More exploring
After our organised trip to Shahara earlier in the week, we wanted to go off on our own as we usually do (though it’s harder in Yemen than in most countries), so we spent the past two days exploring some places reasonably close to Sana’a.
Yesterday morning, we took a shared taxi to Shibam. (Sure, ‘shared taxi’ sounds organised and luxurious, but it’s really just nine people jammed into a station wagon, and if you’re in the back row, as we were, you have to crouch down the entire way as the ceiling isn’t high enough.) Shibam wasn’t an especially attractive place by Yemeni standards but two things really made it a very worthwhile stopover. The first was that a young man took us around town a little bit to show us various things without asking for anything in return. He took us to see their family’s primitive machine for making olive oil, and to meet his lovely little sisters. He also took us inside Shibam’s grand mosque, a rare treat as – like Morocco – non-Muslims aren’t usually allowed inside mosques in Yemen. The mosque dates back to around AD 850, making it the fourth oldest Islamic building I have seen, if memory serves correctly. Inside, some inscriptions in a non-Arabic language testified to its age.
The second highlight of Shibam was the insane market that was going on in the main street, which was especially busy as the Muslim holiday Eid begins tomorrow. The meat market was particularly gruesome – one guy posed for a photo while holding up a cow’s head. Hopefully the pictures will give you an idea of what it was like.
After exploring Shibam for a couple of hours, we jumped into the back of a pick-up truck headed for Thula, our next stop. Thula is an achingly beautiful walled town, one of the prettiest places I can ever remember visiting. The town is made up of stone tower houses and is set at the base of a dramatic rocky outcrop, upon which is an old fort. It’s extremely photogenic, and in Thula I took my best photo so far in Yemen (Edit: I still think this despite just finding out about the outrageous and totally unexpected popularity of the Shahara bridge photo on Flickr). The only downside to Thula was that it was a bit touristy. Of course, ‘touristy’ in Yemen needs some perspective. We were told that in the week before we arrived, on the verge of ‘high season’, there were 120 foreign tourists in all of Yemen. Now there might be a few more over the New Year’s period, but tourism is still very much in its infancy. For what it’s worth, my own estimates are that about 90 per cent of tourists in Yemen are package groups, and perhaps as high as 75 per cent of the groups are Italian, so much so that the shopkeepers selling souvenirs in Thula greet everyone with: ‘Ciao, come stai?’
In the afternoon we took some more local transport to get to Kawkaban, where we were fortunate to stay at a basic hotel owned by a very nice and helpful man, whose wife cooked the best meal we’ve had in Yemen so far. Kawkaban is not as pretty as Thula, but also far more peaceful, and dramatically perched on the top of a rocky plateau. This morning, we hiked for more than five hours from Kawkaban through a wadi (a dried up river bed), passing a few interesting villages along the way and seeing the most greenery I have ever seen in the Gulf (which, of course, is not saying much at all).
We’re pretty exhausted now after the hike, so we’ll probably take it pretty easy in Sana’a tomorrow before planning our next move.
Tags: Arabia, Kawkaban, Travel, Yemen
Nick