MY first impression of Yemen was of a sea of moustachioed men wearing dangerous looking daggers in colourful pouches at their waists and chewing some substance that extended their jaws into a golf ball shape.
I had arrived in Sana'a, the capital, at midnight on a KLM flight from Amsterdam. My luggage had departed elsewhere - Saudi or Syria - and KLM, concerned but confused, had given me a man's survival kit to tide me over. Armed with this, I headed out into the warm Yemini night to the airport taxi rank where I met Norman. Now Norman had been fasting all day for Ramadan, the Muslim holiest month of fasting. Like all of the Muslim world his sense of time had been temporarily reversed. Day had turned into night for fasting and sleeping, and night into day for living, working and chewing "gat". A bunch of "gat", which is a hallucinogenic plant, lay like a big sheaf of box hedge foliage on the seat beside him. He tore strips off the bunch and handed them to me. He then replenished his own already extended mouthful and talked blackmarket money rates. In the face of impending death I stuffed my mouth full of gat leaves in the hope that when we crashed I would float away in a drugged daze. Unfortunately, I did not have the knack of extracting its magical properties and my chewing released instead only a strong smell of newly mown hay.
My black market financial dealings were more successful and as he drove, Norman peeled off wads of dirty notes from a huge bundle of money which he held in the same hand as the steering wheel, our fragile link between earth and eternity.
My hotel in Sana'a was of the Two Sheet de luxe variety since hotels in Yemen are judged not by the star system but by the sheet count on the bed - No Sheet, One Sheet, Two Sheets, and Two Sheets de luxe. The No sheet variety offers a thin mattress which might or might not be placed on a base with legs and bedding which is never washed during its lifetime. In the One sheet hotel the sheet is washed not with the change of customer but with the washing schedule of the establishment, once a month or once a year for instance.
The Two sheet hotel provides sheets which are changed with the change of guest. Then there is the Two sheet de luxe variety in which the sheets are changed every day.
In my room I picked up a copy of the Yemen Times. It was just after the unification of North and South, and the political situation was very uneasy.
In fact, a civil war ensued not long after I left Yemen on that occasion but the main problem perplexing the government was the kidnapping of tourists. From the editorial I learned that hijacking was a favourite local pastime. Various tribesmen had a lucrative smuggling operation in action with Saudi Arabia. The plan was simple; steal a landcruiser, drive it to the border. Sell it. Steal another and repeat the process. It was very, easy, particularly as there were plenty of them about. If the vehicle was filled with tourists, so much the better.
The good news was that such hostages were well looked after. According to that report, the last kidnapped group had apparently gained six kilos from Yemeni hospitality in captivity.
Next morning while I waited for my luggage to arrive I decided to venture out and explore Sana'a. An armed bodyguard was a necessity, I had been told, but the hotel staff felt a bodyguard was required only for travel outside Sana'a so I went alone. Within moments of leaving the hotel, Mohammed was by my side. Mohammed was the prototype of the ubiquitous young men who want to act as unofficial local guides for all tourists worldwide. Normally, these young men are polite and helpful and experience has taught me that it is far less stressful to let them tag along.
In fact, I was quite glad that he was there on this occasion because a short distance from the hotel in a narrow shady alleyway, a man ran out of a doorway barefoot with his djellaba bundled up around his naked genitals. He was shouting and jumping about and hoisting up his clothes and gesticulating. Mohammed looked very calm and I took my cue from him. "What is troubling this man?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly and said "He is mad. Would a sane man run along the hot streets without his shoes on?" It was not lack of shoes that initially bothered me.
We continued our journey to the end of the alleyway and we walked out of the 20th century into the magical timeless world of the ancient city of Sana'a. Crowned with a network of domes, minarets and crenellations it rose dramatically before us, so visually stunning in the intense sunlight that it seemed a dream, like walking into the pages of a medieval fairytale where the palaces are made of gingerbread and the windows and architectural features are sugar ice white. But this was not a dream and we wandered through a labyrinth of tall woven mudbrick towers, inlaid with decorative stucco window arches and embellished with a white washed lacework of geometric patterns and designs.
Life in Sana'a, founded by Shem, son of Noah, has changed little, I discovered, since the days of the ancient trade routes. Intoxicating smells of spices and incense hung like a perfumed cloud in the air and drew everyone towards its source, the Souk. This densely crowded marketplace spilled out into the adjoining lanes in a colourful array of people and merchandise. Sounds of chatter, laughter, barter and exchange mingled with the sounds of children playing and roaming animals and fowl. Every trade had its section.
