Planning
I had wanted to go to Yemen ever since I saw pictures of Sanaa and Shibam, but actually getting there seemed like an impossibility. For as long as I have been thinking of going to Yemen the only real way of visiting it seemed to be either to illegally cross the border from Oman and just see a very small part of the country, perhaps for the day, or to visit the island of Socotra. Socotra looked interesting, but I really wanted to see the mainland and had decided to hold out for that. Slowly, some people started to do organized tours into portions of the mainland, but it just seemed so prohibitively expensive for a solo traveler. And then I got a WhatsApp message.
One of the members of my social travel group in Vancouver (we get together periodically and swap travel stories and tips) posted into the group that he was thinking of going to Yemen with a friend of his from the US and he was looking for a third person to join the group. I was walking down the street in Buenos Aires when I got the message and I immediately said I would go. The tour company and the itinerary had already been picked, I just needed to opt in.
At this point in time, it was not possible to visit any part of Yemen without going on a tour. I’m not a tour person, apart from hiring a guide for a day trip and the prospect of joining a group tour never appealed to me, but the person who was going on this trip with someone that I had already gotten along with and I figured that was enough to vouch for his friend. Plus, a group of three seemed more palatable than a larger group of strangers.
The tour was arranged through a fellow named Kais Al Qalisi, who is a well known tour operator in the region It would be six days visiting Seiyun, Mukalla, Wadi Doa’n, Hawfah, Ribad, Al-Hajjarain, Sif, and Shibam with a guide (Radfan) and driver (Mohammed) and a series of armed guards, starting and ending in Seiyun. The itinerary is posted here. The price for each of the three of us was about $1,450 (each), which included all of our meals in our hotels, water, and visa assistance and we did not have to share rooms at any of the hotels. It did not include the flights from Cairo to Seiyun, which could only be done on Yemeni Airways at exorbitant price of 900 U.S. dollars round trip for the six-hour flight. Yemen is not a cheap trip.
We were connected with a woman on WhatsApp who worked at the airline in Cairo; we wired her the money for the trip and she arranged the tickets which we would pick up at the airport.
For the visa, we simply needed to send our guide copies of our passports and personal information as well as a letter from a doctor. This was the trickiest part. For visa to Yemen, at least at this time, you needed a letter from a doctor that confirmed that you had been tested for and were negative for all diseases. I went to the travel clinic, and they looked at me like I was crazy. How could they possibly issue a letter like that? Would it even be possible to test for all diseases? Most of the travelers I talked to said that they had just forged their own letters, which seemed like a reasonable proposition for some, but I’m a lawyer and I just didn’t feel good about that. What I did feel ok about was a doctor that I knew socially who shall remain nameless who wrote the letter for me. While this doctor didn’t use the language that I had been tested for all diseases, they did say that I did not have any communicable diseases, which seemed to satisfy the visa people, to the extent that they even read the letter which I doubt.
In some ways, arranging all of this seems like kind of a hassle. It’s not as easy as just booking a flight online and showing up at the airport, but it was far easier than some of the other difficult countries I’ve visited like the Congo or Sudan. If you have the money to pay and a person to arrange it for you, you can get the visa.
The Airport
I had flown from Vancouver to London to Cairo and I found myself at the airport in Cairo in a queue at the check in desk to collect my ticket to Yemen. I got to the airport a bit ahead of my two companions and so I stood by myself with about six people ahead of me and a few behind, all of whom had towers of luggage on carts. I had a small backpack. All of them looked at me with a great deal of curiosity. More than one person approached me and asked me if I knew that I was in a queue for a flight to Yemen and I responded with “Yes, I can’t wait to go!” and they thought that was amusing. They laughed and smiled and then seemed genuinely pleased that I was choosing to spend my vacation days in their country.
Finally, I saw a familiar face in the crowd and my friend from Vancouver had arrived with his friend from the United States and our little travel group was united. In the interest of not using their real names (I don’t know if they would object to me using their names but I’m just going to choose to preserve their anonymity), I shall refer to my Canadian friend as John (as in Rambo) and my new American friend as Doc. We picked up our tickets and went to a lounge in the airport, where you could smoke (!) and got to know each other a bit.
The flight from Cairo to Seiyun was unremarkable. It’s always exciting to fly a new airline, but I can’t say that there was anything super unusual about Yemeni Airways. It didn’t have an in-flight entertainment system or Wi-Fi, but it was a standard plane that we boarded from the tarmac and they served us a meal.
And just like that, we landed in Yemen.
Arrival and Shopping
At the airport, we were met by our guide, Radfan who walked us through the visa process, we went to a little room and quickly visa stickers were placed in our passports and without any real questions or fanfare we were led through the airport and to our driver, Mohammed.
We landed at 5:00 PM and by the time we got out of the airport it was probably closer to 6:00 PM and the city was dark but lively. The first order of business was getting appropriate attire. One cannot travel in Yemen, at least at this point, in your normal clothes. You need to wear Yemeni clothing. So we went first to a little shop that sold women’s clothes.
This is probably the number one question that I was asked when I told people that I was going to Yemen, which is what would I have to wear. The answer is you must wear a black abaya, so you are covered from your neck to your ankles and wrists, and you wear hijab to cover your head. The question of whether or not you must also wear a niqab to cover your face seems to be somewhat loose. Our guide did not make me wear the niqab at any point. We did however run into another group with women travelers who are required to wear the niqab at all times. I have absolutely no problem wearing the abaya or the hijab, but I was very thankful that I did not have to wear the niqab as I think I would have found it restrictive and it certainly would have impeded my cigar smoking. The men in the shop helped me pick out a suitable black abaya with some black embroidery around the cuffs. I thought it looks alright. I like wearing all black anyway. For any women who are reading this and are wondering what you wear under the abaya, you can probably wear anything you like but I thought it was most comfortable to wear leggings and a t-shirt. Basically, that is the outfit that I wore every day while I was out and about in Yemen. In the evenings when I was at the hotels I could dress in my own clothes, provided they were reasonably conservative. So, at the hotels, I would wear leggings and a knee-length dress or something similar.
After I was suitably attired, we went to a different store and the gentleman picked out their clothes which were much more interesting. They were these long, wrapped skirts out of patterned and colourful fabric called a futa, a plain colored, short-sleeved button up shirt, and a wrapped headdress called a shemagh.
The clothes were extremely affordable (my ensemble was $22 US) and were one of the only expenses that we had on the trip as everything else was included in the price of the tour.
From there we went to our hotel, the Hawta Palace Hotel in Seiyun. I didn’t know what to expect with regard to the accommodations, but this exceeded any expectations that I had. This place was awesome. It was a couple of two- or three-story buildings in gleaming white Yemeni architecture with the serene courtyard, green gardens, a swimming pool, and flowering trees. It was a bit away from the city and felt quiet and safe. My room was enormous and extremely comfortable if sparsely decorated. We arrived and got sorted and had dinner.
Most of the meals that we had in Yemen, including the one at this hotel, were extensive and quite tasty, if not particularly varied. As a vegetarian, most of my meals consisted of lentil soups and salads, hummus and bread, some fresh fruits and vegetables, yogurt and local honey. It got a bit repetitive, but everything was very tasty. There was also coffee, tea, and water. No alcohol of course. The rest of the group had various types of meat and fish as their main dishes.
We were given Wi-Fi codes at the hotel and technically there was Wi-Fi, but it worked inconsistently. I had been prepared to have no Wi-Fi whatsoever on the trip but most of the hotels had some connectivity in some places at sometimes. It’s not the sort of place that you can go and plan to get a lot of remote work done. In fact, it may be one of the few places in the world where you can still go and be kind of off the grid.
After dinner, everyone else went to bed and I sat up in the courtyard and had a cigar. This became a bit of a ritual on the trip; I would stay up a little later and get up a little earlier than everyone else so that I could enjoy smoking and some time to myself.
John and Doc proved to be excellent travel companions. We seem to be like-minded and share a similar sense of humour and I had an excellent time with them, that said, it was still a bit of a different experience for me to be around people for so much of the time and I needed to have a little time to myself.
Safety
A note about safety. This is probably the second most common question that I was asked about going to Yemen, which was is it safe? Yemen obviously has a bad reputation in terms of safety. They have a long-standing civil war and there were frequently bombings and violence. But as with most countries that face these problems, the war and violence is relegated to certain parts of the country or does not happen all the time. Yemen is large and different parts of the country are controlled by different groups (more on this later) and we would be visiting the parts of the country that were relatively stable, which are in the Hadramaut region or South Yemen. Confusingly, South Yemen is mostly the eastern half of the country in North Yemen is mostly the western part of the country, but it’s this South Yemen part that is relatively safe and the North Yemen part that has the majority of the conflict. The days that we spent in Yemen felt completely safe. I appreciate that that safety may have been created somewhat by the presence of a guide and a guard but there was nothing that we saw that gave me any inklings that our presence would be met with anything other than kindness and hospitality.
I’ve already said so much in this post about what it was like to prepare to go to Yemen and what it was like arriving, that I’ll talk about what we actually saw and did in the next posts. It’s difficult to be brief when talking about a place as unique and fascinating as Yemen.
Read on here.
