Yemen - Expect the Unexpected

The Haraz Mountains, Wadi Hadhramawt, and even the vast expanse of volcanic wasteland known as the Jol that stretches for miles inland from Al-Mukhala on the east coast. There are the minarets of Queen Arwa’s mosque in Jibla, the painted ceilings of Zabid, the partially excavated temples around Marib, and the ‘pastel palace’ in Wadi Dawan. Then there is San’a itself – a walk around the old city and souk by day or by night is a sensory overload. And the most blissful thing about it all is that you can wander at leisure and actually look at things properly. There’s no pressure to buy, and it’s no problem if you want to stop and watch the craftsmen at work.

For me, though, the main highlight was that I didn’t really know quite what to expect from one day to the next. Although you might leave San’a with an itinerary and the relevant travel permits, it’s not a bad idea to prepare yourself for the possibility of delays. Not just bureaucratic delay either; sometimes huge boulders land on the road in front of you and other times there’s a sandstorm. I loved it!

Quick Tips:

Visitors to Yemen are advised to dress modestly. I’m intrigued as to how some female visitors have interpreted this to mean that shorts, tight T-shirts, and a lot of cleavage are entirely appropriate. Neither do you see Yemeni men walking round bare-chested or wearing a pair of shorts. You’ll never really experience the warmth and hospitality of the Yemeni people if you dress in a way that they consider to be disrespectful of their traditions and belief systems. If you keep it modest, more people will want to speak to you, let you take photos, and ply you with cups of tea in exchange for some foreign-language practise.

So far, the kids in Yemen do not seem to have been infected by the ‘begging for biros’ syndrome that usually goes hand in hand with tourism. Let’s keep it that way, eh? Yes, by all means take pens, pencils, and other school stuff and give it to a school, NOT to individual kids. OK, sermon over!

If you’re an avid reader, then take enough books to cover your time in Yemen – it is almost impossible to find new or secondhand books other than textbooks.

Best Way To Get Around:

It wouldn’t be easy, but if you had a lot of time, patience, and cash, then you could ‘do’ Yemen independently using public transport. The somewhat incomprehensible fluidity of the security ‘situation’ in Yemen regarding the safety of tourists makes it impossible to predict whether you will need travel permits or a platoon of heavily armed military types on any given day. Frequent changes mean that even the local tour operators often have to run around getting new permits and re-jigging itineraries only hours before a tour is due to leave. Not only that, but there are a few places that they simply won’t let you get the bus to – you have to be travelling with a tour operator.

When I was there, you couldn’t visit Marib unless you had your own vehicle and were prepared to visit the ruins in a convoy protected by several armed military escort vehicles. So most visitors use local tour operators who do all the paperwork and planning while they spend the first few days relaxing and wandering around old San’a at leisure. Surely this has got to be more rewarding than running between government offices, police stations, and bus stations?

I wanted traditional architecture in the old city. It took a mere nano-second to decide whether the courtyard garden at the Arabia Felix appealed more than the best roof-top terrace at the Taj Tahla Hotel. Both were located in the old city, were traditional mud brick houses, and were within budget. Having spent the last couple of months in the bleached hell that is Oman’s summer, I was experiencing a severe green deficiency. Based on nothing more than the word association of garden with green, I chose the Arabia Felix. It was a most excellent decision and it stayed most excellent until about 5 o’clock the following morning. Yes, garden does mean green in Sana’a and it was all I could do to restrain myself from lying down on the small but very green lawn in the hotel courtyard. Instead, I climbed to my room on the 3rd floor via a steep, winding stone staircase lit by pools of coloured light from small stained glassed windows set into the thick whitewashed walls. The room was spotless, simply decorated and furnished and had an equally clean small en-suite shower and loo. There was even a rare and very precious object—a reading lamp! What more could a girl ask for? Well, in my case, a decent cup of tea so it was back to the shady green courtyard, a few polite nods at some of the other guests and a skank at the menu. The tea was fine, the food was fine, and the staff were fine. The hotel itself is made up of a cluster of adjoining buildings of varying heights with a series of broad whitewashed courtyards, alleys and steps that wind their way through to the central garden area. It is a very attractive building and worth a visit or even a meal even if you’re staying elsewhere. For the navigationally challenged there is also the added bonus of the hotel being quite easy to find in case you lose it. The old city of Sana’a is bisected by an extraordinary stone built channel just over 2 cars wide with tall steep embankments on either side. It is known as the sa’ila and it serves as a dual purpose seasonal river or the fastest and most dangerous main traffic thoroughfare depending on the time of year. The two sides of the city are connected at regular intervals by gently arching broad flag-stoned footbridges. No matter how lost you get in the old city you will keep finding yourself coming across the sa’ila and the Arabia Felix is one of the many beautiful buildings overlooking it. Anyone you ask for directions will only need to point either north or south—easy peasy. Just keep your eyes open after that.

All in all, a great hotel. The problem? Well let’s just say that when choosing your hotel, I would advise trying to find out just how close your room window is to the loudspeaker on the nearest mosque.

This is the hotel I would have stayed in if I had known about it, which I didn’t because it’s new. Well, it’s not new – it’s about 400 years old but as a hotel it’s still cutting its teeth. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re doing though. The hotel is a beautifully restored tower house with, and this is the clincher, a large paved terrace overlooking one of the old city’s allotment gardens. This is just a total plus in a city where there are few places where you can sit, have a drink and enjoy the view all at the same time. Large containers full of flowering plants are dotted around the terrace which is partly shaded by a large mimosa (?) tree. The gardens, completely encircled by old tower houses, are splash of lush green that contrast wonderfully with the golden bricks of the buildings.

At night, the view from the terrace is just magical when the interior lights in the surrounding houses glow through the multi-coloured and intricately patterned stained glass windows. The white-washed rooms in the hotel are simply furnished and the windows draped with billowing muslin curtains. Many of the rooms have either stained glass windows or carved wooden shutters. You can either have a room with a bed or with the traditional mattresses and cushions on the floor. I visited the hotel terrace a number of times and had some interesting conversations with the boss over an alcohol-free beer or two. Most of the renovation work to the hotel building is completed and they’re just adding the finishing touches to the interior decor. A couple of cart loads of mirrors set into reclaimed antique wooden window frames arrived one afternoon and were to go in all the rooms.

A lot of the restoration work on the building involved using reclaimed materials such as doors, windows and support beams. Not all of these come from Sana’a – many of these items are salvaged from derelict properties in the surrounding countryside. The attitude being, better to salvage and reuse than have too many of these items disappear out of the country as souvenirs. I agree, even though I think a pair of Yemeni window shutters would look great on my wall! The plumbing is however, modern.

