About me

and Dr. Hans` Saudi travel treasures

About me

May I first introduce myself briefly:

After many decades of work life in Germany, various circumstances have led my wife and me to the countries of the Middle East, which continue to fascinate us tremendously – even if we have to cast a critical eye on a few things there.

During my first visits to the Middle East, the name I chose for this blog was born: My doctorate is real as is my first name Hans, which is part of a double name. From the very beginning, I was never addressed by anyone in these countries with my – in itself not difficult – surname (with or without a doctorate), but always with “Dr Hans”. In the meantime, I have become fully used to this and have therefore decided to use this abbreviation as part of my blog name as well.

My Saudi Arabia Blog Project

When Saudi Arabia opened its borders to tourists about four years ago, it was immediately clear to us that we wanted to explore the country on our own before the tourism industry would start to go into full swing.

To realise this wish turned out to be more difficult than expected, especially since there are still no up-to-date travel guides and the information available on the internet about individual destinations and sights turned out to be partly outdated or even inaccurate.

Hence we came up with the idea of making our own experiences available to anyone interested by way of a travel blog.

Another travel blog? What’s different?

You might be asking yourself: Another travel blog? There are already so many out there – and there are more and more about Saudi Arabia… . That’s certainly true, but I would like to try to go beyond the usual type of blog and include background information or further notes on the country, its geography and its history, which I think will be of interest to those who are not only interested in the external beauties and special features of the country.

On the other hand, I will not give any so-called insider tips, which for me are pure anachronisms because they will have become common knowledge at the latest once they become public on the blog.

I will also refrain from recommending currently “hip” restaurants, cafés, bars, hotels, other “hip” “events” or “cheap” places to stay.

Such occurrences are often short-lived; indeed, during our visits we found that highly praised restaurants or cafés that still showed up on the Internet no longer existed (in reality). The risk of putting off readers with such information that later turns out to be inaccurate is too great for me.

Communication

I do not claim to have complete knowledge of this country – and hence gaps in the blog will be unavoidable. As I am eager to continue learning, too, I look forward to any substantive comments and advice from you.

Where I have no knowledge of my own, but feel that a particular point should be mentioned, I will make that clear.

Which next blogs are to come?

We have been to Saudi Arabia several times now and want to explore the essential parts of the country – as far as possible -, but this might not be fully possible in the south at the moment due to the still ongoing Yemen conflict.

Therefore, I will for now successively write regular blogs on

Riyadh
Jeddah
Eastern Province (Dammam, Khobar et al)
Al-Ula
Ta’if, Al Bahah

and then hopefully it will continue.

Dr. Hans’ Travel Guides

I hope you don’t mind too much if I do a little self-promotion at this point: Besides this blog I already have an ebook “Dr. Hans-F. Loth – Travel Guide Riyadh and Jeddah”, which is available on Amazon. I would like to update this travel guide as well.
A new travel guide „Dr. Hans-F. Loth – Travel Guide Saudi Arabia – Eastern Province – Dammam, Al Khobar, Dhahran and Al Ahsa” is currently in progress and will hopefully be available to you shortly.

Bye and until next time says
Yours / Your Dr. Hans