Yemen

Nov 13, 1977.  Amber Hotel, Sana'a.  Nice flight to Sana'a, although some airport hassle because I took some photos of the city as we landed (and denied the same strenuously - otherwise, goodbye film).  What a find! From the air, amazing terraced hills with strange cities perched on their summits, the lovely high plain in which sauna is situated, surrounded by strange croppings, mountain peaks, and, air as clean as I’ve seen anywhere.

Hitchhiked into town with some British chaps, who told us of the glories of shopping in Jeddah.  (gold, cameras, etc.).  (We later reouted to spend a full day in Kuwait - Jeddah would have been a mess because of the Hajj).

Sitting in our little room, Nicole napping, me writing, sounds of horns honking (the only really bad part of this city ), incredible Gaudi-like display of homes in the old town winking through the windows at my right. The same little girl I saw (and photographed) yesterday from our more expensive room one story up, is standing on her rooftop, this time in a bright orange and yellow garment covering her like a surgeon's cap and gown, leaning over the edge and looking around before she goes back to hanging up the laundry. Yesterday she caught me pointing my camera at her and jumped for joy - at one point about a half hour later, there were four kids on the rooftop, dancing in unison, waving, saluting, and in general, begging me to take their picture. Nice change from say virtually all other countries we visited this trip. Suddenly, I’m going to have some people pictures.

But really this city is the most amazing we’ve seen. Last night we walked into the old town from the Bab al Yemen, right near our hotel, when it was already quite dark, and it was like stepping onto a movie set for the Middle Ages - except the buildings, and their richness of their surface detail, and their lovely, three dimensional, superimposed skyline, made me think of high Gothic and Chicago simultaneously. The streets, unfortunately wide enough to admit, cars and motorcycles, are lined with four and five story building of brick stucco with white gypsum.  The brick work is very fancy, involving horizontal patterned friezes, and windows of all shapes and sizes, rooftop crenellations, etc. The stucco is carved and shaped while still wet into window frames, borders, roof edges, vertical beams, and even false fronts extending many feet above and around the flat roofs. The workmanship is excellent, so that the many irregularities in brick courses, the occasional tilts from vertical, and the uneven window outlining, seem to be planned by the architect to assist in their efforts to build homes and palaces resembling cakes for children. Little nooks and caves in the walls of these palaces open onto the streets, and each is inhabited by one or two vendors of knives, or grapes, or dates, or frankincense and myrrh (this is where all of it comes from), or spices, or anything else you may need. Everybody is dressed in turbans and shirts and wearing elaborate belts with fancy curved daggers with rhinoceros horn handles and even fancier sheaths (silver if the wearer is a haji).  Nobody shaves much or gets much hair cut, but generally a pretty neat looking bunch of dudes. And since the fear and anger and resentment doesn’t seem to be here, the looks are warm, and we both feel good about the place.

Nov 28, 1977. Sana'a airport. Well, two weeks instead of three, but still a fantastic time. If Yemen were a bit cheaper, and we weren’t so tight on time in Iran, a third week would’ve been distinctly possible.

We spent our first two nights in a hotel near to the Bab al Yemen, the main gate of the old city. These were the only nights we spent in a hotel, not counting the “Marib Hilton" -  fortunately, for the Yemen Arab Republic turns out to be one of the most expensive countries in the world: $12 for our room in the cheapest hotel in town. Other examples: $.25 for an egg, two dollars for a can of beer, $.75 for a royal of t.p., etc. We spent about $220 in our 17 days here; subtracting the $80 for the flight to Marib, that comes out slightly less than $10 a  day - that’s with a lot of help from our friends, no tourist purchases, practically no hotels. We got off fairly lightly, in fact.