The hotel also owns all the allotment plots facing the terrace up to a mid-point of the garden. The boss who, like me, is a bit of a plant freak, showed me the design for this land which includes plots for growing organic veg for the hotel, a small sitting area planted with indigenous shrubs and plants and a space to put a traditional tent. The way the plans were laid out on paper and described to me verbally struck me as being totally in sympathy with the surrounding buildings and gardens. We’ll see! As well as meals, they also do a fine cup of tea.

dawoodhotel@yahoo.com

You have GOT to go to this place—even if you don’t want to eat. It’s extraordinary. You can’t miss it either. From the front it looks like a McDonalds except it’s not. It has same colours, a similar logo and a whole bunch of ‘cool’ Yemeni yoof hanging round a whole bunch of motorbikes outside. The logo stands for something like Al-Hamra but people call it the VIP as well. It’s also like a McDonalds inside except the food is an interesting fusion of burger-bar and shwarma-stall served by staff wearing the same colour uniforms as McDonalds. But walk through to the rear and you’ll find yourself in a large courtyard with a rough overgrown lawn, a couple of trees, creepers and vines everywhere, a pretty striking water fountain and a maitre’d somewhat lacking in customer service skills. He is accompanied by a number of security guards with more gold braids, badges and stars on their uniforms than your average military dictator. You then have a choice – you can go for the al fresco, vine-covered, Greek taverna terrace beside the garden or up a spiral staircase and sit in what I’m inclined to call a post-modernist barn. I went al fresco my first time and shared a large plate of excellent Syrian/Lebanese dips and salads with bread and some less than efficient service. This is a good people-watching place. There are tourists from other Arab countries in their subtly different national dress, Yemeni businessmen in Western style suits, ex-pats from the surrounding Embassy area and the occasional non-Arab tourist. Mid-afternoon is a good time to turn up as the lunch rush is over and the staff seem to have just about got a grip on the job by then. If, on the other hand, you need a bit more personal space or even total isolation, I would recommend the barn, upstairs, facing the taverna. It’s like a huge modern industrial unit/warehouse, the interior décor being a style I would call “accidental kitch”. The place looks even bigger than it is because the rear wall almost completely covered in huge mirror tiles. The lighting is provided by huge plastic sputnik arrangements suspended from the roof with the bulbs stuck on the end of the pointy bits. The floor is also very shiny, so what with this and the mirrors reflecting the lights as well, it has all the ambience of a motorway services. On the plus side, there’s a lot of space between the tables and they have gone for the more up-market fabric rather than plastic fake plants. This is apparently, the ‘posh’ bit to go to at night, even though the menu is the same as that in the taverna. And what a varied menu it is too. My particular favourites from the snack menu were ‘Sated Paper’, ‘Means Salad’ with a ‘Season Accident’ followed by ‘Caramel Pudding’. Actually the food is fine – it’s the menu that’s iffy!

It’s not really called Breakfast Alley but everyone I asked seemed to have a different name for it or else they hadn’t a scooby* so don’t go asking people for directions to Breakfast Alley, okay? Head south from the Post Office in Midan-at-Tahrir along Ali Abdul Mogni Street for about 150m until you see a huge fruit juice bar at a T-junction. Hang a right onto Qasr al-Jumhuri Street. If you want a good Internet café then the Ebhar Net is just up the next right-hand street next to the Al-Dubai Restaurant which serves excellent roast fish and other good value local dishes. If you don’t want the Internet or roast fish then carry straight on for a few metres to the next right-hand turn instead. You will find yourself looking into a wide but dingy passage overshadowed by the architecturally uninspiring rear walls of 3-4 stored once modern buildings and the facade of the somewhat scary looking Aden Port Hotel. At ground level, on both sides of the alley are several sort of outdoor cafes and I use that term loosely because we are not talking the table service, co-ordinated patio furniture with sun brollies, cappuccino cafes of a European capital city here. No, this is more battered formica, rough planks of wood, corrugated metal sheeting and, first thing in the morning, a cluster of sleeping people you have to walk round to get into the alley. Instead of a fountain or statue, the centrepiece here is a large leaking water tank perched about 5 feet up on a framework made out of bits if metal and wooden poles tied together with wire. It all looks a bit grim to be honest but trust me, this is the place to come for breakfast in Sana’a. This is where the soldiers from the President’s Palace, the kidnappers, the shop keepers, the policemen, the qat sellers, the homeless and presumably the lucky guests from the Aden Port Hotel all come for breakfast because they know the food is great.

Well OK, I didn’t try every café but they were all doing a brisk trade and the smells were good. You can get omelettes with everything and other egg meals, beans, sandwiches, damn fine pancakes and a squillion different types of fresh bread. And as for the spicy shai, it was some of the best I drank in Yemen. Not only can you have your shai served in a glass, but you can order a double which is served in a large-sized, recycled condensed milk can complete with the jagged metal lid still attached so you can fold it back over your drink to keep it warm. Despite the scrap-yard décor, the cooking areas are clean, the food is cooked in front of you, it’s good value for money and, if you’re lucky, you might get cutlery. Let’s face it, does anyone really need haute cuisine and sun brolly first thing in the morning?

 * clue (Scooby Doo=clue)

There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good suq and Suq-al-Milh in the heart of the old city of Sana’a, is a particularly satisfying one. Like all suqs it is a riot of colours, sounds and smells, it’s easy to get lost and there’s loads of unidentifiable things for sale. What makes this suq different though, is you can actually stop and look at things for more than a nano-second before being accosted by a straight A student from the School of Hard Sell. Don’t get me wrong – I ‘m not averse to a spot of cut-and-thrust bartering but I do like leisurely, hassle-free window shopping too which is pretty hard to do in a suq. But not in Sana’a where the emphasis seems to be on the social rather than mercantile. Offers of cups of shai were more often than not a pre-cursor to a chat about life, the universe and everything other than the business of buying and selling. I found I actually meant it when I told traders I’d be back again rather than using it as a means of escape.

To experience this social side of the suq you need to get your timing right though. First thing in the morning it’s too busy but folk are winding down nicely by about 11am. During the afternoon qat session it’s sometimes hard to tell if the stalls are open for business or not as many stall-holders appear so laid-back they’re horizontal and almost everyone you see is sitting down chatting. In the evening there’s another activity peak between 6pm and 7pm after which it quietens down again. This is when the offers of shai are often replaced by invitations to eat. Suq al-Milh means ‘salt market’ but nowadays salt is just a minor commodity available in one of the 40 or so well-defined ‘sub-suqs’ each specializing in particular types of goods.

In the days before the Toyota pick-up Era, each of these areas had its own caravanserai or samsarah, as they are called in Yemen, which served as a rest house and secure warehouse for visiting traders and their animals. Many of these buildings are now dilapidated and unused but they still act as the hub of each ‘sub suq’ surrounded by either rings of vegetable stalls, fabric stalls, brassware stalls or small workshops producing everything from razor sharp jambiyas (big scary looking curved daggers worn by pretty much all Yemeni men) to crescent-shaped, stained glass qamariyas. I spent a lot of time in the suq that sells the gold and silver hand- embroidered belts worn by the men and used to sheath the jambiya. The rolls of embroidered fabric looked amazing stacked on top of each other. I couldn’t afford one but the reels of gold thread were a bargain. As for a cheap and unusual souvenir, I don’t think you can go far wrong with a length of woven camel hair that you tie below the affected joint to alleviate arthritis.

When I’m at home there are a million things I’d rather do than go to a nightclub – ironing, reading the phone directory, boiling my head in oil – that sort of thing. But just occasionally when I’m away travelling, if the word nightclub is mentioned I’m galvanised by the prospect of a night on the town. This volte-face only happens to me in countries where I think there’s a damn good chance that the word nightclub doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it should mean.

