Mukullah
Well, I think I just might barely have enough interesting things happening in my life to warrant another post so here goes. This will be rather long, as it is as much for me as anyone else-I want a written record of exactly how these events unfolded, before my memories begin to fade.
On the morning of the 15th of December, having finished my school (well, some of it), I packed my rather large backpack and ran off to the Bab Al-Yemen bus stop to meet up with Josh and Andy. The bus was (to everyone's astonishment) late. So while we waited, Josh and Andy picked up lunch (I had had one last American meal before leaving) and we introduced Andy to Abu-Walads. Josh and I were shocked that Andy had never heard of them, and of course Andy decided to blame me for not having introduced him to them earlier. Getting on the bus was fairly amusing, as apparently the bus company was trying this concept of actually putting everyone on numbered seats. Some problems with this plan: every seat had two numbers on it, and no one was entirely sure which was the correct. Another problem: There were more people then seats. Ironic, since the whole numbered seat thing was devised to do away with possibility. The problem seemed to be that one guy had brought his family along and planned to share a seat with one of his kids, but decided not to at the last minute and instead sat on the floor. After that though, the bus ride was fairly uneventful: except for one amusing occurrence. Before leaving Sana'a, Andy had planned to purchase tickets back from Socotra (later events will prove this to be quite unnecessary, but at that time we considered it quite vital), but had forgotten. Fortunately, this proved but a minor difficulty, as we were able to purchase them in Aden. In order to pass the time on the bus, Andy had brought his mp3 player, which, much to my surprise, contained only sermons. So Andy and I listened to a sermon about Manliness, which seemed surprisingly appropriate considering our plans. The preacher was actually quite amusing, and while I disagreed with him on quite a few points, I thought his main point that the American church was mostly feminized to be a quite accurate one. However, since I am not in America, and since the men who dominate the church here are not the sort of men that preacher was criticizing, I'm not sure if it was actually very useful to me.
Anyways, we made it to Aden perfectly ok, though our sleeping arrangements sort of didn't work out. But we prayed, and after meeting up with an Ozzie friend of Josh's, met an Adeni who offered to take us in for the night. Being poor hitchhikers, we gladly accepted his offer, and spent a pleasant, mosquito free night on the floor under a fan. During the night, Josh's Ozzie friend (have I mentioned he was a bit odd yet?) sent us a text message wherein he warned us that at the place we were staying at people were regularly "touched", and also to watch out for "crusty jugglers." Sage advice, from a good man. (He also had a good story which recounted to us about a time when Yassir apparently said that he didn't want to die before he had kissed a girl-Josh denied it of course, but Andy and I weren't very impressed).
Early the next morning (Yassir and his crazy jetlag-waking us up at ungodly hours of the morning like 7) we went off to the beach, played some soccer in the sand (a most unusual experience, more fun than you'd think-also a lot more exhausting) and then sat down to a nice breakfast before the breakers (notice my amazingly awesome alliteration there), which was kindly delivered to us by a nearby restaraunt. Afterwards, we went and bought the tickets whose uselessness would soon be made known, and tried to hitch a ride to Mukullah. Initial attempts were met with failure, as we did not actually know the word for hitchhiking (later, when we did learn it, we were met with priceless looks which I cannot even begin to describe: "You're what?! Hitchhiking? Perhaps you haven't noticed just how white you are...") so everyone assumed we were trying to find the bus stop. Eventually, after much walking in the wrong directions and jumping on pick-up trucks (which were also headed in the wrong direction) we finally managed to find the road. There we met up with some Yemeni's going the same way, and caught a ride to a town about 80 kilos away for the comparatively good price of 150 riyals (75 cents). Our goal was to keep the cost of hitchhiking under 10 bucks apiece, as that was the price for the bus. From Abyan we joined up with another bus to the next town, where we stopped and had lunch (we were feeling a bit cheap, and while the yemeni's right next to us were eating lamb, we had some sort of weird bread-based stuff, eaten with bread-some mushakal (mixed vegetables) too, so it wasn't all bread...) Anyways, we encountered a bit of a problem from there. You see, apparently the police don't really appreciate foreigners hitchhiking around the country. We had stopped in one place for just a little too long, and the local police felt that they should check with their mudeer (director) before letting us continue. However, the mudeer's cellphone apparently had a dead battery-and he was quite a ways away. First we were told that a tuckum (gun truck) would come and get us. Several hours later (and a lot of missed rides) we were told that we had to go to him, and go in a bus and actually pay real money, which irritated us greatly. So we went off to him, said that hitchhiking was really rather unaceptable and made us get on a bus for the rest of the journey. So we caught one for five hundred riyals apiece to mukullah (an astonishingly good price, considering the distance-we reckon the military probably forced the guy into it) and, regrettably, they forced us to take a police guy with us. So we rode in relative comfort the rest of the way to Mukullah, decided to pay the driver an extra thousand riyals, figuring we'd still be well under the 6000 riyal goal for the journey, and were about to wander off to supper, when, get this, the police guy demands money for having sat on his butt all day chewing Qat. Naturally, we argued about it (he originally wanted 3000 riyals-more than we paid the driver!) but eventually got sick of it and paid him about 700 hundred. Sooo, we ended up under the 6000 limit (by like 200-woohoo) and there's a slight possibility we saved time too, because the buses don't actually leave terribly often.
That night, feeling rich, we spent the night at a hotel that actually had a shower (only showers we had until the end of the trip-but you probably didn't want to know that). Very posh. We paid almost 9 bucks for the room. The following morning, we headed out to look for a boat. Our efforts were met with little success, as everyone kept telling us that the last boat had left the day before. So after a couple hours wandering around, we decided to meet up with Tim Poole and spend the day with him. So we headed over to his house, had a good talk with him, expended a lot of energy playing with his kids, and then decided to head to Qsair, a secondary port where it was thought me might catch a boat. Thinking that hitchhiking might be a bad plan at 10 at night, we decided to go by a more regular mode of transportation. The only car headed that way was a pickup, and rather than try and squeeze four people into the back seat, we instead determined to ride in the back, and stick our bags on the seat. All well and good-but for an interesting development that occurred while we were off drinking some tea. It being Eid al-Adha, many people were taking goats with them wherever they went. One of our fellow passengers was apparently headed back to his village, taking a goat with him. And so our band of three had a fourth member added to it-a sleepy goat. The goat had heard of the concept of staying in one place for more than five minutes at a time, but decided to have no truck with. So we were stuck in the back of a pickup truck for about an hour and a half with a fidgety goat. Fortunately, it did not bother me much...but poor Josh was stepped on multiple times. Good times. We got to Qsair, watched as a rather odd procession went through the streets (it would be hard to describe it...just look at the pictures instead, the ones of a bunch of people dancing through the streets), found a good spot on the beach, and decided to wake up at 5 in hopes of catching a boat to Socotra.
The following morning, we woke up (it was around dawn-a terrible time), and headed to a nearby town where people thought there might conceivably be boats to Socotra. We got there, and the repeated chant was "ba9d al-eid" (after the eid). This was probably the definitive phrase of the trip (we must have heard it at least fifty times from dozens of people). Anyways, we had heard that the Barbos were planning to hit turtle beach in a couple days, so we decided to head there and go snorkeling and whatnot.
Like much of our trip, we did not give a whole lot of thought to planning for this. We headed to the nearest town, and stopped at the only shop in town to get some supplies. They were completely out of dhabas (dhabas are water containers), and the only alternative was...bagged water. Bagged water is actually quite interesting, although for some reason it had a plasticy taste. Anyways we picked up thirty half-liters bags(figuring that that would last 3 days or so...oh wait...we were there 5 days), several tins of tuna, a couple bags of bread, and some macarona. Once we got to the turtle beach, we settled down in a nearby army barracks.
This part of our trip was probably the best fun: beautiful surroundings, terrible food, bagged water, regular spearfishing forays, long walks on the beach in the moonlight (well, on the last night we felt like exploring...so we walked all the way down to the end of one of the 4 beaches), and early morning fly problems. The first night, after setting our stuff down, we went out looking for turtles. We were too early for the large turtles, but we soon struck paydirt: a multitude of baby turtles crawling out of the sand. After scaring the vile dogs away from the evil past-time of massacring defenseless turtles, we took a video of a few coming out of the sand. We then decided to follow a few on their historic trek to the ocean. Some of the turtles (presumable the dumbest of the group) started heading inland. We did not follow those, allow we turned a couple in the right direction. Others however headed directly for the beach-only to encounter many crabholes along the way. It was actually quite funny when one of the turtle fell into a hole. For a minute or so it would do nothing, as if unable to comprehend the situation. Then, slowly but surely, it would dig its way out and continue its journey to the ocean. Even with some help from us, only a small number of the turtles survive-out of the 30 or 40 we saw come out of the hole survived the journey to the sea. It was very sad...but I suppose if all of them were to survive one year, than there would be waaaay too many turtles and most of them would die anyways....
