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YEMEN:
October 1998
Getting out of the port of Aden took half a day. (Flipping,
Felipe, the agent, had made us pay double for some things too).
Diesel cost only 8c (US), 48c (SA) per litre! Aden is beautifully
situated and has tourist potential but no tourist development yet.
We quickly headed out on a nice causeway. Soon we were leaving the
heat and humidity and ascending the terraced mountains towards
Sana’a, which lies at 2300m. Those mountain passes gave us the
first foretaste of Yemeni driving: overtaking on a blind curve;
overtaking an overtaking vehicle on a blind rise!
We had to wait 13 days in Sana’a for our Omani Road permit
and visas. This was the case even though Des, our kind pilot
friend and fellow Land Rover owner in Oman, had started the
paperwork battle 4 months before. Fortunately, Sana’a was very
interesting. It has an ancient walled city with buildings in the
style of a thousand years ago and a fascinating bazaar, which has
not changed.
The market stalls have pyramids of dates, raisins, nuts, and bags
of beans, grains and spices. There are scores of old looking
Bedouin silver jewellery. In tiny cubicles of certain streets all
the processes in the making of the traditional curved dagger takes
place. All men wear the “jambiya”. It is in a leather sheath and
hangs on an embroidered belt. Yemeni men wear a hand-woven cotton
cloth “skirt” and a dark Western style jacket. The turban or scarf
is red and white. Almost all women are completely veiled in black
or have only the pupils of the eyes showing. They do not seem to
work in public and we have not seen them drive. All weddings are
arranged and take place when the girls are very young. Extended
families live together and the houses have separate entrances and
sets of stairs for men and women.
Homes always have a room with a view – either on the top floor or
over a walled garden for the communal chewing of “qat”. This is an
institutionalised mild stimulant drug. The leaves are of the Catha
Edulis Forsskal. 95% of the population use it either on the job
or in long afternoon sessions - men and women separately. Only
fresh leaves are used to form a large ball in the cheek and only
the juice is swallowed. (To us it looked and tasted like Privet
leaves!) There is a special “qat soukh” (market). Good qat is
expensive. The value of this industry is worth more than the rest
of the total agricultural economy.
There are no camping sites in Yemen. We fortunately were able to
park in the pleasant grounds of a new Pizza Hut. There were
friendly 24-hour guards. Our amusement was to watch the black
veiled blobs entertain their brightly clad toddlers on the
colourful playground equipment, next to the parking area.
Eric, the Manager of the Dodge Chrysler Jeep agency invited us
home for a family dinner. He also helped us to buy a new solar
regulator and gave us references in Kuwait, Saudi and Turkey. He
had worked there and shared of his experience and insight with us.
Sheikh Al Rowaishan, who is the owner of Chrysler Yemen, also owns
the Land Rover Agency. (Where we bought some spares). We met the
two young sheikhs, sons of the influential man, who told us about
a new road from Sana’a to Sayun. This saved us about 1000 km. (The
two young men and three sisters were soon to be married off to 5
of their cousins).
Toyota seems to hold the market. Land Cruisers abound. A further
evidence of the atrocious reckless driving is the battered state
of most of the vehicles in the capital city. Most of the taxis are
small Subaru, which look like half size combis. .
After waiting in Sana’a for 13 days, our visas came. They
still said “Arriving at Oman Airport”! We left the next day
regardless. The route was to be: East to Marib and Sayun; then
south to Al Mukalla and East along the coast via Al Ghaydah to the
border with Oman.
From Sana’a to Marib we had to join a convoy of (hired)
tourist vehicles with armed escort. Armoured vehicles front,
centre and back of convoy and a soldier with automatic weapon next
to every driver. Leoné had to sit in the back. (There had been an
isolated incident during tribal unrest in which some Brits and
Australians were killed). At Marib there are ruins of a dam built
in 8BC. Thereafter we no longer needed the customary Bedouin guide
through the 300km of desert because the new asphalt road was under
construction. Four wheel drive was necessary on a sandy deviation.
We were heading for Wadi Hahdramawt, the biggest valley on
the Arabian Peninsula. It is fertile and contrasts with the stone
mountainous desert. Two towns are interesting. Shibam,
which dates from 3BC. It has a tight collection of 500 tower
houses built from mud brick, 5 to 7 storeys high: the “Manhattan
of the desert”. Sayun, “the town of a million palm trees”
has a decorated Sultan’s palace and modern “palaces” painted
pastel shades.
To the coast there was a new road with fancy stone masoned
shoulders and retaining walls. This soon ended. Then poor Little
Diplodocus (Dipli) had to traverse 400km of steep up and down
winding mountain track. After a great deal of effort we would
reach the summit of a mountain from which we can see way in the
distance, other mountains and other valleys, then more mountains
lining the horizon. Each mountain pass we negotiate is a
reproduction of the previous one. In between the blind corners
while cliff hugging and cliff hanging over the turquoise sea,
there were the beaches of pebble or sand. (Lovely camping). With
tyre pressure down, and sand ladders only once, we even travelled
over 50km of sand dunes (following tracks which we hoped were not
made by someone who was lost!).
The last town in Yemen was Whaf. Camels were strolling on
the beach and friendly town elders gestured towards the mountains
when we asked the way. They eventually gave us a young guide when
we could not find the track. This corner of the Arabian Peninsula
catches monsoon rain. Heavy trucks had made deep ruts in the steep
path (which had set hard as concrete!). Leoné was hanging out of
the window because suddenly there was vegetation again (the first
since a month ago). We bounced around and could hardly keep
direction. The left-hand steering arm snapped and track rod bent;
both “again”. As Jan and the Yemeni lad toiled in the heat and
dust, three Canadian backpackers stopped. These were the first
travellers we had met in about two months. They looked clean and
fresh and asked about the road to Sana’a….. Little did they know
what lay ahead!.We
reached the Yemen/Oman border. The last 32 kilometres had taken us
5 ¾ hours.
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