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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