Ramadan in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia [Part VII] - Moving to Makkah and Got Lost

Third day in Saudi Arabia, after we spent first two days of Ramadan in Madinah, we moved to Makkah. We were about to do Umra, so we stopped at one mosque in Bir Ali to take Miqat (first step of Umra, which is the intention & wearing special ihram clothes). This mosque located only 15 minutes from Madinah city. Then we continued to Makkah for 5 hrs via bus.

I used to live in tropical, means that forest and plants are so common, but not in here. Here there're mostly desert, rocks, stone mountain.

the view of our road trip

We arrived at Makkah at 3pm, still about to do Asr prayer. The tour leader asked us to continue Umra after breakfasting. So most of us still wore ihram clothes (special-all white clothes for Umra) till night. After we finished breakfasting with big meal at the hotel and did Maghrib prayer then we went to Al Masjid Al Haram (greatest mosque on earth with Ka'bah inside, center of all prayers around the world). There was one leader that led us to Masjid Al Haram since it was quite far from our hotel, we didn't know the direction, nor the place to do next step of Umra.
We prayed Isha then continued Umra, which was Tawaf (walking/circumambulate the Ka'bah for seven times). After that we moved to Safa-Marwa to do Sa'i (circumambulate Al-Safa and Al-Marwa)

As the first part I told you about our 75yo woman that traveling alone, but still in group with us, that we needed to take care of her. She walked as a normal 75yo people, while the rest of our group walked so fast (since it was sunnah, or better, for men to have mini run instead of walking). So we got lost. Fyi, Al Masjid Al Haram is literally the greatest mosque, around 356,800 square meters with max 4 million people inside. It was very very hard for us to find the rest of our group. But then we met two women that also from Indonesia that fortunately had more experience in Makkah than us. Alhamdulillah. Allah always there to help us. Then we walked together until we finished Umra.

Mosque in Bir Ali where we took Miqat

The view from our hotel

the view from our hotel

The next after Tawaf and Sa'i was Tahalul. Tahalul is cutting our hair but it must be done by other that her/his hair has been cut by other too. We didn't have any scissors, so i borrowed from stranger there, a Pakistani man i guess. He didn't speak English at all, so we both were using tarzan language. Then it suddenly came a women who wanted to borrow my scissors I borrowed, to cut others' hair then she cut mine. We were using tarzan language too, same thing, she didn't speak English.

The other point, not only the middle east pilgrims that don't speak English, but most staff in Masjid Al Haram don't either. When we lost and we asked for direction, none of the staff (I was asking 5-7 staff) understand a very simple english i used. I was asking about our entrance gate with the number on it in English, even tarzan language, but the staff still couldn't understand. Thank goodness there was a man helping us translating English to Arab so we found our way back to hotel. Alhamdulillah.

Overall, good things of being lost are: We could explore more part of the mosque, we talked and asked to strangers, we had more time to enjoy our walk (since tour leader always limit our time).