The Yafe’ Chronicles
July 25th, 2007 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
It is much easier to be on the road in Yemen than to stay in one place. Kaare and I got off to a good start Saturday as we got through three check-points between Sana’a and al-Habilayn, the main turning for Yafe’ on the road to Aden, without being noticed by the soldiers. We were sitting in the back of the “bijou” – the Peugeot shared taxi where 12 were crammed in (see here for how that works) – and the soldiers only saw our local sarongs and headscarves.
In al-Habilayn, 5 hours from Sana’a and about two from the main southern port of Aden, we got our first taste of how this part of Yemen, which used to be part of communist South Yemen until 1990, differs from the North. In the mainly Zaydi northern Yemen, people are still quite traditional in the sense that the old tribal affiliations are strong and politics are strongly tied to traditional structures. In al-Habilayn, like in Yafe’, the traditional politics of the tribes (which are still strong there) are competing against the tradition for socialist and communist mobilisation, in addition to the more recent resurgence of Islamism, which opposes loyalties other than Muslim solidarity. This was visible from the profusion of holy beards, mostly seen in Sana’a among the imams and religious clerics. In al-Habilayn and Yafe’ on the other hand, it seemed to be the most fashionable.
A guy who was in the same car as us coming from Sana’a felt responsible for the two foreigners who were ‘only going to Yafe’ because we had heard it was beautiful.’ He made sure we got off on the right intersection in a dingy little town with litter-strewn streets in pouring rain and got us out of the rain and into a minibus to Yafe’ full of other people. The bearded driver eyed us suspiciously and asked our retainer who we were. He was assured from all of us that we were good people going to the good area of Yafe’ and were assured in return that the bus was going to Lab’us in Yafe’ in good time, inshallah. Once it stopped raining, all the people got out and we realised that there were only the three of us waiting. A little later, our friend, Abd as-Salam, said he had talked to a friend from his village halfway up the mountain who would give him a ride, meaning that Kaare and I, plus a guy who had travelled for 24 hours without sleep from Saudi Arabia, were the only passengers. After an hour, passenger number four showed up, meaning that we were only missing about 14 people before we could leave. This was about four o’clock. Luckily for us, Abd as-Salam felt responsible, so when the Saudi guy got a lift in a pick-up, he said he’d talk to his friend to see if he could take us all the way up the mountains for 15 dollars. We readily agreed, having already talked about the possibility of camping out in al-Habilayn and hope for more passengers in the morning.
We would later learn that lack of public transport is widespread in Yafe’. This is because the population in this extremely mountainous region, and until recently also extremely inaccessible, have a tradition for travelling abroad and get rich and then send the money back home. People therefore tend to have their own cars and leaving the poor to wait for hours for the occasional minibus to come by. But thanks to Yemeni hospitality and eagerness to help out, we were soon on our way in a car, the two of us next to the driver in the front seat. Kaare attempted to comment on the scenery, but I was more than happy to sit by the window in my qat reverie and enjoy the view and the smells as we drove from the heat of the coast, over one of the great wadis of southern Arabia, Wadi Bana, and slowly began our ascent up into the mountains of Yafe’.
The sixty kilometres to Lab’us took more than 2 ½ hours, and along the way the dry and sparsely populated countryside grew into narrow wadis with bigger and more prosperous villages the higher we came. Having travelled the same way ten years earlier, Kevin Rushby, the author of ‘Eating the Flowers of Paradise,’ had described Yafe’ as a pretty lawless area were the local Russian doctor was complaining about the proliferation of gunshot wounds in most of the sick and injured brought in for treatment. We were therefore not certain exactly what kind of place we were travelling to.
It was dark when we suddenly turned left off the asphalt road that had only been completed a few years earlier. A bumpy ride along a gravel track took us into what looked like a village and a right turn took us into a courtyard of what Abd as-Salam and his friend told us was the local hospital. They assured us that there were Russians and other educated people working there who could help us in Yafe’ and that Lab’us anyway had all the services required by foreign visitors as we had earlier declined their invitation to stay in their village after they told us that their village had nothing, not even electricity. Although keen to jump on the invitation to stay, we figured they felt they were required to invite us, but that they were embarrassed about the lack of the most basic infrastructure.
In the hospital, they left us in the care of Saleh, a Yafe’i who had studied on Cuba during the communist regime and who was happy to speak Spanish with me. We chatted for a while and he told us about his six years in Cuba and what it was like to have left a country a communist country of two million people and to return to the unified Yemen of 18 million where Northern economic and cultural imperialism had wrecked his country. This was a complaint we would hear many times over the coming days as people, like everywhere else, seemed to have forgotten the ills and economic collapse of South Yemen and would praise the lack of corruption and the ‘Nidham’ – the ‘System’ and organisation – of the old regime. Saleh’s six years in Cuba, being educated and having all his expenses paid by the state, was still something to look back on with a sense of loss and also with annoyance for the lack of economic security and general welfare following unification and the reinforcement of Northern hegemony following the 1994 civil war between northern and southern factions.
