Trip Outside Sana'a: Part 4 - the Text

The following morning I woke early to take a swim in the Red Sea. I had been there before during my semester in Egypt, but that was hundreds of miles north and on the Sinai side of the Gulf of Aqaba. During that first trip I could look across the Gulf and see the mountains of Saudi Arabia. I never thought that one day I would be on that same shoreline, albeit much further south. This time I imagined myself sailing straight across to the Eastern shore of Africa. I would most likely land in Djibouti.

Getting up was hard considering the long day before, but I wouldn’t have too many chances to swim in Yemen and I looked forward to the opportunity. We saw a Yemeni family out swimming as well. Two young women waded out into the shallow sea, black gowns swirling in the lazy tide, and tossed a ball with their younger brother or son.

Having another long day ahead of us, we wrapped up the swim before 9am, checked out, and hit the road. We would drive north along the flat coastal plain to Zabid, a town that once ranked with Cairo’s al-Azhar as a premier center of religious learning, then continue on through Beit al-Faqih, and take a right on the Houdaidah road to climb back up the mountains and return to the Sana’a Plateau.

We bumped along the long coastal highway, sharing the road with plain-dwelling motorcyclists zipping back and forth, scarves wrapped tighter around their faces and kilts flying in the wind. Scrub brush lined either side of the road. To the left along the shore thatched-roof huts clustered in tiny villages, reminding me of the ancient ties between Ethiopia and Yemen’s coast. We sped happily along before suddenly slowing to a crawl. The road was clogged with Land Cruises and Hilux pickups, with sheep, goats, and cows. We’d past through a handful of small towns already. Why was this one so busy, choked with people beyond the capacity of the surrounding town?

“Souq al-Sabt, the Saturday market,” our Yemeni archaeologist companion said. He went on to explain that towns all up and down the Tihama plain hosted weekly markets, one on each day. Merchants traveled from town to town, following the market rotation. One of our fellow travelers, my coworker, was in need of a specific antibiotic. We decided to stop and see what we could find.

The market had the medicine and more. Wending through livestock, clothes, baskets, produce, cheap goods imported from Asia, men leading baby goats by their front legs, men straddling their motorbikes, we found our way to the pharmacy in the back of the open-air market. Located in a block concrete building, we found inside the exact antibiotic we were looking for. Walking out of the pharmacy I bought a pack of playing cards with $100 bills printed on the backs. The souq had a whole different atmosphere than highland Yemen. It felt more relaxed. Women wore more colors. The infusion of African influences contrasted with Sanaa’s references of ancient Arabia.

After perhaps 15 minutes we had drawn quite a crowd and the Toyota Land Cruiser was surrounded by curious onlookers playfully passing around a cheap fez. Having found what we came for, we waved goodbye and drove on. On the road again we got a good look at how livestock was transported to market: by motorcycle. A motorbike in front of us had two small goats peaking like baby kangaroos out of a satchel draped across the back seat.

We stopped for breakfast just south of the city of Zabid proper. It was a small restaurant on the roadside, a squat concrete building with a tin roof. We sat at picnic tables on a covered porch in the front the restaurant. Part of a cow hung on a hook at the entrance to the building. After taking our order, the waiter approached the carcass, held it steady at the rope, and sawed off a hunk of meat. This was diced and mixed with vegetables, spices and wonderful sauce and cooked over a blue butane flame. We ate the final mixture with large flaky disks of bread. It was the tenderest meat I ate in Yemen.

We finally arrived in the old city of Zabid, squeezing the Toyota through winding alleys of whitewashed brick buildings. Zabid is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, but is in danger of losing funding due to lack of commitment to proper upkeep programs. After finding a place to park where we wouldn’t block the entire alley road, we piled out to explore this ancient city. First stop was the Mosque of Zabid, in front of which we had parked. I now forget its significance. Perhaps it was the largest mosque in Zabid, or the most renowned for religious studies. However, I do remember the next mosque’s significance: this was the Great Mosque, and it is the oldest in Yemen. Both mosques were beautiful and similar in style, at least to my untrained architectural eye. A surprising feature of both was the preponderance of Stars of David. The symbol is found throughout Yemen, and mosques are no exception.