So when a spot of clubbing in Sana’a was suggested one evening, I decided that Yemen was probably one of those countries. It was, on first glance, disappointingly familiar – a couple of bouncers on the door, loud booming music and flashing lights. On second glance, however, it was obvious that things weren’t quite that familiar after all. The loud music was coming from an enormous TV screen showing what looked like an Arab pop video. Whilst I’ll admit the lighting was familiar, it was more Christmas than nightclub in style. It was also outdoors in a courtyard garden, there were few women and there was no dancing. It was however, busy. Pairs or small groups of predominantly ‘20-something’ locals, mostly dressed in smart but casual Western attire, were sitting at tables under the trees. Their faces were strikingly illuminated depending on whether they were sitting beneath a tree bedecked in fairy lights or near to the multi-coloured flashing rope lights or one of the faux Georgian carriage lamps along the path around the courtyard. I’m guessing the tall trees must’ve had a muffling effect on the music because it was a lot quieter inside the club than out. All in all, the atmosphere was ambient, interesting and not unpleasant. And this was despite the fact that the pop video turned out to be an Arab version of one of those pop music talent shows. Not that any of the clientele seemed interested in it – most were smoking shisha pipes and drinking soft drinks while a few others were eating delicious looking meals from a barbecue kitchen set on one side of the courtyard. The smell in the place was an amazing mix of different aromatic tobaccos with the occasional waft of jasmine coming from somewhere in the garden. The fresh orange juice I ordered turned out to be one of the nicest I had in Yemen – it also came complete with a cocktail brolly and slice of orange arrangement floating in it. I did find some more women as well – they were sitting in a screened-off area adjacent to the club’s indoor billiard hall and appeared to be having a great time. It was apparent from the Western style clothing worn by those women not veiled and covered that this is where the young and wealthy of Sana’a come for a night out. In a country with so much poverty it’s easy to forget that there’s money in some pockets.

Wadi Dhahr is an excellent destination for a spot of sightseeing, some gentle walking, or some pretty scary abseiling, depending on whether you’re a tourist or a conscript in the Yemeni army. The Wadi itself is about 14km northwest of Sana’a, but about 10km out of town is a large red rocky plateau area on the right-hand side of the road, where you can get a stonking view of the whole wadi, with the famous Rock Palace nestling in the middle of the fertile valley. On Friday mornings, between 10am and noon in particular, this plateau is a popular pre-wedding, dagger-wielding dance spot for bridegrooms and their all-male entourages, who positively welcome the chance to be photographed. Conversely, the army, who are quite happy for you to watch the abseiling on the cliffs as you enter the wadi, are not at all keen on photography.

About 1km beyond a small, scruffy suq is probably the most photographed building in Yemen—the Rock Palace, or Dar-al-Hajar. The present five-storey building, perched on top of a rock outcrop, was built in 1933 by Imam Yahya as a summer residence. The palace is open to the public from 8am to 6pm, and the entrance fee is 500YR. Only a few of the rooms are furnished, but the interior has some very fine stained-glass windows and the views from the roof are worth the climb. Beneath the building are subterranean wells, one allegedly over 250m deep, and there is evidence that the rock has been inhabited intermittently since prehistoric times.

The palace marks the entry point into the village of al-Qabil, which, despite the occasional heap of plastic waste, is a nice little place with some unusual buildings and lush green gardens. The village also boasts a rather large and ancient hammam, and when not in use, the guardian will give you a very hot and steamy tour, along with an explanation of the workings in a mixture of mime, Arabic, and what sounds a bit like Italian. As you continue to walk through the village, overshadowing the buildings on the western side is a rather precipitous cliff topped with fortified ruins and dotted with caves believed to have been occupied during Himyarite times.

Once through the village, there are a number of options: you can continue walking north through the gardens and qat plantations to the village of Bayt Na’am at the head of the wadi, or, if not feeling too energetic, then double-back and return to the Rock Palace via the wadi bed to the east of the village. Near the mosque there is also another tarmac road leading east out of the village to Sana’a, which provides a quiet and scenic walk back to town. There are no eating places in Wadi Dhahr, but there are numerous locations suitable for picnics in the area. Shared taxis from Sana’a cost around 100YR, and contract taxis are around 1000YR one-way.

"But it’s less than 3km!" I squinted up at the village of Kawkaban perched on the top of the 400m cliff above the outskirts of Shibam and tried to make out just exactly where the path up was. "I’m sorry Mohamed, but that is not a walk –that is a military exercise and I’m not doing it OK?" I’m quite happy to walk but after weeks sitting on my backside studying there was no way I was fit enough for the very steep climb up to Kawkaban in the ‘hour or so’ that Mohamed seemed to think I was capable of. In the car, during the circuitous 7km journey by road to Kawkaban I promised the obviously disappointed Mohamed that I’d tackle the route down instead. The main entrance to the village is across a stone bridge and over a ravine that marks the start of the path down to Shibam. Once through the huge fortified stone gateway the first buildings to be seen had been part of the Jewish section of the village but are now in a state of dereliction. Keep your eyes open - there are still a few old doorways with the Star of David carved above them.

The only ‘shop’ open in the old suq was the workshop of an enterprising metal-worker who was recycling empty Chinese rocket shell casings to make scissors which, at YER200 a pair make unusual souvenirs. The main body of the village is, like Sana’a, an architectural dream with the pinky-red stone buildings surrounding an ancient water cistern. Domestic water supplies are now provided by a large, unsightly, concrete water tower which bizarrely, given Kawkaban’s tourist attraction status, has been plonked quite unsympathetically in the middle of the place. However, the spectacular views over Wadi Na’im and the vertiginous views straight down to Shibam more than adequately make up for the aesthetic failings of the regional planners.

For over an hour, the only inhabitant we saw was a very small boy with a large squeaky blue wheelbarrow full of the usual jewellery-type souvenirs who followed us silently up and down alleyways, around the cliff-edge graveyard to the gates of one of the three hotels in the village. Obviously not allowed to cross the threshold, he abandoned his barrow in the middle of the gateway and disappeared. Although Kawkaban is a popular tourist base for hiking, apparently all the hotels were empty and certainly looked very closed. What you do under these circumstances is knock on the door and if they’re in they’ll make you a drink and possibly a snack. If they’re not in then go to the next hotel and so on. Take a bottle of water with you just in case they’re all out. We hit pay-dirt first time and sat relaxing, shooting the breeze and drinking glasses of mint tea with the hotel owner. Then I remembered that I’d promised to walk down.

I was a few metres outside the gates of Kawakaban village, standing on an old bridge looking over the edge at a stone track leading between the walls of a narrow, flat-bottomed, verdant gorge cut into the side of the mountain. Looking up at the top of the steep rock face of the canyon wall on the right-hand side, it was difficult to tell just where the cliff ended and the houses began – they looked like they were growing out of the rock. If asked to describe this blending of the natural and the man-made* in one word, I’d probably say ‘organic’ or ‘harmonious’ perhaps. Mind you, I’d be hard pushed to use either of these words to describe the piles of rubbish scattered about the gorge. The villagers have been throwing their rubbish over the edge of the cliff since time immemorial and very organic it was, until they too fell victim to the plague of plastic sweeping the planet. I’ve seen worse but at the rate they’re going it won’t be long before all of the citadel villages in Yemen are encircled by rings of plastic waste at the base of their mountain perches.

"OK Mohamed – you reckon it’s 45 minutes to the mosque and it’s easy-peasy?" For the squillionth time Mohamed sighed and answered in the affirmative. So off I set down the rocky path which looked pretty damn steep to me. And pretty damn steep it was too but what a lot of amazing stuff there was to see. I’d expected to see acacia shrubs and prickly pear but I was surprised to see succulents and yukka-type plants clinging to the walls at the top of the gorge. There were bright yellow dandelions, deep red flowering vines, some astonishingly bright blue flowers and loads of plants that looked like plants from home but were slightly different. But, if there’s one thing I enjoy more than interesting plants, it’s interesting rocks. Practically every rock and stone catches your eye. If it’s not the unusual shades of pink, mauve, and rust then it’s the patterns or both. Look at one stone and it’s a mottled light mauve with thin coiling white bands and a line of rust-coloured spots. Yet the stone next to it is patterned with rust and white bands of colour and the one next to that is dark red and so on all the way down.