We were taken to two hotels close to the hospital, the first being dirty and smelly and without a shower, and the second, run by an almost blind and extremely caring man in his fourties, was heaven in comparison. Saleh haggled down the price of his best room with a TV with BBC and en-suite bathroom from 15 to 10 dollars as we were poor students from Sana’a who had come by public transport to enjoy Yafe’i hospitality. Despite this, over the following days the owner would ask us every time he saw us if we needed anything or if he could get us anything from the market and clean our room perfectly every day.
In the morning, we had breakfast at the closest restaurant and chatted a bit to the friendly locals who were surprised to see tourists among them. When we left we were told that our food had already been paid for by two guys who had sat at our table while they were finishing their tea. We mucked about a bit looking at the fabulous new houses that have been built in the area with money from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and the West. A couple of kids in their late teens invited us in to one of the grandest of them, showing us their huge reception room, the enclosed garden where they grew peaches, apples and other fruits and the stunning views of the surrounding area from the roof. It had been built from the fortunes made in Jeddah on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. Before lunch, we met up with Saleh who told us that we had been spotted in town and that the police were looking for us. We therefore went to the police station where the chief was surprised to see that two tourists had ended up in his area without him knowing about it. He explained to us that due to the situation in the country after the attack on tourists in Marib a few weeks earlier, we would have to be escorted by soldiers wherever we went. We sat down with him and his crowd and chewed some of their qat and tried to reason with them. In the middle of this our friends from earlier, accompanied by what would turn out to be one of the sons of the local sheikh, turned up to take us around the area by car. This guy, Munir, somehow got the chief to allow us to move around only with one guard in civilian clothes and we then drove around the surrounding mountains on bumpy roads and with the whole lot of friends and the soldier in the land rover and chewed some of the best qat I have had in Yemen – Yafe’i qat being famous for being very good. Munir mentioned on the way that maybe we would have to pay a bit for petrol and such, but we figured it wouldn’t be anything we couldn’t afford.
As it got dark, we went to Munir’s house and were led into the huge reception room where his father, the old sheikh sat at the end of the room with people spread along the sides. People were really friendly and we chatted for a while about Norway, the only time where I have come across people in Yemen knowing that Norway has a long history of shipping and ocean trade, followed by the great qat to be found in Yafe’ and the sad state of the country at the moment. Meanwhile, we were served generous amounts of qishr, the weak Yemeni variant of coffee brewed from the husks of the coffee beans and an assortment of spices such as ginger and cardamom giving it a pale yellow colour.
Back at our hotel there was a discussion between our soldier and the local guard, who assured us that there was nothing to fear in Yafe’ and that he anyway had his rifle next to him throughout the nigh. Of course, we were not worried at all, but left them to sort it out between themselves and retired to our luxurious room. The next morning, however, we realised that our protection was ours to cater for and the blind hotel owner seemed ashamed to ask if the room the soldier had been sleeping in would be paid by us. It wasn’t much, and especially not what Munir had wanted us to pay for the previous days sightseeing and the following days trip to al-Qara, the old seat of the Sultan of Yafe’ a couple of hours drive away. We argued that we were poor students and that there was a reason that we had come by public transport and not with a rented driver and a jeep. We settled on a somewhat lower sum and agreed that that would take us to al-Qara and pay the expenses for that day, but would be uncomfortable throughout the trip by the return to all the expenditures of this and the previous day. Because of our lack of freedom of movement, we realised that this would be the best way to see Yafe’ as our plans for hiking on foot would probably not be welcomed by the polite, yet concerned, chief of police.
The trip, however, was worth the money. Al-Qara is visible on the horizon from Lab’us three mountaintops away. But the mountains of Yafe’ are extremely steep and the roads atrocious, so it took us a good two and a half hours to get there. The police chief had let us go with only one soldier under the promise that we would only go there and furthermore by sending another gun with us in case we ran into trouble. In the village below the mountain fortress, we had a delicious lunch, bought a huge bag of qat and drove up a ridge to get to the top of the mountain. The fortress town had been almost impregnable due to it’s location until the British colonial forces in Aden decided to incorporate Yafe’ in their ‘Protectorate’ to contain the Ottoman Turks in the north. A couple of planes dropping bombs on the villages of Yafe’ from time to time was enough to make the local Sultan swear loyalty to the King and to promise to defend his northern border since he was kept in power and given generous subsidies from Aden anyway.
Today, only a few families remain in this inaccessible spot, and after walking around a bit and looking at the scattering of Jewish graves who are supposedly filled with gold as that is the Jewish tradition, we settled down on the edge and chewed our qat with a stunning view to the valley and mountains below us. However, after having been spotted in the village below in the valley while having lunch, the local kids all climbed the mountain and was soon surrounding us curiously. Kaare, being the most foreigner looking of us with his blond hair, obviously got the most attention. But the children were polite and well behaved, and since Kهre is good with kids anyway, it was fun to watch him teach the whole young population of the village how to supposedly say ‘as-salamu alaykum’ and the reply, ‘wa alaykum as-salam’ in Norwegian: ‘Hva skjer’a, Bagera?’ – ‘Ingenting, Tingeling!’ (Sorry to you non-Norwegians – it takes too long to explain). By the time we left, this had either turned into the local secret language of the young of Rusad below, or would be repeated to every foreign traveller to make it that far into the mountains at a later date.