We turned in fairly early that night, and the next morning were woken up by the dozens of irritating flies which had discovered our outpost in the night. After taking stock of our food situation, and eating a couple pieces of bread and a large part of a jar of peanut butter, we decided to go spear fishing. Early attempts were met with little luck, although Josh ended up catching two decent sized fish-while Andy and I caught all of nothing. Later on, we went out searching for drift wood, and found a fairly large log which we decided would make good firewood. After lugging it to camp (we rolled it partway, as it was very, very heavy) we discovered that it would not light. Period. Very...disappointing. Anyways, starting the fire was an interesting endeavor. The perpetual wind kept blowing it out before it properly got started. So we decided to go all in, and use the flamethrower method. So we got out Andy's deo, and lit the fire with it. Very effective, though perhaps a wee bit on the expensive side. We decided that fish on its own would not make a terribly good meal, although with tomato paste and soup mix (that soup mix saved us-we used in on almost everything) it was actually pretty good. So we got out Andy's broken teakettle, filled it up with water, got it boiling and then cooked the macarona in it. However, we had absolutely no eating utensils to eat it with. So we poured it into a plastic bag which was handy, stuck some tomato paste in it, shook it around a bit, and then used inverted water bags stuck over our hands to eat it with. Didn't it work out so well. So on the second batch of it (the kettle couldn't fit much at a time) we used a sawed off water bottle, stirred in the tomato paste with a stripped down qat stick that happened to be handy, and ate it that way. Very satisfying. After that, feeling very proud of our amazing survival skills, we turned in.
The following day was quite similar, although rather than go spear-fishing for such long hours we spent a lot of time reading. Finally, on the fourth day of our awesome foray into the wilderness, the Barbos showed up, bringing gifts of bread, tuna, and onions and tomatoes. That night, we outdid ourselves in the campfire cooking deal. After the usual macarona and fish, Andy decided to make some coffee. After boiling some water in the tea kettle, he poured it into an empty tuna tin. There was funny stuff floating in the water, of unknown origin (alright, it was probably macarona from the kettle) and after Andy put some instant coffee in it, it looked even worse. Apparently it tasted pretty terrible too, because the instant Andy tasted it he spit it out. Josh and I didn't quite get up the courage to try it, so Andy poured the rest out. Terrible waste of coffee. Anyways, the Barbos left early the following morning (without even saying goodbye-how rude!) and we hung around reading and spearfishing for the rest of the day. The following morning, we managed to talk one of the army guys into letting us use his gun to shoot some dogs. Regrettably, we missed (notice I'm not mentioning any names here...but there is a video of a certain someone missing 6 or 7 consecutive times). Afterwards, the guy (can you believe we had the bad luck of having a hadrami lend us his gun) got us to pay for the bullets. We had to pay like nine hundred riyals for the nine bullets we used...we discovered later that it was actually only like sixty riyals a bullet...but the guy went dog hunting the next day (presumably with the bullets we paid for) and since he was a really amazing shot, we figure he was probably a bit more successful than we were, and that it was a most excellent investment. Anyways, that night we ate in style: used the army guys' gas stove to fry the fish and cooked the macarona and then tossed a bunch of fried tomatoes and onions in it. Probably the best meal we had while at the turtle beach...it was really good.
