Yemeni O'Cricket

So we'll be leaving the middle east tomorrow to make our long trek home for summer vacation. On the way we'll be backpacking through England, Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. We'll arrive in New Brunswick July 24th (inshallah) and post lots of great pics at that time. Until then, please keep us in your prayers as we are travelling (specifically that we'll meet lots of friendly strangers who like to help out dirty, weary, hungry hikers AND that we won't get lost or eaten by Nessie). So bye for now - we'll be back now and then to let you know how the summer's going, and we're returning to Yemen in September.

Cheers!

Awadh's Village - The saga continues

Hello everyone,

I hope that we’re not boring you with our pictures but we wanted to show you a few more shots of Awadh’s village. We went for another visit this past weekend and this time Ruth had a bilingual friend with her, which made for a better time all around.

We were able to take some pictures of the girls on this visit. They were so eager to pose for a picture and they’d all dressed up for the occasion-especially this little girl in pink. She’d braided her hair and donned her best dress.

And this my friends is the hottest kitchen in the world. I have no idea how they stand it, but the ladies cook rice and other dishes in this small stone building while the goat meat is roasted over coals outside.

As we mentioned before there is quite a good farm in the village (dates and limes mostly). They are quite adept at scrambling up the palms to snag the dates.

Thankfully they do have running water, but the pools in which it collects are green with algae; the water doesn’t even look fit for irrigation, but this is for drinking. And yet this is considered one of the “lucky” villages.

In closing, we'd like to introduce you to Mr. Leo-Gek (leopard + gecko ~he is spotted like a leopard) . This little guy was running around in the bushes.

One of the villagers caught him and was going to kill him because apparently the lizards "milk the goats", whatever that means!

Since then he has become the pet of a 12 year old boy (who was the one who named him by the way).

The last time we saw him he wasn't looking too good and very bloated so maybe Mr. Leo-Gek is actually a pregnant she. Yemeni Cricket isn't up on lizard anatomy: )

The Castle and the Cave

We were riding around in our automobile…when all of a sudden we look over and see the remains of an old mud structure. Now, I’ve got to admit that we’d become pretty ho hum about the whole ancient mud houses thing during our trip to Shibam; but this caught our attention. You know that plastic mold that you could buy at the store to make the perfect sand castle? Well, this, umm… castle of sand… was the exact shape (but not size) and since we were on vacation, after all, we decided to stop and relive those lazy childhood summer days. I wish we could give you some reassurance that we wisely assessed the situation and discussed the structural integrity of the castle, but who am I kidding?! We climbed on up and checked it out, and we've got no regrets - it was fantastic.

Anywho, we had a great time looking in and around the place.

Found some Arabic writing carved into the wall and also these little bug houses. More like villas really, those are some industrious bugs!

We were interested to know how old it was or who it belonged to but the only Yemeni who strolled by seemed very disinterested in its history so we didn’t have much luck as far as information goes, but that's ok, we had fun. We even managed to collect some old shards of pottery to put in our apartment.

You just never know what's going to be around the next bend in the road.....which brings me to our next adventure.

While following a back road down the wadi we saw this gaping hole in the wall of a dried-up river bed. "Looks like a cave," we said. "Let's stop and explore," we said. And we did.

We climbed up to the mouth and followed the winding tunnel. We had standing headway for most sections of the journey, connected in parts by dusty crawl spaces.

It was very dark inside (as caves are wont to be) but a lot of fun. Here we are in the largest "room", which was about midway in and had a small hole at the top, letting in a rather photogenic amount of daylight.

The cave, like the castle walls, was riddled with these bug houses, the inhabitants of which we were grateful not to encounter (especially since they appeared to have at one time outnumbered us significantly).

The other end (much smaller) opened into a series of mini-canyons, which were also a good time, and merited a time investment of their own.






But alas, the day was dragging on, and we had other destinations in mind. So we crawled/ walked/stumbled back through the cave, across the river bed, and off into the evening for more fun in ancient villages.





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Children of Shibam: Say cheese!

We never get tired of taking photos of children! In the hope that you aren't tired of seeing them, here are a few more.....



Monkey-boy here was a wee bit frightening, but cute in a googly-eyes sorta way.



















Some of our subjects were a little more shy, while others objected quite strongly to Sean's artistic vision.















But alas, eventually our muses dispersed one by one....






























...until we were left with a different kind of "kid" to capture on camera.

Al-Hawta and The Hike

So on Friday afternoon we decided on lunch at the Al-Hawta Palace Hotel in nearby Al-Hawta. It really is a palace - or, it was a palace, for a long long time. Now (as the name suggests) it's a hotel. It's a huge walled property with many buildings, all surrounded by the most green we've seen since coming to Yemen. In olden days it would have been self-sustaining; inside the wall is the palace proper, as well as towers, servant-buildings, barns, gardens, wells... incredible.




We spent a couple hours in the swimming pool before we left, constantly attended to by juice-bearing employees who had nothing else to do, as the entire place was empty and we had it all to ourselves.

The couple pictured here were travelling with us - relatives of a fellow Yemen-based teacher (also travelling with us).





By and by, in wandered Martin - a French-German-Australian fellow who asked us if we'd hiked the canyon wall over Shibam yet. We said no, but we would probably do it later that day. So he came with us:) It was a lot of fun, and good to have a guide. It was hot that day, hovering steadily around 44 degrees.



The view was amazing! The ridge is really high, and we could see everywhere - across the Wadi, up and down it for miles.



Imagine what a mighty river once carved this place out!

It was getting dark near the end, and we figured that, as tricky as the ascent was, the descent would probably be harder, so we should definitely do it before nightfall. A bit of a shame, as we would have loved to stay longer in that breathtaking panorama.


