Last day in Yemen…
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007…though I shouldn’t speak too soon. We bought tickets for a bus that leaves in one hour, at 4pm, and is supposed to arrive in Salalah, Oman, at about 8am tomorrow morning.
We’ve spent the past couple of days in Wadi Hadramawt, the longest wadi in the Middle East. The most famous place here is Shibam, a centuries-old walled town in which all the houses are ‘skyscrapers’ – some are eight storeys high, which gives the place the nickname ‘the Manhattan of the Desert’. The houses are not as pretty as those in Sana’a, but they’re taller. For me, the most intruiging aspect of Shibam was perhaps not the construction of the houses (which is remarkable), but the need to construct them in this manner in the first place. There’s heaps of empty space, even today, around Shibam. It seems to me that the inhabitants could easily have built one storey houses and expanded the city in all directions. Instead, for reasons unknown, they built an amazingly compact city and the only sprawl was upwards, not outwards. Hopefully I’ll be able to put up some pictures within the next few days.
So, that’s it for Yemen. I definitely enjoyed the people, architecture and landscapes of the country and it’s completely different from Qatar, which I suppose is what we sought in the first place. Now it’s onto Oman, which will be closer to the oil states but hopefully still interesting enough.
Some final ‘stats’ on Yemen that I didn’t mention earlier, to give you a little idea of what life is like here. The man whose hotel we stayed in at Kawkaban married his wife when she was 11, and she had their first child at 12 1/2. They now have seven children (she is 26), but he said that’s all they’ll have. He said one woman in the village has given birth to 24 children! Family planning eh?
Nick