With all these distractions it took me about an hour and a half to get down. The path is easy to follow and it even has street lights at intervals! About halfway down a tarmac road crosses the path which then continues to the left of some water tanks on the opposite side of the road. Once you reach the suburbs of Shibam follow the road to the mosque. Shared taxis run from Sana’a to Shibam (120YR) and from Shibam to Kawkaban (50YR). * I know, I know – but man-made sounds better than person-made.

Maybe I’d been spoiled by visiting Kawkaban first, but I thought Shibam was a bit of a dump, frankly. Neither the fact that it was the capital of the Yafurid dynasty in the 9th century or that it is home to one of the oldest mosques in Yemen were enough to disabuse me of this opinion. It was, however, an interesting dump.

Walking the ½ km or so through the outskirts of the village, many of the houses were concrete box jobs usually painted to match the colour of the occasional older stone buildings. There were no predefined street layouts or regimented rows of houses, but it seemed like some form of private low-income housing estate. Houses were springing up at random, and each was spawning its own adjacent pile of rotting vegetation and plastic waste. As we got closer to the centre, the older and the more dilapidated the buildings became. And as for the centre...well, it looked like it was about to fall down. On the piece of rough ground near the taxi rank, pink plastic bags by the hundreds, blown upwards by the breeze, rose into the sky to form temporary clouds before floating back down to earth. No, it’s not all spectacular mountaintop village fortresses and desert skyscrapers in Yemen you know. There’s ordinary as well.

So then it was off to the extraordinary small fortified town of Thula, about 10km north of Shibam. It is a stunning sight, nestling at the base of a steep, rocky outcrop topped by a fortress (Husn Thula). Thula is a rare example of an almost perfectly preserved mountain town. The tower houses are built entirely of stone taken from the mountain, and the decorative features of the buildings result from using different styles and patterns of stonework and walling. We drove in through one of the two impressive town gates and parked in a small, deserted square outside a row of closed "antiqks" shops and next to the Tha’ala Hotel.

After what felt like a million steps, we reached the roof of the hotel, where we enjoyed a great view over the whole village and a couple of glasses of mint tea. The two windows on the left-hand side just before you step out onto the roof are made of wafer thin alabaster, which was used in Yemen before the introduction of glass. The windows are best seen from the outside on the terrace.

A wander around the village will reveal numerous mosques and tombs, an old suq, two large water cisterns, aqueducts, and sections of the town walls. There is also a 2km stone staircase leading up to the empty fortress, which is open from sunrise to sunset and costs 500YR entrance.

Thula is a magical town, and there is something new to admire round every corner. Opposite the hotel is a small café that serves drinks and simple snacks. Shared taxi from Sana’a costs 170YR, or 0.5YR from Shibam.

So is it risky then?

Well, although you’re not guaranteed to be kidnapped in Yemen, you could be.  Kidnappings of foreigners had, until recently, dropped off over the last few years, partly because there were so few tourists and partly because the government decided that kidnappers would be sentenced to death. However, things have livened up again since December 2005 when a party of Germans were kidnapped then released unharmed. The following day a party of Italians were kidnapped in the same area and they too were released unharmed after a few days.

This week, four French tourists were kidnapped from their convoy and it is thought that the kidnappers are from the same tribe that carried out the earlier kidnappings. Apparently this week’s kidnapping is because the Yemeni Government haven’t yet released the prisoners they’d promised to release as part of the terms agreed regarding the release of the hostages from the earlier kidnappings. Still with me? If I’ve got the story right, which in Yemen is not easy, then the prisoners being held by the government are tribesmen who got a bit over-enthusiastic over some ‘blood-feud’ issues during the ‘lull’ in kidnappings.

Kidnappers in Yemen are walking a very fine line. If the kidnappings escalate and foreigners start being killed then foreigners will just stop visiting. Tourists in Yemen are a finite resource. The few Yemenis prepared to talk about the current kidnappings all said they felt embarrassed by them. Earlier kidnappings often involved demands for the tangible, like the provision of medical care or a school or two. At that time, whilst most Yemenis were unhappy about the kidnappings they could understand the kidnapper’s motives. On the other hand, these current kidnappings are viewed slightly differently. This tribal ‘blood feud’ stuff is nothing to do with foreigners and we should be left out of it. It’s OK to kidnap each other, which happens an awful lot in Yemen, but you don’t involve foreigners in tribal business. Every one of the people I spoke to apologised to me for their country’s bad reputation.

The problem some prospective visitors to Yemen have isn’t lack of knowledge about the risk; it’s the impossibility of making an accurate decision about the degree of risk they consider acceptable. Yemen is a country where the internal security situation seems to be in a constant state of fluidity. There’s no way any travel advice website can keep up with the situation in a country where, despite appearances, tribal law is still the dominant social system for the majority of the population. It is not unusual for soldiers, police officers and government officials to abandon their posts and go AWOL if the tribe needs them.

Kidnappings have been a feature of inter-tribal disputes in Yemen for years and even the government has been known to use this more traditional method of removing obstacles on occasion. So yes, there’s a greater risk of being kidnapped, or of getting in the way of a kidnapping, than at home but if you should happen to get kidnapped then there’s a high probability you will be released unharmed It’s your decision really. If you choose to go against the advice of your own government and your travel insurers then do so with the assumption that if the sh*t hits the fan, you’ll be on your own. I did meet a few travellers in Yemen to whom the ‘restricted’ areas of the country were like a magnet and their whole rationale for visiting these areas was to have an ‘authentic’ experience. It is not hard to find ‘guides’ in Sana’a who can arrange this level of authenticity if that’s what you’re after.

However, the majority of the few tourists in the country seem to opt for the ‘officially approved’ yet equally authentic experience involving convoys, police check-points and armed escorts. Depending on where you are in Yemen the armed escort business is either in the hands of the army or a bunch of heavily armed guys in the back of a Toyota pick-up. The level of security provided for me ranged from a 14 year old clutching a Kalashnikov asleep on the back seat to the entire cast of Platoon standing at a respectable distance in a circle around me facing outwards while I had a pee in a wadi. The kid with the gun wanted R300 for his services whereas the heavy mob cost nothing and they had their own transport with a very very menacing looking machine-gun arrangement on the back. I assumed the second scenario to suggest a much greater risk of something happening to me than the first but this is based purely on my own somewhat subjective observations rather than any knowledge of the criteria used by the Yemeni security services to determine the precise level of vigilance required from an armed escort.

However, based on some note-swapping with other travellers, I could be so wrong. Maybe you just get what’s available at the time. I met a convoy of Italians who’d travelled the same stretch of road I’d covered the day before with the ‘babe in arms’ and they’d had two fully uniformed, armed and very much awake soldiers in each vehicle. So who knows?

Personally, I think the riskiest thing in Yemen is the number of Kalashnikovs casually slung about the place, particularly in the more rural areas. For some of the predominantly male tourists I encountered, having your photo taken whilst holding a Kalashnikov, was also a bit of a highlight. Sometimes it was the army escorts who handed over their guns, other times it was the guys in the pick-ups who provided the photo-props and in some places you had to practically beat off the hordes of 8 year-olds prepared to pose with their Kalashnikovs. I realise the gun culture in Yemen is authentic but so to are the 35,000 gun related crimes, including 2000 or so deaths, that happened between 2001 and 2003.