Heading out the following morning was not fun. We loaded up our backbacks around 9 and started walking out to main road. Hot. Very hot. The breeze which had sustained us while we were on the turtle beach deserted us when we entered into the hilly terrain between us and the road. It was also uphill part of the way. All right, it wasn't actually very bad at all, but as the only semi-irritating thing we had to do on the trip, it's worth mentioning. After about half an hour, some pick-up came by, and we hitched a ride to the nearest town. This was pretty cool, as I got to hang on the back the entire way. Anyways, after that, our trip was fairly uneventful...we slipped past a few checkpoints without the army guys noticing us, but then had some police car chase after us when someone realized that foreigners had gone through without being checked. After that, we had an army guy ride in the 3 seat back with us, which was not cool. Once in Aden, we found a hotel, ate some good food, and the following morning I got a bus back to Sana'a.
Short list of things that saved us on the turtle beach:
Andy's broken kettle.
Josh's spearguns.
Andy's deodorant (excellent for starting fires)
My mom's cookies.
Granola Bars.
The Barbos.
Macarona.
The wire which we found and were able to convert into a grill.
The Yemeni guys who allowed us to use their gas stove when we got sick of the fire.
The water the Yemeni guys gave us.
Tuna.
The full list is a lot longer...but I can't remember all the other things. Needless to say, we felt very saved afterwards.
Most commonly used yemeni phrases (mostly by us, but some by other people):
haba haba (bit by bit)
mafish mushkalla (so we're trying to do something impossible and/or stupid-no problems)
ba9d al-Eid (this applied to just about everything)
muta9bareen (we're hitchhiking 'cause we're cheap)
weyn a-tareeq l-[insert place name here] (Please don't tell us where the bus stop is. We want the road. Yes, we're crazy. Now can you *please* just tell us where that road is!)
Josh Power took a lot of pretty sweet pics, they're probably posted somewhere on my facebook profile page...
On the morning of the 15th of December, having finished my school (well, some of it), I packed my rather large backpack and ran off to the Bab Al-Yemen bus stop to meet up with Josh and Andy. The bus was (to everyone's astonishment) late. So while we waited, Josh and Andy picked up lunch (I had had one last American meal before leaving) and we introduced Andy to Abu-Walads. Josh and I were shocked that Andy had never heard of them, and of course Andy decided to blame me for not having introduced him to them earlier. Getting on the bus was fairly amusing, as apparently the bus company was trying this concept of actually putting everyone on numbered seats. Some problems with this plan: every seat had two numbers on it, and no one was entirely sure which was the correct. Another problem: There were more people then seats. Ironic, since the whole numbered seat thing was devised to do away with possibility. The problem seemed to be that one guy had brought his family along and planned to share a seat with one of his kids, but decided not to at the last minute and instead sat on the floor. After that though, the bus ride was fairly uneventful: except for one amusing occurrence. Before leaving Sana'a, Andy had planned to purchase tickets back from Socotra (later events will prove this to be quite unnecessary, but at that time we considered it quite vital), but had forgotten. Fortunately, this proved but a minor difficulty, as we were able to purchase them in Aden. In order to pass the time on the bus, Andy had brought his mp3 player, which, much to my surprise, contained only sermons. So Andy and I listened to a sermon about Manliness, which seemed surprisingly appropriate considering our plans. The preacher was actually quite amusing, and while I disagreed with him on quite a few points, I thought his main point that the American church was mostly feminized to be a quite accurate one. However, since I am not in America, and since the men who dominate the church here are not the sort of men that preacher was criticizing, I'm not sure if it was actually very useful to me.
Anyways, we made it to Aden perfectly ok, though our sleeping arrangements sort of didn't work out. But we prayed, and after meeting up with an Ozzie friend of Josh's, met an Adeni who offered to take us in for the night. Being poor hitchhikers, we gladly accepted his offer, and spent a pleasant, mosquito free night on the floor under a fan. During the night, Josh's Ozzie friend (have I mentioned he was a bit odd yet?) sent us a text message wherein he warned us that at the place we were staying at people were regularly "touched", and also to watch out for "crusty jugglers." Sage advice, from a good man. (He also had a good story which recounted to us about a time when Yassir apparently said that he didn't want to die before he had kissed a girl-Josh denied it of course, but Andy and I weren't very impressed).
