Shared taxis are the dream of the impulsive traveler. It waits around till enough people show up to fill it and are usually faster than buses, mostly because their drivers are suicidal maniacs.
The problem is that they are really old and have a tendency to break down. They are also, as most things in Yemen, not 'original' but are converted into whatever is most useful. This means that a 30 year-old car is converted into a shared taxi by ripping out the interior and putting another row of seats in the back. This means that you can cram ten passengers into the car: Two in the front next to the driver and four on each of the rows in the back:
But it's a 'shared' experience and the passengers and the driver talk and shout at eachother for the whole trip, and the driver stops whenever someone needs to buy sweets or qat or needs to pray or when it's lunchtime and so on.
This is the taxi that took me from Al-Hodeida to Sana'a. Luckily for me, the two other guys in my row wanted to split the price of the fourth seat to make more room for the three of us.
When we stopped for lunch in order for the driver to drive back to the nearest town to fix some trouble with the engine, my fellow passengers didn't waste any time and bought their qat at the same time:
I had been chewing for a week straight, so I had decided that I shouldn't chew that day. I tried telling my fellow passengers that I usually chew, but my mouth and gums were pretty sore from too much chewing. But the generous Yemenis never take a no for a no, and of course I ended up accepting their offerings of qat. At the next stop I ended up just buying my own so that they wouldn't end up without qat because of me...
When the driver realised that everybody but him had bought qat he was pretty upset, but he calmed down when the others showered him with qat and told him he could stop later instead. So he munched happily on their qat until we stopped for a second qat stop later on:
As always, the roads of Yemen offered continuous entertainment:
Sometimes the driver trusts God and qat too much and the car goes off the road. This was not my taxi (luckily enough), but an accident that happened a while before we went past. Miraculously enough no one was seriously hurt according to the people hanging around there:
