From a Distance

It appears that we've shown you pictures of every city we've been to in Yemen except the one we live in. This is Mukalla, our beautiful coastal town. It's quite small and very compact. Arranged in a row along the top of the ridge you can see four white gaurd houses - testament to a violent past. That's a Somaliam fishing boat moored on the right.

As the mountains and the sea leave very little room for expansion, overcrowding is really the best and only option available - 'downtown' is a labyrinth of tiny streets and alleyways, crammed full of shops and street vendors. In the mornings and evenings it's insanely busy and cacaphonous, but between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. you could swear it's a ghost town, recently abandoned by every single living thing. Like most towns in Yemen, the place just shuts down for the afternoon; 1 o'clock rolls around and you can hear shop doors slam shut all over the city, all at once (they slam shop doors with startling conviction around here, just so you really know). Immediately Mukalla goes from the busyness and chaos of a three-ring circus to the busyness and chaos of a crypt. Like magic, everyone disappears and the town sleeps with a grave-like silence that says "We're not going to work and there's nothing you can do about it." (Hint: do not try to do business in Yemen in the middle of the afternoon.)

...Peaceful spot, really.

Anyway, here's another angle - what you can't see in the picture above is that the far right portion - and oldest part - of the city is actually a small peninsula, and from the east it looks like this:



This is a dhow - the traditional Arabian boat. There are quite a few of them in the harbour, and they're just beautiful (especially when they happen to glide past you at sunset). Tragically, most of them are moored next to the naval base, where I'm not allowed to take pictures:(


Mukalla Harbour at sundown. With the exception of the second one, these pictures were taken from a small fishing boat on which we spent the evening last Thursday - good times.

And that's it folks - this is where we've been holed up for the last year. We've enjoyed it a great deal and we'll miss it when we're gone, but we're also very excited to see you all at home!

Alternative Transportation

Last weekend five of our closest foreigner friends accompanied us on our fourth overnighter at the turtle colony. And here we are.

This turtle had just finished digging her nest and laying close to a hundred eggs (covering herself with sand in the process) when she took a moment to rest and hang out with my lovely wife.

Strangely, we found no babies at all this time. But I do have a story to tell you:)

Around 11:00 p.m. I was following a new mother turtle back to the sea. Then I followed her into the sea. When there was enough depth to give lift to her 500-pound body, I climbed onto her back and took a ride. I was having the time of my life, but I’m not sure she even noticed. When I got on she didn’t sink an inch - just kept on swimming.

She stuck close to the surface for the first little bit, which allowed me to catch a few breaths in between being slapped in the face by rather large waves. When the water got a little deeper, down she went with me in tow. I was holding on to the front of her shell just behind her neck, and when we got near the sandy, weedless bottom she levelled out and really took off. The warm waters of the Arabian Sea were rushing past and around me as this gargantuan creature, so awkward and heavy on land, shot away over the ocean’s floor with alarming speed and grace. She would tilt left and right as though to avoid unseen obstacles, or as though she were barreling down some giant waterslide – never losing speed or momentum, just soaring over the sand.

All of this was over in less than a minute, of course, as I soon found myself out of breath and needing to surface. I may have taken the shortest joyride in history, but I will never forget it. Ever.

No animals were harmed in the making of this adventure.

Welcome to Nowhere

Now entering the Middle.

Favourite. Picture. Ever.

Random Sampling

Here is a collection of images from our drive to Shibam, which was, unlike last time, pleasantly free of car trouble.

Deep in the desert valley, next to nowhere, a successful irrigation project yields a vibrant field of hay in a world as dry as dust.

Close Quarters: Inside Shibam's ancient wall, narrow mud-brick buildings - "the world's first skyscrapers" - become a lot smaller when you learn that the walls are all one metre thick.



One of the larger houses in the tiny city, having withstood some 500 years of constant use, ruined by a single rainfall. In a mud house, as the locals informed me, if you haven't got a good roof you haven't got anything.



View from the third floor of the ruined house.



With a paintbrush made of straw, a young man whitewashes the top of his family's home with lime plaster to prevent it from looking like the house in the pictures above.



Resting on a roof.



Frankincense burns on a table of souvenirs old and new.



A weaver plies his trade on a homemade loom in a closet-sized shop.



For centuries, water houses like this were built, maintained and kept full by wealthy landowners for the free use of passers-by; they dot the landscape all over Yemen, on rural dirt tracks and city streets. The roof prevents evaporation while the small windows allow you to reach a cup - but nothing larger - in. Troughs and basins on all sides catch spills for camels and donkeys.



The wall surrounding the city - which you can circumnavigate on foot in under 25 minutes - is twenty feet high on the outside, two and a half on the inside. The dust of the ages gets trampled underfoot and the ground just keeps on rising.

Holidays

So after Christmas we taught for a couple days until the week-long festival of Eid, during which we travelled.

First it was off to Sana'a. We spent the first night inside the walls of the old city, which was fantastic. Our hotel was 355 years old, though, which makes it quite new for that part of town (it's the building on the left in the picture below).














It's one of the highest buildings inside the wall so the roof commanded a spectacular view:














And this is a spectacular view of the water closet:)
















On our third day there we left Sana'a to go see House on the Rock, about a half-hour's drive from the city. This thing is probably the single most famous object in Yemen. It's a big house on a big rock. The oldest part is over 2000 years old. The great thing about it is that most of the house isn't what's on top; most of it is inside the rock. There's an entrance at the very bottom, and rooms and staircases and ancient wells go all through it.







This is us hanging out with some friends in the burial cave near the top of the rock, and a view from one of the cave's windows.





























We relaxed in the courtyard for a while and then returned to Sana'a for some shopping. The next morning we flew back to Mukalla and rested for a day before making the five-hour drive inland to Shibam.

No tresspassing, please.

It has occured to us lately that we don't bat an eyelash at certain things that had seemed odd when we first came here. For example:

A Yemeni security system consists of shards of glass cemented to the top of the garden wall.

We hope to post more of the "new normal" over the next few weeks.

Yemeni Christmas

It's time to fill everybody in as to what we've been up to the last couple of weeks. We had a lovely Christmas with the Carroll/Boone clans forging a new family for the holidays. Maybe we could be called the Booroll's....hmmmm. Anyway, we did the usual get up, go to Arabic lessons, read the story, open presents, eat lots of chocolate kinda stuff. (Rememeber that song "Which of these things is not like the others?") We were grateful for our advent readings to keep us focused on the reality of the season because it's so easy to become detached when no one else sees a reason to celebrate. Thanks so much to everyone for sending cards, emails and packages ~it was very encouraging. We were especially thankful to be able to speak to our families on the 25th. We hope that your Christmas was just as merry as ours was!.