Above: Military helicopters at Sana’a airport. Leaving Yemen Leaving Yemen was sad for me.  Sana’a had been my home for 5 weeks.  I’ve never been to a school that’s been so cool.  Where in the world would you find your teacher wearing a gun holster (with bullet holders) to class? I also loved the climate […]

Visiting Jibla While Ibb is an important town for the region, the historic and touristic value of the area is actually at Jibla about 30 mins away by van. It was a nice hillside town.  It is famous for its museum which was the Palace of Queen Arwa (1048–1138). She was reputed to be a […]

Taizz stopover The plan for the day was to head to Taizz for a walkaround, before continuing to our nightstop at Ibb. We had breakfast of eggs, bread and tea at the hotel. Eelco went for a last walk in the old city of Zabid but we didn’t bother. To get to Taizz, we walked […]

Getting to Zabid As a final exploration of Yemen, we are headed to the lowlands and surrounding highlands in the west of the country closest to the Red Sea. Kim and I, together with Eelco who speaks better Arabic, headed to the shared taxi stand near Bab Al Yemen around 0800. But we were redirected […]

This morning, Kim realised that he had lost about EUR200 while in Shihara, made up of Japanese Yen and New Zealand dollars.  He suspected that it may have been taken while we had gone for a walk after arrival in Shihara, despite having been given a padlock by our hosts.  [Edit: I realised many years […]

I didn’t sleep very well, waking at 0130 then dozing till 0630.  Breakfast was served in our room and consisted of a sesame flat bread and a honey bread.  You can’t go wrong with sweet stuff! Kim and I hesitantly used the horrible toilet, somewhat in fear of even worse ones on the road.  Eelco braved […]

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 […]

Nothing morning We had a sleep in today till 0845 before having breakfast of muesli by the poolside.  I wanted to have a last wander around town before our afternoon flight.  There wasn’t actually anything specifically we could see so it made sense to take another look at the town’s icon, the Sultan’s Palace.  This […]