January 1988
From handwritten journal
[Note, 2026: I visited Yemen shortly before it was reunited in 1990. The country was only recently opened for tourism and there were very few facilities for travellers.]
The country is so ruggedly mountainous. And high mountains that poke through the clouds into the distance. It’s dry now, but still veined with riverbeds and dry streams. Descending into Sana’a is like descending into the Grand Canyon. These mountains are flat on top and whorled like eroded wood.
I can see a town here on the table top of the mountain. It is brown like the land. This place was full of water once. The top of the plateau is just incredibly eroded. It looks like lava flowed everywhere—all ashy brown with only a crackled top of soil. Actually, we didn’t descend into a canyon. We kept flying over the high plateau which is where Sana’a is situated. There are a couple of what look like lava cones with dry lakes in the depressions. Whorled sandy land. What an amazing landscape! All carved by water many thousands of years ago.
There seem to be walled-off areas for farm plots—terrace farming—but it all looks brown except for a few scattered tiny emerald patches looking like lichen on a huge gnarled old oak trunk. I think I do see a lava flow—it is, I’m sure. What ashy barren land this is now.
This place is even more exotic than India, I think. This is the real Arab life, unlike what I see in Kuwait (excepting the Bedouins). The buildings look so natural—they suit the landscape. They are built from earth-colored stone blocks and have colored glass windows. So beautiful!
The first most impressive thing is the honking big curved daggers, called Jambiyas, that all men over age 14 wear. They are about a foot long and seem like they’d be terribly cumbersome while sitting and so on. They hang loose and fall between the legs when the man sits and must feel like a perpetual hard-on for them. To me, they look dangerous and obscene—very exotic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jambiya
The second thing is the huge green wad of masticated leaves they all have bulging one cheek—Qat. It’s a narcotic, mildly addictive, and makes them all sleepy and slow. I think it’s illegal, but obviously it’s widely used and is tolerated by the powers that be. It’s strange to see people stuffing big leaves into their mouths like pandas—straight off the branch—but that’s how it’s done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khat
Actually, my first impression of Yemen on the ground came at the money-changer in Kuwait when he handed me the stack of bills: they smelled like a clean saddle blanket—like horse hair (maybe camel?). And indeed, that’s what Yemen smells like. It’s probably Qat I’m smelling but it’s distinctive. I tend to be sensitive to redolence as I have strong impressions of India from smells, too.
Fig 1. Advertisement for Dar Al Hamd Hotel in Traveller’s Guide to Yemen
I’m staying at the Dar Al Hamd Hotel, which is the converted house of a rich man. It’s beautiful in the way that old places are, with some patching together but for the most part interesting furniture and fixtures. I’d love this room stripped down. But is it very cold, this being a stone house. I bundled up in the bed clothes and watched the black and white tv in the room after having dinner downstairs. At first there was a sort of news show (?) with just a man using a pointer to indicate information of a standing pull-down screen. No idea what it was about. But then came on a wonderful Egyption movie, in Arabic (no English subtitles), called Poison. It was enthralling and easy to follow because there was very little dialogue. It was a similar story to the one in It’s a Wonderful Life of the pharmacist who accidentally fills a prescription with poison and sends it out with a delivery boy. The movie showed the boy’s journey across town to his destination.
There’s not much “nightlife” in Sana’a—especially for a lone woman tourist out wandering around at dusk. After I went into a bakala (small shop like a New York bodega) to look for snacks, I just went back to my hotel room. I bought my favorite candy bar and bag of chips—but everything off-brand, with amusingly similar names, like “Snuckers” for Snickers. I wish I’d recorded some of those names.
Fig. 2 Bab Al Yemen
This place, these people, do remind me of India. They look like a mix of Indians and Bedouins. Yemen’s western border is the Red Sea: the nearest countries across the sea are Eritrea and Djibouti, but I read that coastal culture is very Indian because of so much immigration in the past (I’m not sure about this–I didn’t have enough time to visit the coast). There is so much to see in Yemen! I regret also that I didn’t have time to visit the region where the Biblical Queen of Sheba reigned.
In Sana’a, there are so many lame people, but so far I’ve seen only one wheelchair. I saw a guy moving down the street on his knees; another on his hands, with his legs all folded up so his torso would swing between his arms; another by Bab Al Yemen (the old city gate) with an enormous club foot; another with stubbed fingers on his hands; etc. And I’ve seen lots of beggars, too—women sitting on the sidewalks.