I couldn’t figure out if these tourists had either failed to spot the distinctive billboards placed at regular intervals along the roads showing a machine gun inside a red circle with a red line across and the words Dar Al-Salaam Org. written in English or whether they had seen the signs, but failed to get the gist of the message. The Dar Al-Salaam Organisation to Combat Revenge and Violence is an NGO set up in 1997 that aims to mediate in matters of tribal law and so prevent the use of arms as a means of settling disputes. In almost every instance where the organisation has been involved so far, disputes have been successfully settled through negotiation rather than armed confrontation. This year, with their massive budget of US$2000 they have launched a publicity campaign which they hope will eventually lead to an increase in mediation practises and a reduction in the number of people carrying guns. Bit of an uphill struggle in Yemen where there are enough guns to arm every man, woman and child more than twice over. I fail to see how their cause can in any way be helped by foreign visitors who pay to be photographed prancing around with a Kalashnikov.

While I consider the risk of being involved in a gun related incident in Yemen to be a tad greater than at home in South West Scotland, I personally felt at most risk whenever I was within firing range of a Kalashnikov photo shoot involving tourists doing Rambo impersonations. I could be wrong but I sort of assume that the Yemenis have got a better idea of how to handle a Kalashnikov than your average Westerner. This is probably because carrying a gun is neither a game nor a novelty to them. Whereas to our lot, act as if they’re playing with toys. I reckon the risk of being shot by another tourist is particularly high during the early morning convoy tea break stop on the road from Sana’a to Marib.

And don’t think for one minute that it’s just kidnappings and Kalashnikovs that make Yemen a bit more of a risk than South West Scotland. There’s also the ‘qat’ factor to consider. There are lots of people in who Yemen chew qat in the afternoons and there’s lots of these people who chew qat in the afternoons  who’re responsible for potentially dangerous things like cars, guns, gas stoves, guns, welding kits, guns, blowtorches, guns and planes. The place is enough of a health and safety nightmare before you even begin to factor in what the effects of chewing copious quantities of mildly narcotic leaves might have on top of the risk of kidnapping and Kalashnikovs. If chewing qat produces the same effects in everybody as it did in me then I’d like to think that the air traffic controllers in Yemen are all abstainers.
 
So yes, I’d say it’s risky but I’d also say it was worth it.

Do you really need to use a tour operator to see the country?

No, you can arrive at the airport, find a hotel, work out an itinerary using public transport, book your own tickets, arrange your own travel permits, maybe attempt to pre-book accommodation and set off hoping that the army don’t either chuck you off the bus and send you back or make you stay on the bus for another god knows how many gruelling hours. Just because the police give you permission to travel doesn’t mean that the army have to. I really don’t think this is an option for tourists short on time or patience.

You can also arrive at the airport, find a hotel, work out an itinerary using the internal airline network, book your own tickets, arrange your own travel permits, maybe attempt to pre-book accommodation and set off hoping that unlike most information about Yemen, the internal airline schedules will prove to be reliable enough for you to get a taste of the country. I admit that Yemen has a few stretches of mind-numbingly featureless landscape but they are few and far between. The country has some of the most diverse and stunning landscapes I’ve ever seen and that you will only see if you travel through them and not over them. This option is best for tourists who’re either limited for time, don’t want armed escorts or have agoraphobic tendencies.

Or you could hire a vehicle and ‘do it yourself’ but then the army get involved again and you’re supposed to have a guide and frankly driving in Yemen is like a martial art that takes years of mental and physical training so it’s not for novices and that includes novice travellers as well as drivers. I was told that as soon as a boy is tall enough to see over the dashboard of the Toyota pick-up he gets to take his turn at driving. That seems to be somewhere between the age of 8 and 10 I reckon which by coincidence seems to be when they get their first Kalashnikov. I personally would only recommend the 'self-drive' option to people with loads of time and who posses a deep and unwavering belief in existentialism.

If, on the other hand, you have a couple of weeks and you’d like to see as much of the place as possible then it really has to be a tour company. I’m sorry – I realise this might be a blow to the independents out there but I couldn’t see any other alternative. I think you’ve just got to accept that a trip around Yemen is going to be a bit of a compromise. I certainly knew it was going to be for me as a female travelling alone. There’s little enough reliable information about travelling in Yemen and none that I could find before I left that gave specific advice for women travellers. What to wear, what not to wear, what you can do, what you can’t do – that sort of thing. I only had 3 weeks; I wanted to relax after a period of hard studying so I was prepared to turn over the responsibility of organising my itinerary and arranging the appropriate security requirements to someone who understood the system a lot better than I did. It meant that I’d also have someone to answer my questions, to keep me right on the cultural sensitivity side of things and would, let’s be honest here, someone to tell me when to keep my head down. It also meant I could wind down gently in Sana’a for a few days before heading off into unknown territory.

Now I’ve no idea how you choose one tour operator over another particularly in a county where the regulation of standards in the tourist industry does not come high on the political agenda. It’s a cut-throat market out there in Sana’a and unless you’ve had a personal recommendation from other tourists then you’re on your own. Just to make the whole prospect of ‘shopping-around’ for a tour operator on arrival even more wearisome, there also seems to be a disproportionately high ratio of tour companies to tourists. There are stickers are everywhere, and a tour company sticker in a hotel is no more an endorsement than a tour company sticker on a national monument. I had no way of knowing all that before I arrived in Yemen but I am so glad I opted for the ‘OK Let’s See What We Can Find on the Internet’ approach rather than the ‘Let’s Just Arrive and Shop Around’ approach. I found a handful of tour companies on the net and sent them all the same open addressed e-mail telling them when I was arriving, how long I’d got, where I’d like to go to and could they give me a rough itinerary with estimated costs.

I thought I’d sit back and see what happened. Yemen is a potential ‘cash-flow’ problem country. Yes, there are ATMs (All Time Money machines in Yemen) but there’s a low daily cash limit and they don’t always work. Very few traders, and that includes the tour companies and hotels, accept credit cards – everyone wants cash. My intention was to take enough cash with me to pay for tours, hotels and food and I’d rely on the ATMs for pocket money. About half were ‘no replies’ so that was them out of the running. I thought at least a rudimentary grasp of the English language would be helpful so that eliminated a few of the replies received. A couple were far too posh for me so they were out too. The Sheraton! Me? As if? The remainder of the replies all had cost estimates that fell within my budget so the final criterion I applied was purely aesthetic and therefore subjective as hell.

The winner was the tour operator that I thought had the most appealing website so I arranged my hotel and airport pick-up with him before leaving for Yemen. I did arrive in Sana’a with the details of other tour operators as a fall back just in case it all went to mince when I met the guy, which it didn’t. I’m not suggesting that this somewhat random selection process is the best way of choosing a tour operator – all I’m saying is this is how I did it and it worked for me. So if you thought you were going to get some practical advice on how to find a good tour company then you were wrong. However, I advise using a tour operator even if it means just sticking a pin in the phone book (which you can’t because they don’t seem to have one in Yemen)!  

And when I say smooth operator, I don’t mean in a creepy lounge-lizardy, wide-boy sort of way either. Far from it! No, what I mean is that from first email contact to final farewell at the airport, Mohamed Shaif of Yamanat Tours (www.yamanat.com) was a smooth operator in terms of efficiency and organisation. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Yemen is probably a tad more unpredictable than your average holiday destination, so it helps if your tour operator isn’t.