We were right about the descent - it was really tricky; the rocks in the last half were very loose, it was getting dark fast, and the trail was hard to keep track of. And we were all wearing sandals. Martin took a flying head-first leap when the rocks gave way under him; he sort of twisted in the air and landed on his feet again, so I gathered he's not new to this sort of thing.

We reached the bottom a little while after sundown - our legs were trembling from the exertion (this cricket should get in shape:) and we were very dusty, but it was a lot of fun and it all felt wonderful; a wholly enjoyable hike.

Shibam - finally

After a few more hours of driving in the highlands - which looked a lot like the surface of the moon - the road took this crazy drop to the bottom of the Wadi (valley). We snaked through ancient villages and surprisingly lush farmlands; it was a beautiful drive.








Along the way we met these camels, who were far more friendly than the camels around our place.

We spent the next three nights at a gorgeous guest house beside the city wall, which was our base from which we took day-trips to nearby towns, etc.






And as for Shibam itself, here it is. The whole place is made of mud - the wall, the houses, everything. A lot of those buildings are seven stories tall and over five hundred years old! It's an incredible example of early urban planning. Many of the streets are too narrow for anything but a bicycle; almost all the animals in the city are free-range; enchanting shoppes abound. The whole look and feel of the place is like something out of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.


In other news, I stood for a while under this pot, trying to discern its purpose, but to no avail. Notice the elaborately carved window-shutters, though. They're designed to give maximum ventilation while minimizing visibility (from the outside).

The city is currently asking the government to fund a project that would see more of its buildings plastered on the outside, as Shibam was recently hit with a rainstorm and some of the buildings (like this one) didn't fare so well.

And that's it for Shibam, but there's lots more to come from the weekend - stay tuned.

And the adventure begins.....

Thursday’s itinerary: meet at Nick’s place at 8:20 a.m., pick up our fellow travelers at the airport at 9:00 a.m., be on the road by 9:30 a.m. for our 5 hour drive to Shibam. Check in at the hotel around 3:00 p.m.

Thursday’s reality: we get a call at 8:00 a.m. telling us that Nick’s car is in the shop getting the electric windows fixed, as the air conditioner quit the night before – some ventilation would be nice in the 40+ degree heat (that’s Celsius folks, oh yeah). We were assured that it would be fixed by 9:00 and would only throw our schedule off by a titch. By 12:20 the whole group was questioning whether the windows were worth the Yemeni pace of repair. But a mere 10 minutes later we were on our way! Speeding towards carefree fun in the sun, we encountered our first checkpoint where the guards let us through with only 15 minutes of hassle and two phone calls - not too shabby. At the checkpoint they also had a lot of coconut vendors who gladly demonstrated the shucking/hacking technique employed to make a cute little coconut-cup from which to drink. Then we made our way up a steep, snaking road through the mountains – or tried to. We were halfway up – and way beyond civilization - when trouble announced itself with a sudden and very loud rattling under the hood.

It wasn’t nearly as serious as
it sounded, though: the alternator belt had started to shred, so the loose bits were cut free and on we went. Home free? No way. A few miles later, up on the plateau, that belt flew off and took the fan belt with it.

With a menacing hiss the radiator emptied itself all over the engine and, in the middle of a barren desert, the Land Cruiser ground to a sickly halt. The windows, by the way, stopped working about five minutes into the trip. Anyway we sat in the scorching heat for a bit until two trucks stopped (one with tools). Everything was fixed up (minus the alternator belt, voted unnecessary) and we nursed the car to the nearest “town”.

It was a desert truck stop with a little restaurant, so we decided to stay for a lunch of grilled goat and rice. The guys who stopped for us followed us there and paid for the lunch, the belts, and an oil change!

They wouldn’t take no for an answer, and the hospitality made us feel a little closer to home:)

We pulled into Shibam – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – around 7:30 p.m. Stay tuned for the rest of Yemeni Cricket’s crazy capers. Car trouble free - for the most part ;)

We're Baaa-aaack...

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the flurry of inactivity on our blog - we've been travelling:) It was a four-day weekend, and we'll let you know all about it in a series of posts coming soon!

~The Cricket

Canadiana

Fact: Most shopkeepers in Yemen have a TV on in the shop all the time, usually playing an obscure Arabic soap opera. That's all the background you need for this one.

We stopped into a shop on our way to school the other morning, so as to purchase a couple Hadrami cakes (local speacialty - flat, very dense, dry as dust and kind of bitter - what can I say, they grew on us). I was paying when we heard a strangely familiar voice say, "You can club baby seals with Honduran immigrants for all I care."

Surprised to hear English, we turned around.

It was Dog River's own Hank Yarbo! CORNER GAS WAS ON THE TELEVISION!!! In our shocked excitement we hollered with glee, to the great bemusement of the shopkeeper. Calming down, we pointed to the screen and said "Canada!"; he gave us an understanding smile, then motioned for us to stay and watch. Alas, we were already running late.

Even so, I'd have to call that one of the highlights of our year.

What's new pussy cat?

There are cats in Yemen, many cats. The locals believe they have souls; perhaps it is considered sacrilegious to un-tom a tom cat. In any event, they outnumber the people three to one, and I think they are becoming aware of this. The kittens are cute, cuddly; adorable. The adults are harder to categorize. Lean faces, sharp noses and intelligent eyes give you an uneasy feeling when you see them. And you do. See them that is. They are lurking around every corner, hungrily yowling at each garbage can and slinking under every parked car.

We have been making a habit of giving our lunch scraps to the cats in the quadrangle. They looked healthier, they looked appeased. We have not had leftovers in many days. They look mangier, they look displeased. Rebellion is stirring - it may be the heat, it may have been only a matter of time. Whatever the reason, I think they are organizing. Can a creature have a soul, yet be without conscience? We shall see, we shall see………