Janadriyah: Crucial adjustments for its future
The Janadriyah festival held in Riyadh had a record number of visitors this year — 6 million people, including both Saudis and foreign visitors. It is powerful evidence that this time-honored festival is becoming more popular over time, both nationally and outside our borders, and no wonder.
From its humble beginnings as a camel race — still enacted at the start of the festival — it now includes a much broader, richer and more festive sampling of our culture, as anyone who has ever attended Janadriyah this year would agree. The magic lies in the blend of popular Saudi culture of the past and the present. Whatever the case, we clearly have the ingredients for an eminently successful vehicle for communicating our culture.
I say that we have the ‘ingredients’, because the finished product has not quite come to fruition despite its successes and popularity.
As successful as Janadriyah is, it has some liabilities that could limit its viability as an international destination event if they are not addressed at this point. A great first step would be offering more convenient and varied accommodation to tourists coming from out of town. The 40 km trek from Riyadh repeated over a period of several days or the entire two-week duration of the festival can understandably put a damper on visitors’ enthusiasm. Why not concentrate on expanding guest accommodation closer to the festival site? We have to think outside “the box” or actually, in it. Such as those portable, box-like prefab hotel suites that London provided during the 2012 Olympics that were a great idea.
Why not put the challenge out to our architects and see what homegrown versions they can come up with in time for next year’s Janadriyah? Then, we need to involve the various transportation systems. How can we make the journey to the festival as speedy and as convenient as possible? Officials must figure out what are visitors’ most crucial needs.
These practical measures are all-important, but they are part of a bigger issue. Maybe the most crucial thing of all is that we maintain a welcoming state of mind to any and all visitors. It’s a chance to show off the best of our culture and history, after all. Why wouldn’t we concentrate all our efforts on welcoming our guests from all over the world?
And when all involved agree on that main motivation, embarrassingly silly incidents like the one reported by the western media this year could be avoided in the future. I believe we have a winning recipe in the National Janadriyah festival, and a few crucial adjustments would make it a vehicle of knowledge, sharing and goodwill that it has the potential for.
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