When I’d sent out my initial email to a number of tour operators (see Do You Really Need a Tour Operator?), Mohamed had replied within hours providing a couple of itineraries, estimates, and a few suggestions about places that I’d never heard of that I might like to visit. He also suggested a browse through the Yamanat website picture gallery as it might give me a few ideas. As I hadn’t, I did and it did give me a few more ideas. You may wonder why I hadn’t done that first but I did try. Unfortunately my ‘Googling’ about all matters Yemeni had been minimal because me and the Omani Internet server were not getting on very well. It took so damn long for the server to access a website that it would die of inertia and disconnect. It had also been a ‘spur-of-the-moment’ decision to go to Yemen and I more or less left as soon as I could once I’d decided to go so I didn’t really have the time to deal with the time I would have to spend in the time-warp of Omani cyberspace. Nevertheless, I got there in the end and what a nice website it was. Now I’m no expert but I’ve been around the Web a bit and in my opinion there are some pretty badly designed websites out there and the travel websites are no exception. I like websites that are easy to navigate, informative, include a few good photos and if possible provide you with clues about the kind of people running the show.

I don’t tend to spend much time in tour company websites that have a ‘corporate’ look or that are over the top with the use of superlatives. I thought the Yamanat website had a bit more character and was more personal than those of the other tour operators who replied so I decided I’d at least book my hotel and an airport pick-up with them to start with. Then we’d take it from there. I’d already told Mohamed in an e-mail that I was a ‘budget’ traveller but if possible I would like to visit Marib, Wadi Hadhramawt and a few mountain villages and stay in funduqs where available. The suggested itineraries I received in reply all covered these destinations and fell within my budget. When we sat down together that first evening in Sana’a it was with a view to broadening the scope of my visit without things getting out of hand on the financial front. Unlike in neighbouring countries, bartering is not an Olympic sport in Yemen so I didn’t expect negotiations to take long. We studied maps and guide books (such as they are) and within a short time had come up with what I considered to be a pretty good arrangement. I’d spend a few days pottering around Sana’a and do a few day trips into the surrounding countryside with Mohammed himself. Then I was going off in a sort of circle with a driver to visit the desert areas of Marib, Wadi Hadhramawt, Wadi Da’wan, then Al-Mukalla on the coast, down to Aden, up to the mountains around Ta’izz and back to Sana’a. After a few more days pottering around Sana’a, Mohamed was going to take me the Haraz Mountains, down to Zabid via Al-Hudayda on the Red Sea coast, back to Ta’izz then Sana’a for some last days pottering. I could have paid slightly more to have an English speaking guide/driver but my decision not to have one wasn’t a financial one- it was to do with me enjoying myself. Although I’ve visited places in the past where if I hadn’t had a guide then I’d have been clueless about what I was looking at, I just didn’t fancy the possibility of being bombarded with verbal information on a daily basis. I do sometimes enjoy just sitting back and looking at the scenery – quietly. I don’t need to know everything about everything so I told Mohamed that I didn’t need a guide as such but I thought it might be sensible to have a driver with a grasp of basic English just in case. I’m not one of those types that think everyone on the planet should speak English as a matter of course. Believe me, I really do try hard with Arabic but I just end up sounding like I’m vigorously clearing my throat rather than producing coherent speech in any language. So I thought that with the help of an English/Arabic phrase book and a spot of mime, me and the driver would get on just fine. I do enjoy a challenge now and then! I left it in the hands of Mohamed the Tour Operator who, a few days later, introduced me to Mohamed the Driver. His English was marginally better than my Arabic but over the course of 10 days we managed to develop a highly effective system of communication between us. We even managed to crack a few jokes at each other. When you employ a driver in Yemen you’re actually paying someone to keep you out of trouble—someone who’s far more experienced at reading a situation than you are.

Mohamed the Tour Operator told me some real horror stories about Western tourists who hadn’t listened to advice and leapt into situations putting themselves and others at serious risk. So by the end of the first day I knew when it was OK to be friendly at a checkpoint and it was best to just be quiet. I knew when I should wear a headscarf and how to behave at a roadside shai stall. Drivers in Yemen have got enough to worry about without having to think about the possibility of their passengers behaving like prats. It goes without saying that you’ve got no choice but to trust your driver but your driver doesn’t have to trust you. If you gain the trust of your driver in Yemen then the chances are that you will have a much more interesting experience. That will only happen if you do as you’re told.

One thing I’m particularly grateful to Mohamed the Tour Operator for, was his quiet insistence that he was sure that I’d be better off in more conventional hotels in some places rather than a traditional Yemeni funduq. A funduq is technically a traditional tower house where beds are provided as mattresses on the floor. In reality the word funduq appears to cover anything from a flea-ridden qat den to a converted palace in Sana’a. So the Hotel Arabia Felix is just as much a funduq as the squalid covered back-alley full of decrepit charpoys in Zabid I had the pleasure of visiting – very briefly. So again, I left the hotel stuff to Mohamed the Tour Operator and consequently enjoyed a rich and varied experience of hotel accommodation in Yemen.

As for Mohamed the Tour Operator, well yes, he is also a very experienced guide however, on our shorter trips together his style was relaxed and informative but easy on the brain cells. He speaks excellent English and is a fount of information on all things Yemeni. It was obvious that he was respected everywhere we visited and in some places I was even given gifts for no other reason than I was with him. A word of warning though to the less speedy amongst you. Mohamed is really into the trekking side of things so when he suggests a short walk, before you set out, lay down your parameters clearly regarding speed, distance and maximum steepness of slopes. The only way I was going to enjoy his comprehensive knowledge of the flora and fauna was if he kept things down to what I would call a ‘leisurely stroll’!

If and when I get the opportunity to return to Yemen, I would have no hesitation in using Yamanat Tours again and I certainly recommend them to anyone thinking of heading that way.

I know this is going to sound a bit odd but, the first time I chewed qat I was quite overwhelmed by a feeling of nostalgia for my first infant school – the food in particular. At this school they practised the quaint custom of giving you the cane AND a lecture about starving babies in Biafra if you didn’t eat your school lunch. The lecture was bearable but as bewildering to a 7 year-old then as it would be today. The cane however, either across the back of the legs or on the palms of your hands, hurt like hell. The problem was vegetables. Hated them. Especially green ones. So I’m afraid I have to confess to having spent many a childhood afternoon slowly chewing a mouthful of vile-tasting green mush. The strength of the memory was so sudden it was like being slapped on the face with a bag of frozen peas. Now, whether this was an effect of the qat I have no idea but if it was, then it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable one.

