Kuwait after dark: driving into the desert tent camps

By four in the afternoon I had finished every sight on my Kuwait City list, with a flight out only late that night. So I did what the map suggested: crossed the long causeway over Kuwait Bay to see what was on the other side.

The answer, at first, was nothing. Skyline viewpoints at the bridge, then desert: highways, giant power lines, and emptiness all the way to a beach with nothing on it, which was exactly the point. I met perhaps five cars the whole way.

For the return I skipped the bridge and drove the long way around the bay, just for different vibes. As darkness fell, lights began appearing in the desert on both sides of the road: clusters of tents, strings of bulbs, whole villages of them.

I turned into one. Unlit gravel, tents in every direction, and me, a foreigner at night with no idea what I had found. A refugee camp? Some settlement the map did not show? I did not feel I belonged, and I left with more questions than photos.

The answer came later: I had driven into Kuwait's winter camping season. From late autumn to spring, families move out to licensed desert camps to live, for a while, the way their grandparents did, with generators and satellite dishes along for the ride. What looked alien in the headlights is the country's favourite pastime.

Driving back, the puzzle of the empty daytime capital solved itself: near Al Jahra the roads were suddenly full. Kuwait had been in the desert all along. The route that finds it is in the Kuwait guide.