates of the places in Dammam that we needed to visit and had written a rough outline of the steps required and their order, what documents were needed at each stop, etc. I had expanded on that document quite a bit and was correcting and expanding my notes as I went along.

Our next stop was the office of Kanoo Freight in downtown Dammam...a few hundred meters from the MoA! Although my friend had pointed out the Kanoo office in November, he and I didn't actually stop there as he didn't need to complete that step then.

It turns out that if I had been able to observe the Kanoo process in November, I probably would have been much better prepared for what ensued.

The driver and I pulled up across the busy street from the office and examined the small, grubby building with fully blacked out windows. There was a metal security gate pulled across the only visible door. I had to call someone in the office to show me how to get in (the door was down a filthy alley along the side; perfectly logical).

My stop at Kanoo was to deal with the cats. The dogs were going to travel as checked baggage and would be processed at the airport when I checked in. The cats had to travel as manifested cargo and the only company licensed by the Saudi government to handle animal export is Kanoo. Yes, I know, it doesn't make any sense that things had to be arranged this way. Nothing makes sense in Saudi Arabia, the logic-free zone.

As I was pulling out the pile of documents required, I was thinking that I might actually get all the pet logistics handled in less than four hours, in one morning!

I should have known better. After all, it is partly the constant FW of random rules that change without notice or explanation that drove me out of here in the first place.

You can't imagine my horror when the Kanoo guy told me that the cats were not going to fly on April 1. The reason? He couldn't call KLM cargo in Dulles to define the consignee for the cats because they were closed (it was Saturday morning in KSA). The fact that I was going to be on the same flight as the cats was irrelevant. For some reason, KLM in Dulles had to approve this in advance. He told me that if I had called Kanoo the week before, this could have been arranged. But my instructions regarding Kanoo were that no business regarding them could be conducted any sooner than 48 hours before travel. See? FW. One end of the process says one thing, the other end says the opposite. Which one is correct? In the end, it doesn't matter. We are at the mercy of the logic-free zone and all of the planning the world won't protect you from this sort of thing.

After sitting in stunned silence, I said, what can we do? Well, he suggested that the cats travel on Wednesday (KLM doesn't fly the Dammam-Amsterdam-Dulles route every day). However, I would need to get an entirely new set of documents, including new health certificates from the vet on camp. Why a new set of documents, requiring 4-5 hours of time to gather and money to pay a driver, assuming one could reserve a taxi with such short notice? The documents all specify a date of travel, April 1, and with this new plan the cats would be traveling on April 3. Thus, new documents.

My mind was racing--how could this be accomplished when I wasn't even going to be here?

I cried in the taxi all the way home, completely freaking the driver out. I finally called my friend Penny. She's level-headed and rational and all the things that I was most certainly not at the moment. After sobbing on the phone, I asked her if she could help me with this cat business. She agreed even though it was going to be a huge inconvenience and would require her to take time off from work.

I won't bore you with the details but she and I sketched out a Plan B and even before I got home I started to put it into effect.

One of the things that bothered me the most about all this was the Kanoo guy's initial assertion that KLM cargo office in Dulles was closed. See, I kept thinking that the fourth or fifth largest port of air shipment entry on the eastern seaboard simply wouldn't be closed on a Saturday.

But I had to wait three hours, until 0800 EST, until I could verify this.
I realized that I needed to calm down so I ate some food then decided to go pick up my passport from Aramco HR.

In the old days, if you were leaving on a final exit visa, you couldn't pick up your passport until you got to the airport. Now, you get it from the HR office but you can't pick it up sooner than 24 hours before travel. Why? Who knows? The Saudi culture is all about control and coercion and a profound and immediately assumed lack of trust, so I suspect this is just one more aspect of that.

I had to wait nearly 45 minutes at Aramco HR which didn't improve my mood. So when the guy told me that it was more than 24 hours before I was to travel and that I needed to come back the next day, I nearly leaped across the counter to strangle him. Gritting my teeth and trying not to snarl, I said, I'm traveling Sunday night at midnight. Please give me my passport.

When I got home with my passport, I stared at the phone waiting for 0805 EST then called KLM cargo in Dulles. The chipper young woman who answered said, of course, they were open from 0800 to 2000 EVERY DAY!
I immediately called the Kanoo guy. After some consultation with his boss, he told me that if I arranged things with KLM in Dulles that they could accept the cats on Sunday night in Dammam. Let's not go into the matter of why I needed to do his job for him. Let's not even get started about how fucked up this entire process was from start to finish. I said, fine, while thinking at least I was going to be dealing with someone reasonable in Dulles. And that is how it turned out.

Many phone calls later, plus a repeat visit to the Kanoo office to hand over the original documents and lots of riyals, it was mostly settled.

Sunday, my last day IK, was still a mess. Because the cat issue wasn't settled until 1000, and because the cats had to be delivered to Dammam cargo hours earlier than I had planned to be at the airport, I didn't have enough time left to do all the things I needed to do. Just as I was beginning to get wound up over this latest set of stumbling blocks, Penny called (she'd been calling regularly to check on the progress of Plan B, and in fact she had Moya and me over for dinner on Saturday night for some hand-holding and companionship). She literally gave me permission to hand over some of the final tasks to her and Moya, and told me that I needed to take care of myself.

The metaphor is "a weight lifted from my shoulders" but in this case it was literal. The items left on my list fell into place. I was able to go to the gym and burn off some bad juju, take the dogs for a very long walk, finish packing, and take a hot shower. I didn't have to rush.

The saga of getting the cats handed over then checking in my bags and dogs would easily require another 1000 words. My stress levels for the past 12 hours have been stratospheric. I need to endure this for a few more days.
The cats and dogs and luggage and I departed KSA a little after midnight on April 1.