Hit the Peace Corps office after two days, and met Jim and Janice Bame, who arranged to have a stay with Michael Payne, a freaky PCV  who loves a good smoke. We left our stuff with him, and along with Helmwood Hermann, a German photographer taking photos for slideshows he gives back home, we flew to Marib on the edge of the desert for two days. The town sits on a mound surrounded by sand; the Marib Hilton, where we stayed, looks to be the only building which survived the revolutionary excesses of 1962. Visited the Queen of Sheba’s temples to the moon goddess close  by - nothing much left to see except a few rectangular columns and some nice inscriptions, the rest still buried in the sands. The Yemen government is supposed to be leery about digs since an  American archaeologist reportedly stole some stuff while digging in Marib.  Also saw the remains of a dam built about 1000 B.C., and destroyed by floods in the second century. Only the end points and the supports for aqueducts remain, but the scale was impressive.

We met Roger Gavshon at his camp outside Marib, had fine meal with him, then went out with a Yemini friend for an evening visit with a Bedouin family some kilometers away. Neat ladies, unveiled, full of laughter and dancing  - we could’ve stayed a lot longer. Then back to Sana'a with Roger, there to meet Suresh, a Nepalese UN volunteer, former Gurkha soldier, and a great partygoer. Roger and Suresh remain our best friends from our short stay in Yemen.

Next, a week's hitchhiking: Sana'a -> Ibb -> Taizz -> Mokha -> Zabid -> Hodeida -> Bayt al Faqih -> Sana'a.  Roger and Suresh drove us to Ibb, through fabulous mountain scenery with towns perched on peaks and deep, deep valleys. We stayed at the lovely traditional home of Robert Ahuero, a PCV architect. He flew off to Djibouti the day we arrived, but graciously left us his home for the three days we stayed in Ibb. Nice rest for us, with morning walks, afternoon teas, and evening meals on cushions, the sunlight filtering through the multicolored windows of his sitting room. Too bad the place had so many fleas.

Hitched to Taizz no difficulty: we hardly had to stick our thumbs out in the country, people were so eager to be nice. Especially so because the week of Eid al-Adha  was in  progress (in honor of the sacrifice of Abraham), and everyone was driving around, chewing khat and being nice. Taizz wasn’t much to see, but we had a good five hour walk in the hills behind, and found a bakery with nice cakes. Still, Yemen is no gourmet paradise: bread of various sorts is the staple, usually dipped in a bean or meat sauce, often quite spicy. Chicken is available, but at about five dollars each. Stayed with another Nepalese UN volunteer, Ratna Sharma, rather dull fellow, but quite hospitable. It’s tough to sit with a couple for a long time and have virtually nothing to say.

The next morning a young Yemeni with a new air conditioned car picked us up and offered to drive us wherever we wanted to go: so we went to Mokha, a famous name (where mocha coffee is shipped), but now a dead village on the red Sea, subsisting on whiskey smuggling. Zabid was much better, an eerie town of lovely brick buildings, it’s inhabitants all zonked out on khat, smoking water pipes and looking straight out of a Hollywood set. It claims the oldest continuously functioning university, as well as the birthplace of algebra.  

We slept out in the desert that night, a night marred by the presence of three dogs who stationed themselves about 20 m from us and barked continuously until we left the next morning at five. The fellow was keen on drinking whiskey, and then on getting close to Nicole - we ditched him in Hodeida with no misgivings. 

Here we looked up yet another PCV, living an old place, right on the waterfront, and a truly dedicated pothead. I think we smoked five joints an evening, along with a little myrhh just for the hell of it. Hodeida ain't much, but it had good yogurt, milk, with cardamom seeds, and lambs liver, so we didn’t starve. Went body surfing twice in the Red Sea, with fair to good waves, and the first chance in a long time to get really clean. It must be unbearable in the summer  (supposedly Hodeica has one of the worst climates in the world), but we enjoyed not too hot days and velvet nights, sleeping on the roof under a full moon. 

Friday, we hitched to Bait al Faqih for the best market scene in all of Yemen. As usual, most of the action centered around the selling of khat, which arrived in trucks, on donkeys, and even camels. Took many (too many?) photos of the market ladies, first because they didn’t seem to mind it, and second because they weren’t veiled, but instead were dolled up with all kinds of decorations, and looked very exotic. Once more, the problem was everybody wanting his picture taken: I’d point my camera, and the gang would start to line up in front. Better than Africa, anyway.

