Musings and news from the Republic

Sana'a, Yemen

In the last month having spent a great deal of time in airplanes and untold hours in airports, I have reached the conclusion that despite hardship it must have been immeasurably more satisfying to have traveled by boat and camel caravan like Ibn Battuta. Flying and the whole associated business of getting on a plane is now perfectly loathsome unless you are in the rarefied atmosphere of First Class, and I never am.

And just to start on a controversial note - can I possibly be the only person on the planet who would like to see the occasional ‘child-free’ flight? I suspect nobody dares admit it and the marketing and PR departments of airlines would probably turn an alarming shade of puce at the thought of having to dream up politically correct ways to sell the concept, but I believe nonetheless that an anonymous poll would reveal that most passengers (including parents traveling without their offspring) would delight in the prospect of a flight where there was no possibility of sitting in the vicinity of a tantrum-addled small person for 10 hours. I do not in truth blame the child – traveling in steerage is enough to induce anyone to wail, but as every parent knows it is useless to remonstrate with a two year-old on the ground let alone in a pressurized chicken coop at 35,000 feet……

In the meantime air travel in the Middle East grows exponentially – the Arabian peninsula economies, or at least most of them, are booming despite creeping inflation rates. New low-fare airlines such as Air Arabia are springing up like mushrooms, and the larger carriers are giving the more established European and Asian carriers a major run for their money. Meanwhile I dream that the governments will give some of their oil revenues to the French so they can criss-cross the entire peninsula with a high-speed rail network……

A sunny, wintry day in my native land. The Birks o' Aberfeldy in Perthshire, Scotland

A rather different vista - the hills of Kampala, Uganda, taken the same week. Neither has anything to do with Ibn Battuta but it does reference my airline tales of woe.....

Life in the Medina Qadima (Old City)

Sana'a, Yemen

Sana’a is a very dusty place and the tower house I had rented had not been lived in for three months. The house is about 350 years old and few of the windows fit their frames, so dust and sand had seeped in through every crack, with the result that several millimeters of the stuff coated the entire abode. From the outside, the house clearly lists at one corner, and as I conducted my “walk through” I came upon one tiny room at the top of the house which is at some point going to disengage from the rest of the building. Knowing my luck it will happen at the first hint of the summer monsoon when I am on the roof with no other way of getting down. The owner is remarkably sanguine about the imminent destruction of his property, as when I suggested he should fix the large crack that runs across the ceiling and down the wall, as well as the roof beam that is split in two, before it fell to bits he said not to worry.......

Garden near my house

Leaving Yemen

Social Impact; Yemen at a crossroads? The news as I leave Yemen is that UNESCO has threatened to take Zabid off the World Heritage List unless the government comes up with an acceptable plan for its renovation and upkeep. I have always thought Zabid one of the most interesting cities in the country with a unique patrimony that is in danger of disappearing for ever. Yemen has a wealth of monuments but many of them are already in such an advanced state of dilapidation that it is probably impossible to restore what is left; the Turkish architecture of al-Luhayya, Beit al-Faqih, Hodeidah, Mokha - almost all gone. Perhaps the threat will jump-start a rescue plan for Zabid before it is to late.
The face of an old woman of Mokha in front of a quietly decaying Turkish building.

The other news is that the government is planning to close the gun villages - I tried to visit one of them al-Jahana, not far from Sana'a but could not. I could not get past the security check points, and even had I succeeded my presence would not have been welcome. In addition to this radical measure, the government is trying to come up with a plan to persuade farmers to grow crops other than qat by offering a subsidy to offset initial revenue loss. This will be very difficult to implement for social reasons, but it surely must be inevitable. With 50% of the population under the age of 16 and a still unacceptably high rate of illiteracy, especially among women, which negates their ability to get work, Yemen cannot afford to maintain huge tracts of its agricultural land for the growing of qat which contributes nothing towards the GDP, and where the supply of qat per person per day costs in the region of 1000-1500 Yemeni rials per day - about $5-7.50. Some qat chewers spend upwards of $50-75 per week on qat - this in a country where $300 per month is not a bad salary.

A new wireless internet cafe called Coffee Traders has recently opened in Sana'a, it saved my life, or at least my website, as I could not get my laptop connected to the internet in Yemen for some reason. They happen to serve excellent coffee - it is perhaps odd but in the land which practically invented the stuff, it is quite difficult to get any good coffee because they export all of it. The people of Coffee Traders roast their own beans and thus I could be found quite frequently in their charming courtyard in front of a large double-shot latte bashing away to my heart's content, it is the little things that count....
Dressed to kill - I did not wear this to the cafe.....

Yemen is a land of contrasts; it is without a doubt one of the most spectacularly beautiful countries in the world but the countryside near qat markets is disfigured by millions of discarded pink plastic qat bags, while trash middens are piled up outside towns and villages across the country. It has an undeservedly dodgy reputation - the US State Dept. still has a Travel Warning in place for it - yet its people are among the most hospitable and friendliest you could hope to meet. They are colorful too, both literally and figuratively - everyone who visits falls under the spell of Yemen and its people.....
    Typical African-style village on the Tihama on the Red Sea coast.

