wadi doan
Narrower and less accessible than Wadi Hadramawt, side canyon Wadi Doan offers a similar but more dramatic panorama - palm groves and fields lined with irrigation canals filling the wadi floor, densely clustered mud towns creeping up the canyon walls, proud palaces along a single gravel road. As we bike 'upstream', the scenery intensifies gradually, and culminates in the bird's eye views from the rim of the canyon wall...
Above, evening and morning scenes in Seef.
Seef has a cute hostel, the walls of its dining room packed with stickers of travel companies that have passed through over the years and carry you out of the canyon, as far as Sana'a, Italy, even Lichtervelde. In Seef we buy a jar of the renowned Doan honey, supposedly the finest in the world.
Doan's gravel road reduces biking speed to Socotra level, yet we don't mind, busy taking in the increasingly dramatic scenery of steep mud towns and palm groves all around...
Inside, Hadrami houses are complex and enigmatic. The sparsely furnished rooms are almost an afterthought to the high, blank-walled corridors and staircases which seem to fill much of the building’s volume. Everything seems designed to bewilder, like a maze for laboratory rats, until you realize that the intention is to prevent the meeting of incompatibles – different sexes, different classes. ... From the outside, these buildings are essentially sober – an architecture where form, function and mass have won over ornament. There are exceptions though, like the playing-card symbols stencilled in pastel colors over the palaces of Doan. (tMS)
Finally we arrive in Al Khorayba, a bustling town along the gravel path. Only the added mud colors - with splashes of gorgeous light blue - make today's Khorayba different from Freya Stark's pictures from the 1930s. Wonderful... yet not to the delight of a couple of youngsters we end up talking to, who desperately want to move to Mukhalla to set up an animation studio.
From a rock outcrop, we watch the canyon change as clouds pass by (below).
Last stop in Wadi Doan, past Khorayba, is the house of Osama bin Laden's ancestors. A robust building (above) - not surprising as Osama's father made his fortune in Saudi Arabia's construction business - in an idyllic setting (below)...
Time to leave the sunken world of the Wadis, to finally climb our faithful companions the canyon walls, and take a look what's beyond the rim...
Above, evening and morning scenes in Seef.
Seef has a cute hostel, the walls of its dining room packed with stickers of travel companies that have passed through over the years and carry you out of the canyon, as far as Sana'a, Italy, even Lichtervelde. In Seef we buy a jar of the renowned Doan honey, supposedly the finest in the world.
Doan's gravel road reduces biking speed to Socotra level, yet we don't mind, busy taking in the increasingly dramatic scenery of steep mud towns and palm groves all around...
Inside, Hadrami houses are complex and enigmatic. The sparsely furnished rooms are almost an afterthought to the high, blank-walled corridors and staircases which seem to fill much of the building’s volume. Everything seems designed to bewilder, like a maze for laboratory rats, until you realize that the intention is to prevent the meeting of incompatibles – different sexes, different classes. ... From the outside, these buildings are essentially sober – an architecture where form, function and mass have won over ornament. There are exceptions though, like the playing-card symbols stencilled in pastel colors over the palaces of Doan. (tMS)
Finally we arrive in Al Khorayba, a bustling town along the gravel path. Only the added mud colors - with splashes of gorgeous light blue - make today's Khorayba different from Freya Stark's pictures from the 1930s. Wonderful... yet not to the delight of a couple of youngsters we end up talking to, who desperately want to move to Mukhalla to set up an animation studio.
From a rock outcrop, we watch the canyon change as clouds pass by (below).
Last stop in Wadi Doan, past Khorayba, is the house of Osama bin Laden's ancestors. A robust building (above) - not surprising as Osama's father made his fortune in Saudi Arabia's construction business - in an idyllic setting (below)...
Time to leave the sunken world of the Wadis, to finally climb our faithful companions the canyon walls, and take a look what's beyond the rim...
posted by Jan at 11:00 PM
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