The trip back, following a different road ending up as a rocky riverbed on the bottom of a wadi, was bumpy to the extreme, and from the muttering of the driver and the concerned comments from all eight passengers in the car, the exhaust pipes and the suspension of the land rover will probably never be the same again. After three hours like this, and in increasing heat as we came lower towards the coast, we finally hit the main road at a town called Askariyah. We were offered to drive into the town to buy beer as this is one of the few places left in southern Yemen outside of Aden where alcohol is still drunk openly, but we politely declined as alcohol is not very hard to come by in Sana’a, especially not for foreigners.
The driver of the car was mumbling about the cost of fixing the car after the trip, so that night Kaare and I decided it was time to leave Yafe’ as it was getting expensive and the thought of going hiking with two guards who would want to sit down for lunch and then stay seated for another few hours to chew their qat, which would be paid by us, did not sound like the kind of hiking we’d had in mind before coming to Yafe’.
Our trusted soldier was sad to hear that we were leaving the next morning as being taken around in a car and treated to free food and qat for two days was much more exiting than his otherwise dreary life stuck in the police station in Lab’us, hours away from his family and on a salary the equivalent of a hundred dollars a month. He therefore asked us if we could ask the police chief if he could guard us all the way to al-Baydah, the main city east of Yafe’ on the eastern main road to Sana’a, which would be close to where his family lives. After paying a polite visit to the police and reassuring the chief that we’d had a great time in Yafe’, we were released and our soldier told that he could take two days of leave, ‘but no more!’. He was probably the happiest man in Yafe’ that day as he smiling all the way to the qat market, talking about going back to ‘the madame’ and chewing good Yafe’i qat, which he spent a small fortune buying.
On our way to the hospital to say farewell to Saleh, we were accosted by a guy with a long beard carrying a cardboard box. He was shouting at us in the local dialect and extremely hard to understand all while he was shouting in general: ‘Eggs 30 riyals! Chickens 10 riyals!’ He was obviously exited and we were unsure exactly what he wanted from us. We stopped and looked into the cardboard box that he had placed on the ground and opened in front of us. It was full of little chickens dyed in all kinds of colours. There were green chickens, blue chickens, purple chickens, and the occasional naturally coloured yellow chicken to complement the spectrum. Our happy soldier told the man to leave us alone while telling us that ‘He has no brain!’
In al-Baydah he had to take us to the police station to sign us over to the local police before he could leave, and the local chief was smiling from ear to ear when he met two foreigners, not only dressed in the local fashion in sarongs, but also speaking Arabic and chewing qat and otherwise being a lot more interesting than the regular tour groups they were responsible for escorting. He started talking about our escort and we were arguing for a while in Arabic of how this was not at all necessary as our travel permit explicitly stated that we were travelling by public transport and that we had come all the way from Sana’a to Yafe’ without a single soldier accompanying us. These discussions with people in charge were actually the most satisfying of our whole trip as we were able to get our point across and to make them change their minds, all while arguing with them in Arabic. As we said we were not eager to pay yet another seat in a shared taxi for a soldier, the chief instead told us that he would provide us with a whole police car free of charge.
Thus, we sped through the countryside at a 130 kilometres per hour in a police car that occasionally turned on its siren to get the slow lorries out of the way. The army checkpoints were quickly traversed with the uniformed men shoving our permits at the soldiers and telling them to get on with it. The whole way we chewed qat with the officers who were well impressed with these foreigners so different from the normal and boring lot in hired jeeps they normally had to escort through the governorate. In Rada’, and hour and a half north of al-Baydah, we asked if we could stop and look at the old mosque and they said it was no problem. When we arrived, though, the mosque who has recently been restored to its past splendour through 18 years of restoration work that has required the training of a whole new generation of artisans skilled in the old ways of building and decoration, was locked, and one of the officers went off to locate the caretaker. He came dragging back an old man who was obviously not happy with having his afternoon rest interrupted. He showed us around the mosque, all while the other officers were waiting in the car outside, but was more pleased when we tipped him for his troubles as we were leaving.
Outside the city we were let out at another police checkpoint where we would be taken by another car to the next city where we could catch a shared taxi to Sana’a. One police officer we chatted to here asked us our names. As usual when Kaare is asked about his name, he pronounces it in a way that means ball. Seeing that the soldier didn’t get it, I told him ‘You know, “ball” as in “football”!’ The soldier looked horrified and replied: ‘No, no, he is a human being after all!’ Apart from this guy, the police officers at this checkpoint, being late in the day, did not seem too happy to be dragged away from their qat chew behind a wall of sandbags that looked ready to collapse at the first hint of shooting. They therefore stopped several cars until they found a guy going to Sana’a. The police officers told us he was a friend of theirs, but I am not too sure about that. In any case, we were bundled into the pick-up and taken to Sana’a in record time. On arrival, we tried to give him money for the ride, but he told us not to worry about it and left us to make our way back to the Old City. It felt good being back in civilisation where people speak a familiar dialect and getting across town takes as long as the ride with the al-Baydah police.