I knew a bit about qat before I hit Yemen and to me, it sounded innocuous enough in terms of its psychotropic effects. My attitude was, if I was offered it I’d try it but if I wasn’t then I wouldn’t go looking for it. As it happened I wouldn’t have needed to look for it – some of the streets in Sana’a are paved with it. I haven’t a clue how Yemenis decide which qat market is any better than another or even how they know they’ve got the best grade qat for their money. It’s a bit like wine in a way – it all seems to depend on age, bouquet, flavour and which region it comes from. You can also buy it in small, individual neatly tied bundles or go for the family pack and buy the whole branch of a tree. Most people though, seem to buy it by the medium-sized, translucent pink, carrier bag full. The first few times I came across a qat market I actually felt slightly voyeuristic and a bit uneasy with it. It just took me a day or two to get used to the idea that these guys were just ordinary market traders selling a perfectly legal product and not necessarily hard-core drug dealing warlords. After that I relaxed and found the qat traders to be as affable, friendly and as humorous as all the other market traders. The only time I bought any qat myself was from a guy standing on the side of the road half-way up a mountain somewhere miles from nowhere. It’s a bit like a drive-thru qat market on some stretches of road where there’s a seller standing on the precipitous outside edge of the tarmac every 100y yards or so. Far down in the valley bottom you can see the neat fields of the qat plantations, each field overshadowed by a low watchtower. Along the steep lower slopes below the road, miles of terracing hold yet more plantations of qat ranging in height from small shrubs to medium-sized trees. I was told that this is the place to buy qat because the leaves are fresh off the plant. The active ingredient in qat is a chemical called cathinone which is similar in properties and effects to amphetamine. After 48 hours though, the cathinone breaks down to become cathine which, so the text book says, is much less potent than cathinone. So basically, if you own your own bush, you’re laughing! At the crack of dawn every day, truck loads of the stuff are shipped into the towns and cities to feed an internal demand worth US$4 million a year. The critics of qat say that the 80% of land given over to qat production could be used to grow more profitable export crops, that it may cause cancer of the mouth and stomach and that thousands of working hours are wasted every year because nearly 90% of the population are wasted every afternoon. Supporters argue that chewing qat kills stomach worms and parasites and helps prevent asthma and diabetes. They will also argue that the whole qat business from cultivation to sale provides regular daily employment for thousands of workers, although interestingly, they seem to forget that a high proportion of the regular daily pay earned in the qat business is used by the workers to buy their regular daily bag of qat. Some Yemenis also argue from a traditionalist perspective – chewing qat has been a part of their culture for more than 600 years and the ritual is an integral part of social relations in Yemen. Now I’m not even going to try to figure out what would be best for Yemen economically but it seems to me they might be able to afford some decent medical facilities if they were to invest in a spot of growth somewhere in the export market which wouldn’t necessarily be to the detriment of the qat market anyway. Neither can I even think of anything that could replace qat chewing as an important part of social interaction between friends, strangers, tribes and families. It’s a complex issue and not even one that can be resolved by Islamic law as there is no specific guidance in the Qur’an regarding the use of qat. The vast majority of inter-tribal feuding that goes on in Yemen seems to concern land-ownership disputes. In particular, land in productive qat growing areas. I think it would be hard to deny the possibility of a link between the use of firearms and qat cultivation.

On the health front well, I didn’t know about the cancer stuff before I tried qat but frankly I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. I don’t think though, that the three qat sessions I sat through were enough to either raise my overall risk of cancer or significantly reduce my chances of becoming diabetic. Three sessions were enough though to make me pretty damn sure I’d hate to have to do anything involving quick thinking or quick anything after I’d chewed it. Personally I wouldn’t want to drive, handle a gun or work for air traffic control after chewing qat. I’m actually not very good at it either. You’re supposed to keep up a regular flow of leaves into your mouth at the same time as not swallowing any. I found it really hard to eat at that pace – it made me think of rabbits.  I also couldn’t quite get the hang of keeping it all on one side of my mouth and I kept swallowing it by accident as well. It also tastes bog awful and I couldn’t figure out why anyone 600 years ago would’ve bothered to chew the leaves for long enough to realise they had interesting effects. Legend has it that a shepherd noticed a goat behaving ‘tranquilly’ after chewing the leaves and it took off from there. I’m not sure if I felt entirely tranquil even though I was sitting on cushions in the mafraj (top floor sitting room) of a traditional stone house with stupendous views over the mountains. I’m not really sure what I felt. Mostly it was pleasant but sometimes I felt a bit agitated and fidgety. It seems that different types of qat produce different effects in different people so you can feel laid-back, animated, aggressive or even more than usually frisky at any given moment after a chew. In common with all chewers however, I wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry and I had trouble going to sleep.

If you do decide to partake then the correct etiquette is that you take your own qat to the chew-in but the host provides the water. If you’re in any way organically orientated then politely decline all offers of a chew. On my last day in Yemen I saw a guy up a qat tree randomly throwing handfuls of what looked like ash over the neighbouring trees. It was actually a pretty noxious cocktail of inorganic fertiliser and pesticide in frequent and unregulated use by qat growers which probably contributes to the risk of cancer and the astringent effect it has on the inside of the mouth. Washing your qat before consumption does not seem to be an accepted practise.  It is however, perfectly acceptable for you to throw your empty pink plastic carrier bag away anywhere you like. If nearly 90% of the population are buying qat daily then it seems reasonable to assume that the qat business in Yemen must be responsible for the bulk of the non-biodegradable litter wafting around the country. It might not be ethical tourism to try qat but at least you can try a spot of ecotourism in mitigation by taking your own carrier bag to the qat market. 

 

It’s not that I thought I’d waltz out of the airport and straight into a world of ancient Yemeni architecture without coming across some style of suburbia first and it’s not that I thought that Sana’a didn’t have any suburbs - I just wasn’t quite sure what to expect. From what I knew of the economy of Yemen I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to come across too many gleaming shopping malls or fusion Arabic-Italianate white-walled villas common in the spotless suburbs of your average Gulf Peninsular capital city. One glance around the arrivals hall at the airport was enough to confirm this – it reminded me of an airport in up-country Burma in 1980. I’ll admit that in Sana’a, air traffic control was a bit more advanced than a bloke up a tree with a pair of binoculars waving a bed sheet but it was all a bit dated and shabby looking.

This was pretty much my first impression as we drove through the suburbs from the airport into town. Most of the small shops and many of the residential buildings looked like they had been modern, once. In gap spaces between them were the supporting skeletons of new concrete buildings or the rubble of old concrete buildings. Suburban Sana’a looks a bit like it’s being built and demolished at the same time except that the building and demolishing have been temporarily suspended for the time being. The style of the buildings is a curious mix of concrete brutalism and faux-traditional with features such as decorative stucco and modern qamariya (semi-circular stained-glass windows) adorning the facades of obviously contemporary buildings.

Towering over the suburbs is an enormous mosque, still under construction, surrounded by a forest of cranes and crawling with the ant-like figures of the workers. I think its official name is the Sultans Mosque but most of the locals kept calling it ‘The Presidents Mosque’. I was surprised at the number of Yemenis I met over the course of my visit who openly expressed the view that Sana’a needed another mosque like it needed a hole in the head and that they’d rather the money was being spent on something useful like health or education. Although nobody got themselves particularly worked up about political issues, I did detect a mild feeling of dissatisfaction with the President so I was curious as to why there were posters and photos of the guy everywhere. And I mean everywhere. He smiled down benevolently from shop walls, car rear windows, at the camel working the sesame mill, on the metal workers in the suq, while you were eating your dinner and, in one case, in a ladies washroom.

I gather this display of support is seen of as a type of rudimentary insurance policy – the belief is that if you’ve got a pic of the Pres then you’re less likely to get hassle from the authorities. Quite what form this hassle takes nobody could really explain but if there’s ever a coup in Yemen there’s going to be a lot of photo burning going on. Anyway, I digress – with the exception of the mosque; the only other buildings that appear to have had any serious money invested in them are to do with the military. The walls around some of the bases are pretty impressive and if I was Yemeni I think I’d consider joining the army if I thought I’d get access to the new state-of-the-art military hospital if I needed it. As you get closer to the centre of Sana’a there are still no glitzy shopping malls but there are a couple of very modern, in your face, office buildings. Probably nothing you couldn’t see in London, Delhi or Dubai but oh, so incongruous rising above their grimy, dilapidated neighbours.

