NOWHERE BY CHANCE - A STORY ABOUT A PRINCESS
This is Princess Noura. Her Highness Princess Noura bint Faisal Al Saud is the great-granddaughter of King Abdulaziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia. In another land, in another time, on a snowy highway, we sat together in the back of a Cadillac Escalade as she ferociously took to a giant Salvador Dali coffee table book with a giant pair of scissors.
At the time, Princess Noura was 22 years old and her father, Prince Badar, was the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States. Due to that fact, it was deemed necessary that to protect her from kidnappers and abduction, she would be accompanied by a full-time armed bodyguard, transported in her own armoured vehicle with a personal driver, and when snowboarding, escorted by a professional, unarmed snowboard instructor: me.
Each day I would travel to Hala Ranch with 20 other ski and snowboard instructors to collect our respective Princes and Princesses. We had one each. After our cars, bags and bodies were searched, we would gather for a banquet breakfast in the subterranean bowels of the 5,200 square metre ‘palace’. The palace, an obscene, gargantuan, ranch-styled monstrosity, crowned a 95 acre ranch, on the slopes of Aspen Colorado, in a gated residential neighbourhood unapologetically branded Starwood. We had a special room where we would await our assigned wards.
Most days I waved farewell to all the other Prince and Princess entourages, and settled in to watch CNN in our special room. Reality, or perhaps surreality, would bite when Prince Bandar would appear on-screen alongside President Bush, Vice President Cheney, or National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. At the time he was deeply involved in Saudi–US relations, working to repair and manage diplomatic fallout after 9/11. Serious business. I watched as I waited for my Princess imagining Prince Bandar upstairs on the phone to the White House. More often than not around midday some official would come and say, ‘Princess Noura is not coming today’ and the driver would take me back to the ski resort.
Excuse me here, while I place a story within a story. Being cut loose and available in the middle of the day, in the middle of the holiday season, coupled with the good fortune of being exotically foreign (small, blonde, Kiwi), featuring a cute-as-a-button accent (their words), and also being a qualified, experienced, female instructor afforded me more odd and interesting assignments. Once, however, despite these many attributes, I was thankfully overlooked for a TV assignment, after it had been rightly determined – in a conversation held in front of me by two managers – that I was ‘too quiet’. This I considered a bullet well and truly dodged.
Maybe celebrities are nocturnal, because many afternoons, after coming down from the palace, I would pick up Trey, Will Smith’s kid, to go snowboarding for the afternoon. I taught his brother Harry and became friendly enough with the family to be invited to their New Years Eve celebrations. Champagne-charged confidence countered any sense of fish-out-of-water-ness at the do, and I took to the dancefloor with unabashed abandon. I tore it up with my new friends until a 4am limo ride, shared with Will’s mother Caroline, delivered me home to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before returning to the Princess Project.
Remarkably, on day when the Smiths took the day off, I was assigned to teach Mariah Carey. She arrived with superstar fanfare, a 20-person entourage, a one piece, zip-up-the-front, skin-tight ski suit and a big black bodyguard assigned to flank us by foot, packing, on the slopes, in street shoes. Ridiculousness.
Starstruck people screamed ‘We love you Mariah’ from the chairlift and little crowds formed. My internal monologue chimed: be cool, she is just a person, she is just a person, say something normal. My goal when teaching anyone was to find a way to connect. And so I nonchalantly asked Mariah an everyday question: ‘How’s your work going?’, and she provided an otherworldly reply: ‘Good, I am singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl next weekend.’ There was nothing normal about this at all. I signed a non-disclosure agreement to snowboard with Mariah, so I will end the story inside the story there.
During the total 6 weeks I was booked with Princess Noura, I only met her 3 times. When she appeared, she was not what I had expected. This dear girl, with enormous brown eyes, had shaved her head. She moved with an overexaggerated masculinity stomp that seemed like defiance and an attempt to shake off all that was smothering her. She nodded at me politely, with barely hidden disdain. I was just another hired hand. She chain-smoked in the backseat out of a barely cracked window. Our worlds were poles apart. She looked sad and I felt deeply sorry for her.
Noura radiated rebellion. Despite her 22 years this smelt like teen spirit. She was polite because she was conditioned to be. Her contempt oozed as she snowboarded as fast as she could to get away from me, to feel free, to escape the suffocation, to feel a little danger; all of this I surmised of course. All her feelings were fair, but this was my world: no dice, I snowboarded faster. We would wait for Keely, her body guard, at the bottom of the run: another cigarette, more silence. I delivered several inane clangers, as we tend do when we try too hard. Be cool, she is just a person. But I could not imagine her world, and I puzzled over how to connect.
Noura and I had both seen the world, but under very different circumstances. With all the freedom in the world, I had spent a recent winter season at Crystal Mountain in Washington State, where I met my friend Fleur. The following winter Fleur joined me to travel Spain in the springtime after I completed a winter season in Soldeu in Andorra. Fleur introduced me to the work of Salvador Dali and randomly convinced three of us to drive and sleep in a very small car to visit his haunts. Notwithstanding stomach bugs, dead-legs and wild Euro driving, we saw the Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres, in Catalonia, then travelled what felt like a long way, to Port Lligat, to visit his house on the coast. All good fun for three young girls on a road trip.
It was the second time I met Princess Noura when the Salvador Dali book appeared. The book was beautiful, a hardback with highest quality, heavy pages and stunning images, and she was cutting out pictures for an assignment. I looked across and I quietly ventured, ‘I went to his house once’. Her head turned in my direction quickly, her eyes cast upwards through her long eyelashes toward me. I felt her gaze land. A wall came down. I was human and I had connected. To say we became best buds, going out for coffee and shoe shopping might be overstating it, but the small shift was enough for me.
I have thought about that moment for years. The humanness of it, the curious shape of serendipity, if you are careful and take the time to notice it. The distinct power of stringing two moments together. The cliché of only time telling. So today I looked up Princess Noura online, and there she was on Instagram, holding up a big, beautiful book. Evidently she co-authored and published Costumes of Saudi Arabia: A Heritage of Fashion this very month, May 2025. Go figure.
Since we went snowboarding she has grown out her beautiful hair and travelled the world her way. Education opened her gilded cage and fashion seems to have shaped her a perfect place in the world. She has a bachelor's degree in Business and Marketing from Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a master's degree in International Business with a Japanese Perspective from Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan.
Gloriously, she is the founder of Saudi Fashion Week and has carved out a name for herself, serving as the Sector Development Director for the Saudi Fashion Commission under the Ministry of Culture. She also established the Global Culture House, a consultancy aimed at promoting culture, creativity, and sustainable business practices. She is still going fast and I am proud of her!
A gig with the Princes and Princesses was much sought after amongst the crew in Aspen. It was well known that at the end of each royal stay, envelopes were dispersed to every instructor with wads, literally thousands, of USD inside as gratuity. The exchange rate meant the dollars were doubled when exchanged to NZD. I piled all mine together and put a deposit on an investment property back in New Zealand, as you did, laissez-faire in the early 2000s. I have my Princess to thank for making snowboarding a ‘real’ job.
Today I hope Princess Noura is still snowboarding. I hope she is still going fast and still learning. I hope she is having fun and being creative. Most of all, I hope some future designer, artist, creative, or rebellious adolescent somewhere is cutting up her book for their project.
There is only one planet, but there are eight billion worlds.
Byron Katie