Fig. 3 How women dress and carry goods
The women mostly cover themselves completely. I’ve seen mahajbas with long jackets, and women in all black, with black cloths over their faces, and burkhas. The Yemeni abaya is a colorful and wildly patterned cloth which is worn over the head and covers the entire body. But you can see those gals coming, especially as they often seem to be carrying something large and heavy-looking on their heads. I’ve also seen several face cloths of the type that’s black with a red swirling pattern. There are all black-covered ladies (like Bedouin), but these other ladies, while completely covered, are certainly more interestingly clothed. I’ve seen no uncovered Arab heads here: even the little girls wear scarves.
The men wear mostly the heavy red and white patterned kifiyeh, without an agal, but often wrapped tightly around the forehead with a tail down the back. The traditional dress seems to be a white (not new and spotless like in Kuwait) dishdasha with a vest or jacket, and, of course, the ubiquitous curved dagger tucked in an embroidered wide belt.
The people here are very nice and polite to me, a rare western tourist—most strangely to them, I’m sure, a woman travelling alone. They don’t stare unduly or make rude comments about me that I notice, even though I have a much larger body than all of them. There aren’t many fat, or tall people here. They are handsome people, though.
Fig. 4 Rock Palace in Wadi Dahar
Lots of climbing involved here: my thighs ache. And my breath gets short even faster here than normal because of the altitude, which is about 1,300 ft above sea level. I’m used to life at sea level, in Kuwait. The houses are elongated cubes, straight up. The steps inside are steep and require big steps—particularly hard to descend these when your legs are rubbery from the climb up. Every house has its formal sitting room, furnished with carpets and cushions, on the top floor. But the views are fantastic, especially from the top of the Rock Palace at Wadi Dahar.
Fig 5. Photo of Koukaban
Koukaban, high atop the mesa, is just breathtaking, with its wall and fort towers and impressive city gates, and surrounded as it is by terraced farms below. The buildings are of cut and fitted stone blocks with lots of decorative arches for doors, windows, and just as decoration along the rooves. Of course, there are the typical Yemeni colored glass windows. Of all the suitable places I’ve seen while travelling for leaping to one’s death, Koukaban is by far the best. (Other places: the cliffs near Acapulco where death-defying performers dive far down into the sea; the dizzingly high cliff on Naxos, aGreek island, where stands the Door to the Temple of Apollo—far above the rocky cliff foot, roiling with white waves of the Mediterranean.) I stood at the abrupt edge of the mesa and looked down the cliff across the valley. Raptors soared in the air below me. My guide, AbdulHamid, says that in summer (they have spring and fall monsoons here) all the vast stretch of valley is like an emerald green carpet as far as you can see, which is pretty far. Now, during the dry season, only the wadis (crevices in the foothills) are green.
Fig. 6 Typical Yemeni architecture and decoration
The “road”—actually stone-paved foot path—down from Koukaban to the market town, Shibam, must be ancient. It was well built and is well-trafficked between the upper and lower towns. The descent on this wide path, which I decided to navigate by myself while AbdulHamid drove the car back down to Shibam, is actually pretty steep in places, and what makes it more difficult is that there are no hand-holds so you have to pick your way carefully so as not to slip and wham down on the back of your skull. The stones are worn smooth with millions of footsteps. They are not as slippery as the stones on the Acropolis, though, which were marble and slick as ice. Even stepping carefully I slipped badly more than once there. The part at the bottom of the Shibam path is the worst because the discernable path stops and you’re left with climbing down the sandstone. It’s hard to tell which way to go and I took a wrong turn, which led down into a cactus-filled wadi.
(Just to interrupt the narrative for a minute: I’ve just come from dinner having been driven from the dining room by the din of twenty French people all talking at once. They are so cute, though. The host or leader made them all stand around for ten minutes while he seated them boy-girl-boy-girl, presumably not next to their spouses. It would be funny in any context to me, a socially casual (and clumsy) American, but it is particularly amusing here in Yemen, where men and women do not sit together in the same room, let alone take pains to make sure two of the same sex are not seated next to each other. Also, the women were all dressed to the teeth: one in a short pouf dress, another in a red dress with a side slit up to the top of her leg. Not a hijab or burkha among them!)
