I’m going to share an incident that happened to me on 4 th January 2019. However, as things are opening up and changing, this is starting to slowly wear out. I am not saying they are close minded but it is a scene they are not used to. What I mean is that, in general, Arabs treat females as queens, something I am not complaining about, but the concept of females being independent is not something they can comprehend. The ‘guardian thing’ is more of a cultural thing, not the law. I travel around independently all the time and, definitely, without a guardian. This common misconception needs to be eradicated as soon as possible. 1 – As a female, I need a guardian to travel to Saudi and around Saudi. Here are some common misconceptions about solo female travel in Saudi Arabia. In this article, Nada takes us through the 9 misconceptions about traveling to Saudi Arabia as a woman. Nada actually grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, so she knows the people and culture very well and has traveled around the country extensively, so who could be better than her to explain about solo female travel in Saudi Arabia?
However, since Saudi is known for being an extremely patriarchal country, I received more questions than I had ever received before, some of them asking about safety, while others if it was even possible to go travel to Saudi Arabia as a woman alone.Īs always, I can’t give an accurate response about solo female traveling but, luckily, during my journey, I met Nada from Nadal Al Nahdi, a 20-something-year-old backpacker who has traveled solo to some very cool destinations such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Oman and Sudan, and the coolest thing about her is that she is half-Yemeni, half-Indonesian. Those images really triggered the interest of many travelers who would have never thought of going there, and that included many women as well. When I was posting all the photos and videos from my visit to Saudi Arabia on my Instagram Stories, people were actually amazed at all the places I visited and the people I met, as they were so many miles away from all the stereotypes the media has been showing us during the last decade.
Since I am a man, all my articles tend to be kind of male-oriented, not on purpose though, but it is just that, sometimes, I forget that the experience for women may be totally different. In the last few years, I have been traveling extensively across the Middle East and other Muslim countries, so it is not surprising at all that, every week, I receive tons of requests and questions from kick-ass women who wish to travel to the same places. I am organizing 1 epic expedition to Saudi Arabia. ¿ Do you want to come with me to Saudi Arabia?