The ride back to Sana'a was spectacular, the nicest route we took in Yemen. After crossing the Tehama, the road climbed steadily up wadis until, around 7000 feet, we were winding amongst high peaks, deep valleys, mountain top villages, the whole Yemeni bit, only somehow more dramatic than we had seen before. We reached Sana'a in the early afternoon, headed straight for Suresh's house, and helped him with preparation for a party that evening, which drew many men and disappointingly few women. Still, it was fun to dance until two, and then communally crash on Suresh's floor, along with Roger and the resident kitten.

Sunday, our last full day in Yemen, we lazed about, exchanging addresses, and trying to eat up some of the extra party food. Then it was goodbye to the Yemen Arab Republic, and off we zoomed to Kuwait.

December 1, 1977. Tehran, Iran. Letter to folks

Dear folks, 

Hello again from the merry travelers, big Sam and Nicole, who right this minute are shivering with cold in a crummy room in a hippie hotel in Tehran, our first stop in Asia. Goodbye Africa – we miss your warm climate and tropical foods already. Hello Asia – may your yogurts and kebabs and ancient wonders help us forget your subpar temperatures and hoards of grungy freaks. 

Maybe we’re getting old, or maybe we’ve been pampered by 14 months of traveling in countries or tourists are rare and a generally pleasant diversion for the locals, but to be in this big city, surrounded by fellow travelers and local people who see thousands like us every day, is kind of a blow to our pampered psyches. Ah well, we’re only here for a few days, just long enough to take The National Museum (great, as you may know) and do some sniffing around the covered bazaar (Some nice carpets and Persian miniatures can be found if one searches diligently amongst the Seiko watches, Panasonic tapes, quarters, and Taiwan suitcases).  Then it’s off to warmer parts of the south: Shiraz, Isfahan, Persepolis, Kerman, the "Persian Milk Run", before returning to Tehran on the 17th. Then disaster strikes: Nicole abandons me, flying to France for three weeks with her family in southern France, while I wander aimlessly through Afghanistan, slowly freezing to death, dodging the stones thrown by hostile nomads, eating sheep's head soup and drinking camel urine, hoping to reach New Delhi by mid January for a rendezvous with Nicole and perhaps Yann and Domitille as as well. Then it’s back to familiar territory: Nepal, Kashmir, North India, where the air is pure, the food exotic, and horrible intestinal diseases are just a swallow away. Well I never learn?

We are fresh from two weeks in the Yemen Arab Republic, a place only recently opened to visitors, and a gold mine of a country. We would’ve stayed a lot longer, but nobody speaks anything except Arabic - not our strong point - and the cost of living is out of sight: about 25% higher than New York City! The reason: Yemen has virtually no natural or industrial resources, but it’s strategic location on the Red Sea makes it a desirable friend of all the world's superpowers, who pump money into its economy at a fabulous rate. Hence, the Yemeni sit back, relax, count their cash, and charge outrageous prices to each other, and to visitors: six dollars a beer, $.75 for tea, $60 for a hotel room, etc. we survived mainly by bumming off Peace Corps volunteers, cooking our own meals, and hitchhiking, but even so we spent about $15 a day for the two of us, more than any African country we visited. 

Economics aside, the place was worth it: Arabs on camels with curved daggers in their belts, women veiled completely in black - they must see by radar -  Bedouin nomads camping in the desert - the whole Arabian Nights bit.  The country is a scenic wonderland, with mountains as high as the Sierra Nevada, cut by deep valleys and flanked on the west by the warm waters of the Red Sea, and on the east by the terrible Empty Quarter, where even the Bedouin don’t venture. The towns are built on the top of the highest peaks, some reachable only by 3–4 day donkey rides.  The buildings themselves are of a style unique to that corner of the Arabian Peninsula: five and six story “skyscrapers“ of stone or brick, with windows of all shapes and sizes, fitted with colored glass, the walls white-washed in stripes and other patterns, each home looking like a decorated cake, a palace out of a fairy story. You won’t believe the photos I’ve taken. 