Inside the Great Mosque some religious attempted to proselytize to us. They were polite but insistent. I explained I was Christian and so knew God already; they explained that this was good but insufficient. Monotheism followed a historical progression, they said. First was Judaism, introducing Man to the One God. Then came Christianity, which improved upon and displaced Judaism. Then came Islam, the final and complete revelation of God and his message to Man. Like a baby develops into a youth and then a man, they illustrated. I said Christianity suited me just fine, but to keep things cordial mentioned I’d think about this metaphor. But tension grew when they asked our Yemeni archaeologist why he had not already proselytized to us. They questioned the quality of his faith. We left.

The old souq of Zabid was empty. Either it was a bad time of day or the local economy was getting hit hard. I did see one concrete stall selling baby chicks vibrantly dyed. We then moved on to try and see some old manuscripts in an archive the archaeologist knew of. By archive I mean a second storey room in an ordinary unmarked house with locked glass cases. There was a long delay while someone from the building sent for the key. Seeing the manuscripts piqued my interest as a history major, but there wasn’t much to see inside. We were supposed to receive a presentation on something but this didn’t happen. I don’t remember why, but I do remember being hot, humid, tired, and fatigued. We all were. We were happy to pile back in the car and move on. We drove out of the city under a recently restored medieval gate.

After a much needed nap in the back of the car I woke up in time for lunch. All I can remember was fried chicken and defending my food from relentless flies. I couldn’t believe it was only lunchtime; it felt like it had already been a full day. After finishing lunch we had to wait a while before getting back on the road. Aiman the driver was searching for some Dew, which people drink with qat, which he had already bought so he could stay awake for the long drive through the mountain pass back home to Sana’a.

Another nap bridged the gap to our next stop: a bathroom break somewhere north of Bait al-Faqih and south of Houdaidah. While waiting for the girls to finish their business, I got out of the car to stretch my legs. A group of boys, from middle school to high school age, were playing foosball in a small outbuilding a couple yards away. They invited me in to play with them, where I enjoyed a five-minute game of footer (as our German students at the school used to call it). This is one of my favorite snapshot memories. Foosball is everywhere in Yemen; from street corners to cafes to clubs in remote villages boys can be found playing the game. This was the first and only time I got to play the game on a whim.

Traffic was clogged on the way out of town from our pit stop. Some of our crew bought necklaces of jasmine from the vendors on the road, taking advantage of the long line of stopped cars. Finally moving again, I settled back into my backseat perch, buried in Paul Dresch’s A History of Modern Yemen. I found the book so confusing the first time through, a deluge of brand new names, places, geographical features and formations. I had no foundation in this. Our Middle Eastern studies classes had no place for Yemen deferring to the important examples of Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey. Any mention of Yemen was merely a footnote to Nasser’s attempts to spread Pan-Arabism there in the 1960s in war known as “Nasser’s Vietnam.” The book made so much more sense now after having been in Yemen for two and a half months and absorbing from popular culture who the important historical figures were and where the major geographical features and regions are.

I could not keep my head buried in the book for long, however. Yemen’s geographic diversity was about to surprise me again. We began the trip three days prior by driving along the north-south mountain range which spans the entire western portion of Yemen. We followed the range south through Ibb, Jibla, and Taiz, gradually lowering in elevation. We crossed to Mokha, on the southwestern tip of Yemen on the Red Sea shore. From here we drove back north along the coastal plain known as the Tihama, through Khokha and Zabid. We were now parallel to Sanaa again, but on the wrong side of the Haraz mountains. We were at sea level. The capital was on a plateau atop the mountains, near the highest peak in the Arabian Peninsula. We had reached the road that connects Sana’a to Houdaidah, the Red Sea port city. It was time to turn east and climb.

The lush verdant valleys were the first to catch my eye. Bubbling brooks, running water! cut fertile valleys through the barren rocky mountains. I was awestruck to see such green, such life, in a country that for me had so long been defined by the dusty city of Sana’a. Shortly after entering the mountains we pulled to the side of the road, deep in one of these valleys, to let the engine cool before beginning the long, hard climb up the Chinese-built highway. A red rock face met the left side of the road. The right side dropped off into a cultivated farm sprinkled with banana trees before abruptly ending again at the mountain side shortly across the narrow valley. After ten minute or so we piled back into the car and started off. Hidden green valleys watched over by stone tower houses passed by the window.