If, after a few days of the wonderful architecture in the old city you should find yourself hankering after clean lines and minimalism then the newly completed Sony office block is a good example. Of course, it’s the old city of Sana’a that’s in the books, on the postcards and on your mind as you head into town so you can be excused for giving the suburbs more than a cursory glance. However, do not dismiss them altogether. There are many great mysteries out there I can tell you. I can completely understand why someone might want to buy a bottle of water, some mangos or even a photo of the Pres while they’re stuck in traffic but why do the street kids also try to sell you elasticated bandages? Is it just by some weird chance that Sana’a has a suburban street where the only goods for sale are either wedding dresses or car exhaust pipes?

These and other questions will give you something to occupy yourself with on those long drives across the more monotonous bits of Yemen. There is in fact a stark contrast between the old and the new city of Sana’a. Although the old suqs are busy they are not claustrophobically so and there is little of the frantic bartering that usually typifies a Middle Eastern market. With over 30,000 people living within the walls of the old city which covers an area of 183 hectares, you’d think it would be heaving with humanity but it isn’t. I know it sounds cliché but away from the suqs, Sana’a is an oasis of calm. I was bowled over by the areas of allotment gardens in the middle of town all overlooked by the hundreds of differently designed windows set into the facades of the old city houses. Instead of the usual neatly clipped lawns and ornamental trees of a small city park, there were neat squares of spring onions, garlic, herbs and beans with the occasional date palm tree dotted about.

I think they should do that in more cities. Although archaeological evidence indicates there has been a city on the site since at least AD2000, most of the present day houses are around 400 years old give or take a few. The golden brown mud brick tower houses, decorated with stained glass windows, brilliant white stucco patterns and intricate fretwork, are just stunning. Of course staying in one of the handful of these houses that is now a funduq is one thing but actually living in a tower house is another. I was reliably informed that there is nothing in the slightest bit romantic at all about the state of the plumbing and sewage systems in the buildings and lugging three kids and two bags of shopping up all those stairs can be a woman’s worst nightmare.

I was only carrying a camera and a bottle of water up to the roof of the Taj Tahla Hotel and I was struggling. Mind you, it’s easy to forget that Sana’a, with an altitude of 2250m is quite high and whilst you’re unlikely to die of altitude sickness, you might feel a bit iffy during your first few Sana’a stairway ascents. Once you get your breath back, it’s all worth while. You watch a deep red sun setting over the mountains while the city turns deep gold and some bloody tourist starts banging on about how the water tanks and satellite dishes ruin the view. Yep, Sana’a is another one of those places where some tourists would rather the natives trailed up and down to the well all day and listened to the communal radio at night just so the holiday photos look good.

I thought the water tanks and satellite dishes blended in quite well actually. I guess the locals are used to coming across the odd foreigner in a deserted winding back alley, standing still and gazing up at the front of a building because this is how I spent a lot of my time in Sana’a and nobody seemed particularly bothered. But that’s probably because there are so few of us touristy types about at any one time. Sana’a is one of those destinations that trouble me when I write about them. If I, and others like me, rave about how wonderful Sana’a is to such an extent that the place ends up knee-deep in tourists then it’s no longer the wonderful place it was in the first place. Mind you, so long as there are people out there who’re convinced that Yemen’s national sport is kidnapping and the country is infested with al-Qaeda operatives then this will not become an issue. So go now, while it’s safe!

I’m not usually one for enthusing about retail outlets, but just occasionally I’ll go a bit wild. In old Sana’a, with its combination of gob-stoppingly amazing architecture and brilliant suq, it’s all to easy to walk past treasures without seeing them because, let’s face it, the brain can only take so much stimulus at any one time. Especially if you’ve only got a few days in town and you don’t have a decent guidebook. I’m sure I’d have discovered these places if I’d had more than a few weeks in Sana’a, but I’m not so sure I would have found them in that time if I hadn’t been told about them. When I’m at home, I consider shopping to be a necessary evil, whereas when I’m away, it’s more like sightseeing. So I’m not suggesting you go shopping per se; I’m just saying you might enjoy a look at some of the more contemporary delights the suq has to offer. I did. If, on the other hand, you are not keen on art or embroidery, then forget it.

It’d never really crossed my mind that there might be such a thing as a modern art ‘movement’ in Yemen, much less a couple of great art galleries and some excellent artists. There is a thriving Graphic Art Society in Yemen with over 250 members, but in a country where there is no financial support or encouragement for artists and nobody’s got any money to buy their work anyway, only a handful of artists are able to make a living out of it. Two such artists are Mazher Nizar and Fuad Al Futaih, both of whom have exhibited abroad to international acclaim, and it’s easy to see why. What I found particularly interesting, looking at their work, was the apparent relaxation of the traditional rules regarding the representation of humans and animals in Islamic art. Although using different media and having their own distinctive styles, both artists have concerned themselves primarily with representations of women. In a country where the vast majority of women are veiled and dressed in black, the works of these two artists are surprising, refreshing, and very colourful. Considered to be the ‘patriarch’ of modern art in Yemen, Al Futaih’s work can be seen in the National Art Centre near the Al-Abhar Mosque. If you’re looking for a souvenir with a difference, there is something here to suit most pockets. Original paintings can cost up to US$2,000, but there are also excellent quality prints at around YR1000 or, if you’re really short of dosh, postcards cost YR100.

In 1993, Al Futaih founded the Modern Art Group to encourage promising artists, one of whom was Nizar. Inspired by the traditional architecture of Yemen, Nizar’s early works were finely executed watercolours of local buildings and street scenes, many of which are depicted on postcards for sale around the city. Eventually, he too experimented with mixed media producing colourful paintings of animals or women often accompanied by decorative symbolic images such as birds. These are such a contrasting style to his early watercolours, it’s hard to believe they’re by the same artist. The place to go to see Nizar’s work is his Gallery Al-Bab, which is set into the city wall on the right-hand side as you enter through the Bab al-Yaman. The gallery itself is a wonderful place, full of winding corridors, narrow stairways, and small whitewashed rooms exhibiting not only Nizar’s work but the work of other contemporary Yemeni artists. The stairways will eventually lead you to the terrace above the Bab-al-Yaman, which is a great place to idle away some time looking down on the crowds entering and leaving the old city. The prices of the paintings and prints vary depending on the artist, with Nizar’s work being pretty much in the same price range as Al Futaih’s.

My final hidden treasure is a building that, by coincidence, contains an art gallery, among other things. The National Handicrafts Training Centre, which is sort of near the Old Sana’a Palace Hotel and sort of on Al-Sulayhi Street (just ask), is housed in one of the few restored samsarah dotted round the suq. Also situated in the building are a number of slightly pricy shops selling silver, brassware, wooden items, and trunk loads of jewellery. A visit here is worthwhile, not only to see the beautifully yet simply restored interior of the building, but also to see examples of more contemporaneous handicrafts from Yemen. A small shop on the ground floor sells modern craft items such as embroidered bags, purses, and jackets produced by the National Women’s Centre for Development Handicrafts, which was set up to help disadvantaged women earn a living. (The main branch of this organisation is just north of the Al-Abhar Mosque, but when I visited, they were in the process of doing the place up so there were no crafts on sale). The pricey shops in the restored samsarah are worth a glimpse simply because between them they have a broad range of items from all over Yemen. If you’re planning on travelling around the country and you hit these shops before you go, then you’ll have an idea of what comes from where and the max price you should be paying for something.

I’m sure there are plenty more treasures hidden away in the suq, some of which may well be far more interesting than those I went to see. However, until someone else finds them and writes about them, I recommend those mentioned above. (PS The photos have little or nothing to do with the content of this journal entry – I just thought I’d put them in anyway).