Part of the old city walls of Taizz

The Lost Colony of Aden, and the Sufi

Mockha to Aden, Yemen

“I travelled from there next to the city of Aden, the port of the land of al-Yaman, on the coast of the great sea. It is surrounded by mountains and there is no way into it except from one side only. It is a large city but has no crops, trees or water, and has reservoirs in which water is collected during the rainy season.”

The 277 kilometer drive from Mokha to Aden is not especially memorable; Bab al-Mandeb, or “Gate of Tears”, located at the south-western tip of the Arabian peninsula where the Red Sea meets the Arabian Sea, is the graveyard of many an ill-starred ship, hence its sorrowful name.  Today it is nothing more than a collection of tumbledown wooden shacks. The excellent asphalt road peters out before it reaches town which remains unpaved.

The little port of Bab al-Mandeb.

Lost Villages of the Tihama and Mokha; A Destiny Foretold

Zabid to Mokha, Yemen

Ibn Battuta had followed a different path - from Zabid he had gone to Jibla, then Taizz and from there to Sana’a and back to Aden whence he took a boat to Zeila in Somalia. There was an element of criss-crossing that I wished to avoid, and in addition I had no intention of visting the war-torn, anarchic place that has been Somalia for the last three decades, by boat or otherwise. It made more sense to visit Aden first then drive back north to Sana’a. 
Me in Zabid with only two children in tow.

It was thus that I found myself in Mokha for the second time in two months. I wish I knew why we did not camp out on the beach again but we did not, and instead ended up in a hotel in Mokha, quite possibly one of the filthiest places I have had the misfortune of overnighting in. Ants, cockroaches and other unmentionables flew, leapt and crawled around the room and the bathroom, tiled in a particularly lurid shade of green, was beyond contemplation. I slept fully clothed on top of the sheet on my silk liner. We left the following morning practically at first light. At night we had driven past quietly disintegrating buildings to the garbage-ridden and fetid port for our nightly shisha ritual. As has been mentioned, Mokha (Mocha) has a rich trading past (in coffee) of which nothing remains.  I am given to historic nostalgia and places such as Mokha always strike me as harbingers of the doom that awaits some of the world’s great cities of today;  the ineluctable combination of globalization and climate change will make of them what has befallen places like Mokha or Ugarit, Byblos, al-Ola and Qana - great and powerful names of antiquity now obscure, forgotten and haunted by bats........

Yemen’s Red Sea Coast and the Ottoman Legacy

Al-Luhhaya to al-Jah, Yemen

“I embarked on a ship....and reached the township of al-Sarja, a small town inhabited by a body of the Awlad al-Hiba.”

The remains of the once-thriving port of al-Luhayya

In the English translation of the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the footnotes simply say Sharja is a “township of grass huts with an anchorage in the vicinity of al-Luyyaha.” So, arriving in al-Luhayya we looked for it, asking all the old men we could find - nobody had heard of it. The English translation completed over 50 years ago, could refer to half the coastline. Al-Luyyaha itself is almost in the sea - this stretch of the Red Sea which was so important under the Ottomans is disappearing, victim of the natural effects of tide and climate, as well as the man-made contribution of lack of attention and money. (I believe Sharja is a memory a little further north than we ventured.)

The remains of an Ottoman building in al-Luhayya

SIM cards and history in Sana'a

Sana'a, Yemen

Buying a SIM card for your phone in Yemen entails giving a copy of the picture page and visa stamp of your passport to the store-owner which he presumably passes along to the appropriate authorities, and filling out an application form which must be stamped with your left thumbprint.  A phone call is then made to some mysterious entity and only then do you get your cellphone number. One assumes in these disturbing times, that the Yemeni government wants to keep tabs on who’s who. (It is interesting to note which countries keep close tabs on such things. In Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria you pay cash and trundle off with the new SIM and phone number, nary a piece of paperwork in sight. In Tunisia, Libya and Yemen your passport is required and recorded. I cannot quite find the common thread there.....)  The good news is that the SIM card and a charge card costs the grand total of $12.  Email is also very cheap here at 50 cents an hour (100 Yemeni Riyals) for relatively fast connection, with internet cafes everywhere in the major cities.

A view of Old Sana'a from the rooftop of one of the city's many samsarahs.

Enchanted Lanterns and Controversy in the Great Mosque

Sana’a, Yemen

“I took leave to continue my journey to the city of Sana’a. It is the former capital of the country of al-Yaman, a large and well-constructed city, built with bricks and plaster, with many trees and fruits, and with a temperate climate and good water. It is a curious thing that the rain in the lands of India, al-Yaman and Abyssinia falls during the period of summer heat, and mostly during the afternoon of every day in that season, so that travelers make haste when the sun begins to decline to avoid being caught by the rain and the womenfolk retire to their dwellings because those rains are heavy downpours. The whole city of Sana’a is paved and when the rain falls it washes and cleans all the streets. The cathedral mosque of Sana’a is one of the finest of Mosques and contains the grave of one of the prophets.”

