Friendly Charming People and Monumental Architecture
DH One good reason to visit Yemen is its friendly, charming people who do their best to make visitors feel like guests. While trying to get round the confusing capital, Sanaa, Yemenis not only gave me directions but also told taxi drivers my destination.
Yemen is famous for its monumental architecture, its mosques, palaces, and distinctive, elegant mud-brick houses. Narrow buildings, two to eight stories tall, with stone or brick foundations and mud-plastered, mud-brick exteriors pierced by arched windows and decorated with geometric designs in whitewash or pale stone. The Yemeni house is cool in summer, warm in winter, always handsome, whether in the meanest village or the wealthiest city suburb.
Sanaa is a sprawling, shabby city of 2.5 million. At its centre lies the beautifully restored walled town with its bustling souqs. Just inside the arch of Yemen Gate there is a wide cobbled plaza where Yemenis relax, read newspapers, and drink hot sweet tea in small glasses. The narrow streets are lined with shops selling food, materials, shoes, and daggers in simple and elaborately decorated leather holders attached to wide leather belts.
Sanaa boasts some excellent restaurants which serve charcoal-grilled fish and paper-thin rounds of Yemeni bread baked in clay ovens, a chilli sauce, curried prawns, and mansaf, whole lamb filled with spicy rice and roasted slowly in an oven. Yemeni cuisine is strongly influenced by India.
The most fashionable restaurant of the moment is al-Fahker, the place influential people dine.
Yemen is a big country with many attractions. We took a car into the countryside and toured the magnificent palace of the imams, the former rulers, built atop a huge rock. At the medieval town of Thula we were pursued by vendors selling daggers, jewelery, and Indian materials. But even insistent touts could not spoil the beautiful multi-storied houses of Thula, dating from the 15th century. At the hilltop village of Kawkaban we discovered a tourist hotel with a splendid view but no clients.
