a new day in old sana'a

Sana'a is a wonderful city. The sheer size of the old medina and the fabulous brick tower houses leave an unforgettable impression. Sana'a served as a comfortable home base to our Yemen trip, after arrival and before departure, and between our trips west, to Socotra, and to the Hadramawt.



Today, Old Sana'a is completely surrounded by a modern city, but is still large, chaotic and lively enough to retain its raw beauty. Before the Italians paved the Old City, Sana'a was refered to as the Arabian Venice, the water replaced with dust. Pavement meant easier car access (less dust less Venice), but at the same time probably saved Sana'a from abandonment, or from mummification. One of the most wonderful paving jobs is found on the western edge of the Old City, where a paved riverbed doubles as a highway in the dry season.



Everything is worth pointing your camera at, and everything has been fotographed over and over again, so we didn't take a lot of pictures in Sana'a. Just strolled around in all directions, discovering the different soukhs, at different times of day, getting our nuts and raisins for the next biking chapter. Even souvenir shopping is a pleasure in Sana'a.



Although some have been abandoned or built upon, Old Sana'a has retained some of its urban gardens. Cultivated patches of green, allowing light and air into dense clusters of brick, those gardens are almost nicer than regular city parks. Urban farming, the dream of any urban designer.
At its heyday, the city of Sana'a was completely self-sufficient - residents could fully depend on the inner city gardens for food supplies.



We really felt at home in the capsule called Sana'a, mainly through its residents - the friends at Yemeni Dreams, the witty urban kids, the English or French speaking elderly Sanaanis, the vendors, the barber.

On one of our first strolls, we heard a bunch of kids calling us 'Absi wa Lena' and bursting into laughter. Finally Zemzem, a bright young polyglot from Thulla rushed us through the soukh to find us a bag of potato chips featuring Absi and Lena, two manga characters, apparently famous from Yemeni television. And actually - Absi with the messy hair and Lena with two ponytails - we had to admit the resemblance... All of a sudden we had the perfect answer to the "whatsyurname?" resonating from every street corner.

Picture our astonishment when we came back to Sana'a after two weeks in the Hadramawt, stepped out of Abdulalem's 4by4 in front of Taj Talha, and were welcomed by the same bunch of kids, interrupting their game of bottlecap soccer shouting... Absi wa Lena! Absi wa Lena!

down to the arabian sea

"I am happy, and I am free!"



In truck stop Huweyrah we connect back to the 'Hadramawt Highway', the asphalt road from Tarim to Al Mukhalla - a perfect spot to catch a ride with sweet Abdullah Ali Abdullah and his qat-chewing buddies, all the way down to Al Mukhalla.




Al Mukhalla is a pleasant port town on the Arabian Sea. Although relatively crowded, it feels more relaxed than the Hadrami cities on the other side of the jol, down in the wadi. And the fish... is delicious.





The increasingly scenic coastal road from Al Mukhalla to Aden brings us west, to the border of Shabwah province...




Sunny greetings from Yemen!

'La spiaggia fantastica' at Bir Ali, the official end point of our trip, where we spend two gorgeous January days in the company of black lavarock, extinct volcanoes, turqoise waters, strong winds, blinding sunlight, waterfoil, the good old crabs, and some Shabwah tribesmen.





At dusk, after a climb up one of the nearby volcanoes, we dismantle the bikes, dust off the sand, and fold them back into their suitcases...



The next morning, 6 o'clock, sunrise over Bir Ali. The return trip begins - tonight in Sana'a, then later Brussels and finally back to Manhattan...

the charm of the jol

After a peak down the rim, there's just us, our bikes, an ocean of stones baking in the sun, a dust track fading in the distance, and the name of a town a couple of days ahead - "Huweyrah" - where the track supposedly reconnects to the asphalt road.

The horizon, however a little intimidating, is a breathtaking relief after spending a week between towering canyon walls, the call to prayer bouncing from side to side.



The straight line on our (sort of useless) map turns out be a winding track along the ups and downs of the stone desert. The Jol isn't flat at all, thousands of local depressions - baby wadis - are wedged out of the rock, leaving table mountains reaching up to the 'original' sediment level. Below the map we should have had, showing the Jol in its topographical diversity, the gravel road in white.



You go steeply down and steeply up on the other side, and the slow-footed camels take their time; and, in a blank space of the map, the existence of these ravines makes it impossible to guess even roughly how long a journey will take across the jol. I was finding it just double what I had been told. (fS)

The Jol isn't completely empty either - we come across several water wells surrounded with simple autarkic settlements, a school, some camels, and the ubiquitous Pakistani road engineer. He invites us for a great lunch at his encampment, restocks our supplies, and lets me flip through the engineering drawings for the road he's currently building from Mukallah to Wadi Doan. And he confirms we're on the right track to Huweyrah, more or less halfway.




In the winter of 1937, Freya Stark - "one of the most unconventional and courageous explorers of her time" - crossed the Jol with a British archeological expedition. Traveling by car from Mukhallah to Tarim (opposite direction from us), she remembers her earlier expedition across the Jol, by camel.

We climbed to the empty topmost level of the Jol. Here all looked dead. The plain lay like a stripped athlete, steaked yellow and glistening in the sun. On the horizon, scarce emerging, lay the ridge of Kor Saiban and my former journey. Regretfully I remembered it, thinking how much is taken from the tenuous charm of the jol by rapid travel; its delicate and barren gradations, dependent on the slow transience of light, vanish into drabness under the strident wheels of cars. Even as I lamented, Providence sent a puncture, and gave us ten minutes in the heat of the morning, which the archaeologist improved to an hour by wandering after flints. (fS)

The classic trip across the Jol - a straight shot from the Arabian Sea to Wadi Hadramawt - took 5 to 8 days by camel. We zigzagged from Tarim to Al Mukhalla in a similar amount of time: three days through Wadi Hadramawt, two in Wadi Doan, and three days on the Jol.



Skies on fire at the end of day two, time to set up camp. More stark Jol beauty below...