bucket list destination - Yemen

The reason I was in Egypt was actually to take a flight from Cairo to Seiyun, in Yemen, with a tour group. It’s not a country you can visit as an individual, but visas are granted to tour groups meeting specified criteria, so I’d signed up for a tour – a week in mainland south Yemen, followed by a week on the island of Socotra.  Then earlier this year, trouble broke out in Yemen, between the UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (based in the more northerly part of the country…) and the Saudi-backed and internationally-recognised Presidential Leadership Council (the government), with the former rapidly taking over significant parts of the country but then being pushed back, with the main results being their expulsion from the Leadership Council and the withdrawal of their UAE support.  Thankfully this was all over before my trip was due to take place, so I could still go to ‘southern’ Yemen, but the withdrawal of the UAE included the cancellation of their weekly Tuesday flights out of Socotra to Abu Dhabi and their replacement by weekly Friday flights out to Jeddah.  I was given the option of cutting my mainland trip short by four days so as to give me a Friday-to-Friday week in Socotra, or maintaining my full week on the mainland and cancelling the Socotra part.  I opted for the former, on the assumption that mainland Yemen was more likely to become more dangerous (and thus un-visitable) in the future than Socotra which I would visit some other time.

Who knows whether that will turn out to have been the right decision?  But I’ve wanted to visit Yemen ever since I saw an exhibition, decades ago, at the British Museum of photographs of Yemeni architecture.  I missed out on their exhibition-related tour, which had already taken place when I saw the poster advertising it, but I knew from that moment that it was somewhere I had to visit one day.  Why I left it so long I can’t explain (it wasn’t a dangerous place to go at that time), but I had finally got round to it and was not going to cut the tour short.  & I have to say that my week there was absolutely superb, so I’m very glad I went for the full week.

From the moment the plane got low enough for me to properly see the Yemeni landscape below us (thank goodness I was able to get a window seat!), I was entranced, as this was like no country I had seen before.  Stunning landscapes, and then during the week I also saw the lovely mud-brick architecture (and the beautiful mosques), the occasional date palm oasis, and elements of the local culture, from the women in their traditional Madhalla hats – who didn’t like to be photographed so the photo isn’t great but you get the idea – to the qat (also spelt khat) markets and seemingly all of the men (including our drivers and guide) chewing qat for much of the day!  As regards the position of women, by the way, yes I wore a hijab for the entire week - not obligatory, but culturally appropriate.

Learning a little more about the political culture was interesting too.  The two regions were initially separate countries: the Yemen Arab Republic that had previously been under the Ottoman Empire (‘North Yemen’), and the communist-aligned People's Democratic Republic of Yemen that had been under the British (‘South Yemen’).  Then in 1990 they agreed to unite, but for various reasons, but internal and external, things went downhill … my local guide told me that some 70-80% of the population of South Yemen would love the British to come back and rule them again as we would, they believe, do a much better job than the present government!!

But back to reality … with three more photographs of this stunning country.