The old City of Sana'a. I did not get into the Great Mosque. I tried, but there is currently a minor drama going on in Yemen; the first is an ongoing dispute between the government and the al-Houthi tribe in Sa’ada in the north, which has incurred several fatalities on both sides but mainly on the tribal side, the other is a trial in the capital involving ‘the bearded ones’ as the extremists are euphemistically called, and the government’s determination that they are not going to get a further hold in the country than whatever it is they already have. So, for now the mosque was off-limits.

The fine art of qat chewing

Ta’izz, Yemen

Taizz, Yemen’s third largest city, sits on an elevated plateau surrounded by fertile, green terraced hills and is best viewed from the 3200 meter Jabel Saber which dominates it. Atop this mountain is one of the country’s oldest mosques, the Ahl al Kahf, meaning ‘cave of the people’. This refers to a story in the Koran when several young men who tried to devote themselves to God were made to worship the pagan gods of the time. This forced them to flee to the top of the mountain where they slept for 309 years.  Two buildings make up the mosque and obviously the site dates to pre-Islamic times. After my visit I was informed that it has 2 qiblas as it was built when Muslims still prayed towards Jerusalem. If this is true, the mosque would have to date back to 624 or before which is when the Prophet Mohammed changed the direction of prayers to face Mecca. This would be remarkable, as although some parts of Yemen indeed accepted Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet who died in 632, Muad ibn Jabal, the first missionary sent by Mohmammed to Yemen, did not arrive until 631.

The charming little mosque al-Kahf set atop terraced hills.

Indigo and Sesame in the Tihama; Magnificent Past, Uncertain Future

Zabid and Jibla, Yemen

“...and then rode to the city of Zabid, a great city in al-Yaman......after San’a, there is no place in al-Yaman that is larger than it nor whose population is wealthier. It lies amid luxuriant gardens with many streams and fruits such as bananas and others......it is a great and populous city and contains groves of palms, orchards and running streams, in fact the pleasantest and most beautiful town in al-Yaman.”

So wrote Ibn Battuta in 1329 arriving from the northern Tihama coast.  I arrived from the southern Tihama coastal backwater port of Mokha, which ironically in the 17th century was the reason for the decline of Zabid. In its turn however Mokha has sunk to an eternally humid, windswept ghost town. (The coffee term ‘mocha’ derives from this improbable place.)

Socotra’s Nogat Coast

Socotra, Yemen

The southern terrain of Socotra is gentler than the north with wide swathes of sandy beaches. The fishing villages along the shoreline have palm-frond huts for shelter and shade, but even here as in the cooler mountainous interior, their houses are substantial stone-built cubes.  In the village of Zahek, a tiny fishing village that sees very few tourists, children playing on the shore ran away when I emerged from the car. This was slightly disconcerting given that in 1881 two German scientists conducting research on the island reported the people were friendly and “neither women nor children took flight at our approach”. What had happened in the intervening years, or was I so frightening? One of them timidly crept back asking me if I was “Sahibi?” Sahibi is a variation of the word used during the Indian Raj for white people. He was asking me if I was white.......

This little boy wondering if I was white is playing with broken coral and shells in the background.

Goats, Vultures and The Way to Hug Cave

Socotra, Yemen

The check-in desk for Socotra at the airport in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was a scene of utter chaos. Newly arrived from Damascus I was greeted with the information that the flight to the Socotran capital of Hadibo was oversold.  There are only two flights a week to the island so this news was not welcome. Yemenia Airlines is a much-improved carrier but their reservation system needs a bit of work.......I got on. On arrival in Hadibo I found a room on the third try - there are only 5 hotels on the island - after which I had breakfast at Hadibo’s main - not quite only - restaurant for breakfast where I had a plate of beans and delicious bread. My table companions were three tame goats and five Egyptian vultures. Throughout the island, the goats are perfectly tame and will eat from your hand, climb up on the table and eat from your plate or failing that will hoover up everything behind you including used paper napkins. As for the vultures they hover over every island village scarfing all the garbage and as such are known as ‘municipal’ birds since they do the work of trash collectors.

These ungainly looking vultures are probably the most common bird on the island.

Off to Yemen

Damascus to Yemen

And so I come to yet another divigation. I am beginning to realize how Ibn Battuta felt. I am off to Yemen and although I will be following Ibn Battuta's journey for much of the way I am leading a trip, so will be visiting rather more of the country than he did. The places he visited which I cannot, will have to wait.

I decided to visit the Indian Ocean island of Socotra first. Ibn Battuta never visited Socotra but another globetrotter, Marco Polo, did as did St. Thomas who allegedly baptized half the population, en route to India. However Islam came to the island in the 16th century and given how the islanders (and most everyone else in the Indian ocean) had suffered at the hands of the at-the-time fanatically Catholic Portuguese, most everyone converted en masse. Emblem of the island, the Dragon's Blood tree (dracaena cinnabari) is so-named for its red resin which is still used as a dye in local cosmetics and pottery.