Excursion to Shihara

Setting off

Today we’re off on another adventure.  Possibly the biggest adventure we’ll have in Yemen.  We’re going to Shihara, halfway towards the border with Saudi Arabia.  It’s a tribal region that’s considered the Wild West of Yemen.  Yemen has many medieval type cities built high in accessible places.  What makes this one different is that it is more inaccessible than others, the security situation is dodgier and we are overnighting.  

I woke early to collect in the washing I hung out last night.  Yep, I did washing on an overnight stop back at my home base.  We were supposed to leave at 0700 but with Yemeni time, the transport arrived at 0730.

We got to the edge of the city and waited for over half an hour for our armed escort of about six soldiers or police with machine guns, plus a mounting on the back of the truck for another weapon.  The escort is mandatory in order to get a permit (tasrir).  It is to minimise the risk of kidnapping.  I’ll talk more about security later below.

Here, Marika and her cousin joined us as well.  Marika is an amazing German woman in my hostel who is deaf.  But despite this, she learnt Arabic as a foreign language!  How amazing is that, despite not being able to hear the sounds?!

On the way

We carried on from here around 0900.  After a few hours, we stopped for lunch of salta, chicken and bread.  Sealed roads gradually turned into dust tracks. 

People-watching, I noticed that there was fewer people here with janbiya but instead, the arm of choice was the Kalashnikov AK47.  I was told that in the highlands, guns and machine guns are a way of life … possibly in the same way that daggers are a way of life in the city.  Perhaps the arms are necessary to protect the valuable Qat crops.  

The landscape on the journey was arid except for a short patch of green.  The Yemeni obsession with Qat (a kind of chewing leaf; arguably a drug) is even more obvious in the highlands where they are grown.  So much land is devoted to this pricey commodity that there doesn’t seem to be enough land devoted to nutritional agriculture.  I guess you could say Yemenis are Qatholics (as their second religion after being Muslims).

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Security and a close call

FYI, there are different grades of risk for travel within Yemen, and this will be the “highest”.  I’ve so far done the “no permit required” areas, eg. the road trip to Aden.  Much of the country is in an intermediate risk grade where one has to obtain a travel permit (granted relatively easily for a fee).  This trip requires a permit and armed escort.  

I’ve seen that many Americans pretend to be the same nationality as their travel companions (Brits or Canadians) when not required to show passports at checkpoints.  They claim that Americans are sometimes not let through (despite permits) as the Yemeni government can’t afford to have anything happen to Americans.

Shihara, and the area surrounding it, is the wild west of Yemen.  Although we had about 6 armed guards (with machine guns) looking after us on our trip, one vehicle in our convoy got run off the road by opportunistic machine-gun toting locals. 

Thanks to the armed guards following close behind, we didn’t find out what their fate would have been otherwise.  The near-victim in this case was a Marika who had been in Yemen for about 8 years … she claims that this is her first incident and events like this are rare.

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Finally in Shihara

Towards the later part, the road went uphill.  We went up, up and up.  Our very old Toyota Landcruiser managed the paths cut into seemingly sheer cliffs with no problems.  The trip was a 4X4 lover’s dream.  

The ascent seemed endless and I never thought we’d get to Shihara.  But eventually I saw Shihara’s icon, its stone bridge above us.  We continued our ascent and arrived soon after.  

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We put up at a simple funduq (hotel).  I was a medieval kind of place, two floors up inside a building fashioned from cut rocks as building blocks.  The walls were plastered with mud.  The interior floors were plastered but made from tree trunk supports.

All the boys in the group shared one big room while the girls took another one.  The toilet was horrible.  There was another one upstairs which was slightly better but had no water.

We locked up and went for a walk around the village.  There was lots of garbage down the hillslope near our funduq.  We employed some children as guides to take us around.

Shihara has a limestone arch footbridge, constructed in the 17th century by a local lord to connect two villages across a very deep gorge.

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Overnighting

We enjoyed a dinner of scrambled eggs, rice and a thick soup.  Dessert was a honeyed bread.  

After dinner we played some games.  A couple were educational actually; eg. finding the plural of an Arabic word.  

Since my skills in Arabic are more limited, I resorted to entertaining the others with my impersonation of my teacher Ghailan:  

• Specifically, it was regarding how some things are not distinguished in Arabic, eg. vowels.  When I questioned him about pronunciation for Egypt (Misr vs Masr) or Eleven (Ishroon vs Ishreen).  He says “Same”.  
• On the other hand, there are a number of consonants in Arabic that don’t have equivalents in English, eg. several distinct consonants map into only one consonant such as D, S, T in English.  He would say “Different”.  
• And since there is no B in Arabic, he often points something out to me by saying “This is imburtant”.

We retired before 2100.  It was one of those rare instances in my travels where I went to bed without brushing my teeth (or a shower).

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