The Yemenis add to this dream-like atmosphere by spending a good part of their waking hours chewing khat, a plant whose leaves contain a mild amphetamine. Every morning, in every market in Yemen, all you see are men bargaining for a bunch of khat plants – and they pay plenty, from five dollars to more than $200 a day. Then, around noon time, everybody gets together with his buddies and starts chewing the leaves. And this goes on until evening time. While they chew, the Yemeni are loquacious, friendly, delightful companions, but don’t try to get any work or decisions out of them; by dinner time, everyone is zonked, sort of staring blankly into the sunset. We saw Sana'a, the capital, for the first time at about 6 PM, and we had the impression that everyone was hypnotized. Very strange indeed. We tried several times to chew the stuff, but it tastes horrible, and you must stick to it for hours before anything happens, so we always gave up too soon. The khat habit makes Yemen a tough country for a Peace Corps volunteer or any other outsider to accomplish anything, and development projects are consequently staffed by non-Yemenis. It’s fun to watch all the Russian, Chinese, North Koreans, Germans, Americans, and Saudi Arabians, running around, trying to get things done while Yemenis sit back, relax, chew khat, and speculate on the folly of western work habits.

Some interesting (and even perhaps true) facts about Yemen;

• Sana'a claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world world. 

• The Queen of Sheba supposedly ruled Yemen around 1000 BC - we were shown her temple to the moon near Marib, on the edge of the Empty Quarter.

•  Yemen was the first country to export coffee  - from the town of Mocha (you guessed it – mocha coffee!) on the Red Sea.

• Algebra was reportedly invented in Zabid, a town in the coastal area, not far from a Mocha.  It had than 230 schools and mosques at its peak around the 14th century.

• Frankincense and myrrh are still produced in Yemen.  They are hhe incenses which made her rich in olden times.

•  Yemen claims to be the true center of Arab culture, where Arabic is spoken in its purest form. 

All this, and more, in a tiny country just opened to tourists about five years ago. Better hurry, it’s changing fast.  An amazing travel find.

But enough travel news. You must be getting tired of these travelogs by now, and frankly it is a lot easier to travel than it is to tell others about it. More important by far than the places we see and the new foods we eat is what is happening to the two of us as we continue this most unorthodox style of living. The most obvious change is our pace.  Everything has slowed down for us, and everything we do seems to take longer in doing. My minimum unit of time at home used to be about five minutes – now it is about one hour. With all the time in the world ahead of us, we have stretched our activities to spend more time. I think back to how I used to go skiing in the Sierras in one weekend, driving six hours each way, and realize I’ll never be able to do that again. 

When we come to a new city, we usually spend the first several days just “settling in“, sniffing around, getting a feel for the place before actually going out and doing it. We spend much more time eating, and preparing a meal is often the major activity of the day. We are always wandering through markets and bazaars, asking about unusual items, where they come from, what they cost, how they are used/eaten/worn. We have come to enjoy retracing our steps, visiting places several times over, getting pleasure from the repetition instead of the novelty. We find ourselves, consequently, making more frequent and more contact with other people who likewise are in no hurry, have no schedule to meet, who have no list of things they must check off before the day is done. And when we have no immediate plans, we are usually free to pick up and pursue any chance encounter that seems promising. The last time I traveled through this part of the world was about 10 years ago, on my way home from Malaysia; I remember seeing lots of amazing buildings and works of art, but making practically no friendships beyond extremely casual and ephemeral ones. This time, the emphasis seems to be on people, and it’s a much more satisfying way to live, I must say. I guess.  Nicole and I have found more close friendships this past year than all the years I worked at good old H.P.  Look at my Christmas card list: maybe 40 cards, which only about 10 going to people I knew before I flew to Nairobi. I guess all of this is the normal development that comes with increasing maturity, but the traveler's lifestyle certainly has accelerated that development. 

Lots of love, Sam