It’s interesting to think in terms of feminism here. There is none, of course—the men are kings and the women workhorses. But the roles people play out here are necessary in some ways. What am I saying?! They’re not necessary but they work for the society as it is—still living in ancient times. Apparently the women are content as long as they are lucky enough to have married men that are good to them. (I remember, when I was in college, what a young Sudanese bride told me is a saying among them: marriage is like a watermelon. You don’t know what you’ve got until you open it. Fatalism, I guess.) How many girl children are killed here I don’t know. I do know that girls can be sold into marriage by their fathers against their will—which is against Islam, I’m told. The women certainly work hard here, perhaps harder than the men. They take care of the children and the house, prepare the food, fetch water (and hauled it up the mountainsides before the advent of pipes), and also go to market and carry huge bundles around on their shrouded heads. They also work in the fields. The men seem to drive the cars, sit in the shops, and work in the offices and at trades—all the while chewing the leaves off branches of Qat like koalas.
Fig. 7 Shibam houses
As we were returning to Sana’a, driving through the beautiful but desolate landscape, I thought how lonely I’d feel, how isolated. But that is probably not true of these people. The have their homes filled with family and children. The women undoubtedly look to their mothers and female relatives and friends for love and companionship much more than to their husbands. The husbands are probably just placeholders really, except that one might be kinder or more generous than another, and that’s the only point to think about them. The men obviously think of the home as an eating and sleeping place but not much of their lives take place in it. As I observed, they sit outside their shops and chew Qat with their male compatriots. Men and women are fundamentally segregated even within the marriage, I think. They are like different specie to each other.
Fig. 8 My journal entry showing a drawing of stairs inside a Shibam house
The house I visited in Shibam was truly amazing—and dangerous. The stairs inside were very steep, requiring huge steps up on the balls of my feet as there wasn’t room on the step for my whole foot. Plus, the platform of the step was not level, but slanted downward, as illustrated. And, the stairwell was unlit, and very dark at the bottom. No hand rails, either. The kitchen was on the bottom of the house and the Salon-al-Qat on the top with the beautiful view out the windows all along the wall. There were only carpets and back cushions all along the walls as furnishing.
A boy brought our lunch there—and kept bringing and bringing it. Typically Arab style, the two of us (me and AbdulHamid) were served enough food for ten, according to Arab hospitality. We had rice and vegetables and hot salad and tomato-pepper hot sauce, and another oily hot pepper sauce, then the lamb (which I saw butchered that morning) in soup, and another thing like cooked yoghurt with rice and the hot tomato sauce dumped into it. (Getting the theme here? hot!) The food was served boiling hot in a stone dish, and we ate it with freshly made bread (like Iranian bread). I didn’t care much for this last dish perhaps because it was so strange. But I tried everything gratefully. Finally, we were served a honey cake with delicious tea. I think that the cooking must be done over fire or on a wood-burning stove as the cake was a little burned on the bottom. Plus, I saw people selling bundles of wood, which I assumed is not needed for heat in this warm country. These stone houses do get cold though in winter, even when it’s 25° C outside. What must those castles in England and Scotland been like?
On the drive back to Sana’a, we passed through fields, some of which produced Qat, and had perimeter watch towers manned by armed guards. Apparently, theft of Qat is a problem here and a cause for bloody conflict. We passed a person walking along the road far from any town, and I said to AbdulHamid that I didn’t mind if he wanted to pick the guy up. But he said that it would be dangerous to do that, because you couldn’t be sure if the person was good or bad, and armed or not. Of course, all men were armed with their jambiya. Yemen is also known for growing coffee. In fact, I think the lore about how coffee was discovered as a beneficial drink started in Yemen: https://coffeegeek.com/blog/history/yemen-the-ancient-origins-of-coffee/ (Oh, actually, the story I was thinking about of the goatherd and his jumpy flock comes from Ethiopia.) So we didn’t pick up the man walking by the road, and at one point, AbdulHamid, who was driving, took out a branch and began pulling off Qat leaves, filling his cheek like a chipmunk. I guessed he knew what he was doing, at the wheel on that sleep-inducing narcotic. I’m sure he did it all the time.
There’s an elegant crystal chandelier in Sana’a airport, hanging above the orange plastic ticket desks. Very incongruous. It was put there by Arab design, but looks as though it was there from a time before, as though the departure lounge had been a Russian ballroom. (Added 2026 note: South Yemen, known as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, was communist before the reunification in 1990, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had been administered for a time by the Soviets.) I wanted to take a picture, but generally, photos are violently frowned upon by the authorities in these countries. There are armed soldiers everywhere. So, after my very brief visit, back to Kuwait I went, flying in reverse over those high mesas out of Sana’a.
Fig. 9 Cover of Traveller’s Guide to Yemen, picture “View over the old city of Sana’a”
[Note, 2026: All photos here from this guidebook. In 1988, I took a lot of photos on film. Would have to dig to find them.]
Traveller’s Guide to Yemen. (1983). Yemen Tourist Company, Sana’a.