Early the next morning (Yassir and his crazy jetlag-waking us up at ungodly hours of the morning like 7) we went off to the beach, played some soccer in the sand (a most unusual experience, more fun than you'd think-also a lot more exhausting) and then sat down to a nice breakfast before the breakers (notice my amazingly awesome alliteration there), which was kindly delivered to us by a nearby restaraunt. Afterwards, we went and bought the tickets whose uselessness would soon be made known, and tried to hitch a ride to Mukullah. Initial attempts were met with failure, as we did not actually know the word for hitchhiking (later, when we did learn it, we were met with priceless looks which I cannot even begin to describe: "You're what?! Hitchhiking? Perhaps you haven't noticed just how white you are...") so everyone assumed we were trying to find the bus stop. Eventually, after much walking in the wrong directions and jumping on pick-up trucks (which were also headed in the wrong direction) we finally managed to find the road. There we met up with some Yemeni's going the same way, and caught a ride to a town about 80 kilos away for the comparatively good price of 150 riyals (75 cents). Our goal was to keep the cost of hitchhiking under 10 bucks apiece, as that was the price for the bus. From Abyan we joined up with another bus to the next town, where we stopped and had lunch (we were feeling a bit cheap, and while the yemeni's right next to us were eating lamb, we had some sort of weird bread-based stuff, eaten with bread-some mushakal (mixed vegetables) too, so it wasn't all bread...) Anyways, we encountered a bit of a problem from there. You see, apparently the police don't really appreciate foreigners hitchhiking around the country. We had stopped in one place for just a little too long, and the local police felt that they should check with their mudeer (director) before letting us continue. However, the mudeer's cellphone apparently had a dead battery-and he was quite a ways away. First we were told that a tuckum (gun truck) would come and get us. Several hours later (and a lot of missed rides) we were told that we had to go to him, and go in a bus and actually pay real money, which irritated us greatly. So we went off to him, said that hitchhiking was really rather unaceptable and made us get on a bus for the rest of the journey. So we caught one for five hundred riyals apiece to mukullah (an astonishingly good price, considering the distance-we reckon the military probably forced the guy into it) and, regrettably, they forced us to take a police guy with us. So we rode in relative comfort the rest of the way to Mukullah, decided to pay the driver an extra thousand riyals, figuring we'd still be well under the 6000 riyal goal for the journey, and were about to wander off to supper, when, get this, the police guy demands money for having sat on his butt all day chewing Qat. Naturally, we argued about it (he originally wanted 3000 riyals-more than we paid the driver!) but eventually got sick of it and paid him about 700 hundred. Sooo, we ended up under the 6000 limit (by like 200-woohoo) and there's a slight possibility we saved time too, because the buses don't actually leave terribly often.
That night, feeling rich, we spent the night at a hotel that actually had a shower (only showers we had until the end of the trip-but you probably didn't want to know that). Very posh. We paid almost 9 bucks for the room. The following morning, we headed out to look for a boat. Our efforts were met with little success, as everyone kept telling us that the last boat had left the day before. So after a couple hours wandering around, we decided to meet up with Tim Poole and spend the day with him. So we headed over to his house, had a good talk with him, expended a lot of energy playing with his kids, and then decided to head to Qsair, a secondary port where it was thought me might catch a boat. Thinking that hitchhiking might be a bad plan at 10 at night, we decided to go by a more regular mode of transportation. The only car headed that way was a pickup, and rather than try and squeeze four people into the back seat, we instead determined to ride in the back, and stick our bags on the seat. All well and good-but for an interesting development that occurred while we were off drinking some tea. It being Eid al-Adha, many people were taking goats with them wherever they went. One of our fellow passengers was apparently headed back to his village, taking a goat with him. And so our band of three had a fourth member added to it-a sleepy goat. The goat had heard of the concept of staying in one place for more than five minutes at a time, but decided to have no truck with. So we were stuck in the back of a pickup truck for about an hour and a half with a fidgety goat. Fortunately, it did not bother me much...but poor Josh was stepped on multiple times. Good times. We got to Qsair, watched as a rather odd procession went through the streets (it would be hard to describe it...just look at the pictures instead, the ones of a bunch of people dancing through the streets), found a good spot on the beach, and decided to wake up at 5 in hopes of catching a boat to Socotra.
The following morning, we woke up (it was around dawn-a terrible time), and headed to a nearby town where people thought there might conceivably be boats to Socotra. We got there, and the repeated chant was "ba9d al-eid" (after the eid). This was probably the definitive phrase of the trip (we must have heard it at least fifty times from dozens of people). Anyways, we had heard that the Barbos were planning to hit turtle beach in a couple days, so we decided to head there and go snorkeling and whatnot.