The last leg of the trip was spectacular. The road began switchbacks once we got higher into the mountains and the sun began to set. I cannot even describe the view. All I can say is that you have not seen naturally beauty until you’ve driven the Houdaidah-Sana’a road, starting at the bottom in early afternoon and arriving in Manakha at the peak of sunset, when the sun finally falls behind the previous row of mountains and the sky turns pastel purples and oranges.

Well, I’ll try to describe the views anyway. You can just see more and farther than anywhere else I’ve been. After reaching a ridge after a long set of switchbacks, you can turn around and see the entire valley spill out before you. You can spot the bend in the asphalt, thousands of feet below, thick as a shoestring, and think “oh, I remember being there a couple hours ago.” To your right you see another ridge peak, a couple miles away and at the same altitude, but with a valley that seemingly drops down do sea level in between. To your left is the same. Atop every ridge is a quaint stone house, built in the unmistakable Yemeni style. The house sits at the highest point possible, both for defense and to conserve space on the mountain side, which is carved into terraces. Much of Yemen looks like a brought-to-life topographical map. You look to that distant peak, with the bottomless valley in between, and the isolated house on top. You look closer, squint, and spot another peak perched by another impossibly remote house.

I remember finally reaching Manakha, the halfway point where the climb ends and the trip through the high mountain passes that take you to the Sana’a plateau begins. I turned to look back across the valley. The surrounding mountains had turned an icy blue and purple, the sky shown a soft orange, every crag and jagged peak, every silhouette of a mountaintop house, thrown into colored relief by the sunset. An immense valley between us and them. By this point my camera had died, but I don’t think pictures could have done it justice.

The drive had its fair share less transcendent moments. I already mentioned the switchbacks. These usually involved blind hairpin turns, with a rock face on side of the road and a thousand foot drop off on the other. Aiman’s qat had kept him awake, but it also seemed to make him a little more aggressive in navigating the road. I was more worried about the other drivers, however, many of whom seemed to enjoy taking these blind death-traps at great speed. Who cares if someone’s coming in the other direction? This road, as I’ve mentioned, connects Sana’a to the port city of Houdaidah, the main point of entry for imports making their way to the capital. Accordingly, large trucks filled the road. Before every turn I imagined one of these trucks rounding the corner just as we did and the carnage that would ensue. I got over it eventually.

Darkness fell and we continued through the mountains to Sana’a. We arrived at the final checkpoint before the city and handed the guards the last copy of our travel permits (in Yemen a permit is required to move from governorate to governorate, for foreigners at least). A half hour later we crested a ridge and below us spilled an immense bowl filled with orange lights. We were back in Sana’a.

***

Epilogue:

The students back at the school were abuzz. Mubarak’s fall the previous night sparked spontaneous celebrations in the streets, which then turned into demonstrations. Up to that point all protests had been organized in advance with set times and dates. They usually began around 9:00am and ended in the early afternoon, when most people left to lunch and join qat chews. These organized protests were foundering; people were losing interest. Only two days before clerks at our hotel in Taiz seemed convinced that Yemenis were more interested in going home to chew qat to sustain a protest like those in Cairo.

These new protests, fired by the enthusiasm of Egypt’s success, were the first to arise unplanned. A handful of inspired students began a sit-in at Sana’a University.

This was February 12^th. Over time the sit in grew. Activists set up a permanent stage for speakers. The mu’atasimeen, literally the “sitters-in,” set up tents to emphasize their commitment to maintain the sit in until Saleh abdicated power. In early March a protester was shot trying to bring his tent into the camp. The tent-city later expanded beyond the university square, now dubbed “Change Square,” and stretched into the surrounding streets. More protests were shot on March 12th, and then 52 were massacred on March 18. This led Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen to defect from the army on March 21, sparking fears of civil war. I was told by my boss to leave the country on March 23. I boarded a plane early the next morning.