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)!