The real Arabia? I think we found it…
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006We’ve just come back from a two-day, one night trip to Shahara, a mountain top village north of Sana’a that’s about 2000m above sea level. The only way to go is by hiring a car and driver, and while it’s expensive, I enjoyed it immensely and it was well worth it.
It started rather inauspiciously, though. We woke up yesterday morning to the hotel staff in Sana’a telling us that Shahara was ‘closed’ and that we couldn’t go that day despite arranging everything the previous day. (Places in Yemen periodically become ‘closed’ to foreigners if there’s potential danger, but it all seemed a bit unusual because Shahara is not usually one of those places.) The police were milling around the hotel, so we really didn’t know what was happening. After a few minutes, a middle-aged Australian man arrived and took us aside.
“Are you the ones going to Shahara?” he asked.
“We were…”
“You still are. Let’s go.”
It turned out that Shahara was not closed at all, and the hotel staff were trying to take business away from our new Australian friend after a spat they’d just had with him (according to him, they tried to swindle him out of $1000, and he lost his temper and a yelling match ensued). The police had come to arrest him, but he jumped in his truck, we hopped in, too, and we drove off. As we returned this afternoon, the Australian said there was still a chance he’d be thrown in jail, as the police will likely side with the Yemeni hotel owners in this dispute.
In a nutshell, that’s Yemen – an old, tribal, traditional, disorganised, and remarkable place. To illustrate this further, as we were driving we came to a point on the highway where the armed bedouin were stopping cars and demanding money from each passing car (highway robbery, I suppose). They let us go straight through without stopping because we were foreigners – strange, I thought, since we probably had more money than any of the other cars. When we reached an official government checkpoint a few minutes down the road, our driver tried to tell the police about the bedouin; they didn’t care.
It took us all day to reach Shahara. For the last two hours, as we climbed up the mountain, Wendy and I were standing up in the back of the pick-up truck, which is the scariest, but also the best, way to travel.
The scenery around the place was majestic. After spending more than a year effectively living on a giant, flat, sand bar, just seeing mountains was wonderful enough in itself. The landscape was barren and the mountains rocky and jagged, but many of them were still terraced, with the locals all growing the same thing – qat, a stimulant-type of leaf that all Yemeni men chew seemingly all day and night, every day (many spend 2/3 of their income just on qat). Because of the instant profit of growing qat, everyone wants to do it, even in isolated villages where it would be more practical to grow produce. For the record, I tried it yesterday for the first time and didn’t experience any effects. I think even for them it’s not about the effect anymore; it’s a social activity, and most business deals and negotiations are done while chewing qat.
By late afternoon, we reached Shahara and I was lucky that the light was still very good for photography. The town is literally perched on a cliff and some of the buildings date back to around AD 1200 (or they’re 1200 years old, and thus date back to around AD 800; hard to tell since local guide Yahir’s bad Italian was the lingua franca for the trip). In the ruined building pictured here, a cow was grazing in the interior of the ground floor. There are several other beautiful buildings in the village, but it’s unfortunately quite dirty as Yemenis don’t understand how not to litter. (Side note: When our Australian friend pointed out hundreds of plastic bags, that once held qat leaves, lying littered on the side of the road to a local guide, the Yemeni, frustrated, held out his hands in disbelief and loudly said, “It’s Yemen!” One of the things the Australian is trying to do is change attitudes like this among the Yemenis; to make them understand that they should take pride in their country and keep it clean.)
The other attraction of Shahara is a small, 17th-century bridge that joins two adjacent mountains. This morning we crossed it as part of a 2.5 hour hike part of the way back down the mountain through the abundant qat crops. Once we crossed the bridge, the views back towards Shahara on its cliff perch were spectacular, made even more atmospheric by the clouds of mist that rose up from below, as you can see in the first photo at the top of this entry.
Now we’re back in Sana’a, ready to do some more exploring tomorrow of some places nearby. We’ll probably do another overnight expedition, then return to the capital where our well-connected driver from the Shahara trip has said he can introduce us to some locals and give us a bit of a different experience from the usual sight-seeing stuff.
As always, more photos (and better versions of the ones that are up here) can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jungle_boy/
Six or so of these tower houses in the old city are now budget or mid-range hotels, and we’re lucky enough to be staying on the fifth floor of the one that is said to have the best view of old Sana’a out of all of them. We are in a lovely little room with two floor mattresses and four windows, from where we can look out and see an endless skyline of these tower houses broken only by the occasional minaret.
For the first time in our travels in Muslim countries, Wendy is wearing an abaaya that she bought from a shop in the souq. Even more so than in Qatar, almost all Yemeni women either wear the full veil or the one with eye slits, though Wendy has gone with a shaila that covers her hair and neck but not her face. I’m still contemplating going Yemeni myself, which would involve a dish-dasha (a man-dress, for lack of a better term), a tea-towel style headdress and a belt and dagger, which all Yemeni men wear.
Nick