On Location Oct 06 – Yemen

I could not sleep. I wandered dream-like through a fairy-tale land. I was surrounded by giant cakes, stories high, a delicate white icing highlighting the windows and tracing fragile patterns on the walls and crenellations. Wafts of incense and perfume delighted my olfactory senses. Black shapes ghosted past me. Men walked past their cheeks full of gobstoppers. Children ran amok, screaming with delight at the whizzing and banging of firecrackers. Everywhere people hailed me, saying that I was welcome.

I wasn’t dreaming but it felt like it. I was in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Stereotypes – some of which are none to reassuring – fill the mind at the mention of Yemen. Toyota pick-ups crammed full of militant men in white zannah, wearing jackets (invariably with the label still on the sleeve), and red and white headdresses. Whilst such stereotypes do exist, the mistake has been to pigeonhole Yemen.

There have been and are problems with kidnappings but these are confined to certain areas of the country, no go zones. In the same way that one would not go to certain areas of New York, Nairobi or Newcastle there are areas to be avoided in Yemen. I am not being cavalier – I have two young daughters.

I am not so arrogant to presume that I know the country and its peoples after all too brief a stay, but I did come to understand that the reality is more complex. Problems between countries are problems between governments and do not manifest themselves into problems between peoples. The overwhelming reception I received throughout my stay in Yemen was one of welcome and friendliness.

My Alice-like enchantment with Sana’a did not prevent me from seeing a less prosaic side of the country. Plastic bags are a plague that litter most villages and are indicative of a poverty and malaise. The former is due to a number of circumstances, ranging from the harsh terrain to the government’s isolation by the rest of the world; the latter is no small part to green chocolate, namely qat. This privet-like leaf is bought and sold in fevered transactions and chewed with disengaged relish, a small plastic bag of which costs anything from 500 Riel (Approx US$2.50) to 1,500 Riel. That might not sound much to us but on average Yemeni men are reckoned to spend a third of their income on qat, often to the detriment of feeding their families.

The fact that Yemen is authentic does not mean that it is stuck in a time warp. I often saw the Jahmbiya, a curved dagger, worn in tandem with a mobile phone. Its ancient houses are still lived in; its towns are not museums. The streets of today are vibrant and full of life, perhaps not more so than in Wadi Hadramawt.

A deep scar of a valley, over 150 kilometres long, Wadi Hadramawt is a veritable Eden in the harsh surrounds of the desert. The rich green of the fields of maize and the date palms lie in verdant contrast to the arid and parched limestone escarpment that towers hundreds of metres over the floor of the wadi. It oozed wealth, contentment and honey. Wadi Hadramawt is reputed to have the best honey in the world – I sincerely hope so given that I paid US$25 for half a kilo of premium honey.

The toy-town tower blocks of houses added a surreal and other-worldly enchantment. Appealing and intriguing, they are even more incredible when you realise that they are simply made of earth, straw and water. Cement has arrived, giving rise to a strange fusion of ancient and modern, but the mud-brick remains the basic element and the easiest to use. Large flat bricks of mud and straw are dried in the sun and mortared and then plastered over with more of the same. The building is then given a limestone icing that both waterproofs it and lends it an air of romance and fantasia.

Shibam, dubbed the ‘Manhattan of the Desert’ by Freya Stark in the 1930s, is the picture postcard image that sells Yemen. Individually the houses are no more remarkable than many others in Yemen but collectively they stand together to make a very picturesque whole. Whilst superficially pretty, within it is sad and soulless. Dust and inertia hung heavy in the air.

Driving out of Wadi Hadramwat in the early morning was as magical as our arrival. A witches’ coven of women dressed from head to toe in black, with tall pointed straw hats, huddled together as they worked in the field. We passed through Al Hatwa, a town of no real note except that I enjoyed the unobtrusive vitality of its market. Battered old Toyotas, barely recognisable under the scrapes, dents and broken bumpers; the banter of barter blaring out from loudspeakers; men with heavy dark beards absent-mindedly cleaning their teeth with meswak; the pungent smell of dried fish, the exotic smells of spices; an eclectic mix of faces and features. All men. All alien. None hostile.

That and many other images come to mind of Yemen. It is an incredibly visual country. The stunning terraces, dramatic mountains and impressive dunes of the mainland contrast with the dazzling clear waters and brilliant white sands of the island of Socotra in the Red Sea. Charming, bizarre houses, bearded men bearing daggers and women all in black are images indelibly etched into my memory.