Mysterious women, shrouded in black or dressed in colourful shawls and veils, glided through crowds of dagger bearing men wearing eastern djellabas, western style jackets and red or black and white Palestinian headdresses or, mashadda. At intervals, the call of the Muezzin to prayer gave an ordered sense of time to the otherwise timeless atmosphere of a market place in what is arguably the oldest inhabited city on earth.
During the following days I visited some of the outlying mountain villages. The road leads past manicured gat plantations, guarded by fortified towers to a cliff top overlooking Wadi Dhahr valley. Below, Dar al Hajjar, the world famous rock palace of the last Imam, sits majestically on its free standing rock plinth against the backdrop of an azure sky flecked with wisps of frothy cloud. Above, on a rough stretch of ground near the cliffs edge, the relatives of the brides and grooms of the wealthy families of Sana'a gather on Fridays to dance and fire gunshots across the ravine in an effort to outdo each other in a display of noise and physical agility.
A NEW moon signalled the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the festival of Eid. I set out with a guide and guard to travel the 175 kilometres to Marib, ancient capital of the Sabaean Kingdom and home of the world's oldest dam.
Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, was the Sabaeans most famous queen. Her historic and romantic meeting with King Solomon is recorded in both the Koran and Bible and has engaged the minds of painters, poets and writers through the ages.
Apart from her, little is known about Sabaean culture except for the ruins of monumental temples. These are most eloquently represented in Marib by the five square monolithic pillars of the Temple of the Moon which soar boldly from the desert floor. They are a stark testimony to the existence of the affluent, sophisticated temple building civilisation which the Sabaeans had established here from the ninth century to the first century BC.
Their wealth was derived from trading and the location of Marib at the mouth of a fertile valley or wadi, made it a strategically important collection and filtering point for goods traded on the ancient land and sea routes.
Across the Arabian desert, the Hadramaut kingdom prospered equally from its trading connections from the fifth century BC for nearly a thousand years. Its ancient capital, Shabwa, lies on the fringes of the Hadramaut valley not far from the pre Christian skyscraper city of Shibham.
The journey through the desert from Marib to the Hadramaut takes about 15 hours. My guard this time was a Bedouin named Mohammed. He arrived at my hotel at 3 a.m. in bubbling form. While provisions such as water and petrol were being loaded on to his pick up truck, he leaned casually against the fuel tank, a cigarette wedged between his diamond encrusted fingers. He wore a Khalashnikov over his shoulder, a dagger at his waist and a smile that revealed a fortune in gold teeth. I knew that with Mohammed I would be perfectly safe against marauding tribesmen said to patrol the route. I was travelling with one of their own.
We followed the old trade route through sand mountains and stony desert which flowed in shimmering aquamarine towards a watery horizon. At midday, during our fourth puncture stop, we were invited by the henchmen of a one armed Bedouin chieftain to share his "Eid" celebration lunch. We did not dare refuse his hospitality. I was seated at his left side as an honorary man, because customarily men and women do not eat together. We ate from a communal pot. The chieftain scooped up great dollops of delicious lamb stew in his gnarled leathery hand and placed it in my right hand for me to eat. His little sons from his fourth wife ran playfully around us and veiled women with hennaed hands peeped furtively from behind a screen and giggled.
THE journey through the Hadramaut valley to the port of Mukalla follows the same stony terrain and sandy tracks as the camel trains of old. Along this route tons of luxury goods, gold, perfumes and frankincense from the back of the botswelia carterri desert trees in Yemen and Oman were carried "to the palaces, temples and homes of the rich of the ancient world. It is a place of relentless hardship, searing heat and spectacular sculpted rock formations. The track rises upwards, crosses the flat roof of the table mountains and descends towards the sea and the town of Mukalla.
Because of military activity I was advised to return to Sana'a by air. On the plane I sat beside an oil rig worker dressed in an orange overall in the stifling heat. He explained that on the previous day he had been the subject of a terrible attack by tribesmen. They had robbed him of his passport, money and clothes, killed his guard and his driver and driven away in his landcruiser. He had wandered through the desert for 12 hours, totally disoriented, before he was spotted by an army helicopter patrol and taken to the airport.
A few months ago, I visited Yemen again. The military blockades are down, the bandits are gone to ground but its beauty and its exoticism, its air of adventure and romance make it more than ever one of the strangest and most exciting travel destinations of the world.