Like much of our trip, we did not give a whole lot of thought to planning for this. We headed to the nearest town, and stopped at the only shop in town to get some supplies. They were completely out of dhabas (dhabas are water containers), and the only alternative was...bagged water. Bagged water is actually quite interesting, although for some reason it had a plasticy taste. Anyways we picked up thirty half-liters bags(figuring that that would last 3 days or so...oh wait...we were there 5 days), several tins of tuna, a couple bags of bread, and some macarona. Once we got to the turtle beach, we settled down in a nearby army barracks.
This part of our trip was probably the best fun: beautiful surroundings, terrible food, bagged water, regular spearfishing forays, long walks on the beach in the moonlight (well, on the last night we felt like exploring...so we walked all the way down to the end of one of the 4 beaches), and early morning fly problems. The first night, after setting our stuff down, we went out looking for turtles. We were too early for the large turtles, but we soon struck paydirt: a multitude of baby turtles crawling out of the sand. After scaring the vile dogs away from the evil past-time of massacring defenseless turtles, we took a video of a few coming out of the sand. We then decided to follow a few on their historic trek to the ocean. Some of the turtles (presumable the dumbest of the group) started heading inland. We did not follow those, allow we turned a couple in the right direction. Others however headed directly for the beach-only to encounter many crabholes along the way. It was actually quite funny when one of the turtle fell into a hole. For a minute or so it would do nothing, as if unable to comprehend the situation. Then, slowly but surely, it would dig its way out and continue its journey to the ocean. Even with some help from us, only a small number of the turtles survive-out of the 30 or 40 we saw come out of the hole survived the journey to the sea. It was very sad...but I suppose if all of them were to survive one year, than there would be waaaay too many turtles and most of them would die anyways....
We turned in fairly early that night, and the next morning were woken up by the dozens of irritating flies which had discovered our outpost in the night. After taking stock of our food situation, and eating a couple pieces of bread and a large part of a jar of peanut butter, we decided to go spear fishing. Early attempts were met with little luck, although Josh ended up catching two decent sized fish-while Andy and I caught all of nothing. Later on, we went out searching for drift wood, and found a fairly large log which we decided would make good firewood. After lugging it to camp (we rolled it partway, as it was very, very heavy) we discovered that it would not light. Period. Very...disappointing. Anyways, starting the fire was an interesting endeavor. The perpetual wind kept blowing it out before it properly got started. So we decided to go all in, and use the flamethrower method. So we got out Andy's deo, and lit the fire with it. Very effective, though perhaps a wee bit on the expensive side. We decided that fish on its own would not make a terribly good meal, although with tomato paste and soup mix (that soup mix saved us-we used in on almost everything) it was actually pretty good. So we got out Andy's broken teakettle, filled it up with water, got it boiling and then cooked the macarona in it. However, we had absolutely no eating utensils to eat it with. So we poured it into a plastic bag which was handy, stuck some tomato paste in it, shook it around a bit, and then used inverted water bags stuck over our hands to eat it with. Didn't it work out so well. So on the second batch of it (the kettle couldn't fit much at a time) we used a sawed off water bottle, stirred in the tomato paste with a stripped down qat stick that happened to be handy, and ate it that way. Very satisfying. After that, feeling very proud of our amazing survival skills, we turned in.
The following day was quite similar, although rather than go spear-fishing for such long hours we spent a lot of time reading. Finally, on the fourth day of our awesome foray into the wilderness, the Barbos showed up, bringing gifts of bread, tuna, and onions and tomatoes. That night, we outdid ourselves in the campfire cooking deal. After the usual macarona and fish, Andy decided to make some coffee. After boiling some water in the tea kettle, he poured it into an empty tuna tin. There was funny stuff floating in the water, of unknown origin (alright, it was probably macarona from the kettle) and after Andy put some instant coffee in it, it looked even worse. Apparently it tasted pretty terrible too, because the instant Andy tasted it he spit it out. Josh and I didn't quite get up the courage to try it, so Andy poured the rest out. Terrible waste of coffee. Anyways, the Barbos left early the following morning (without even saying goodbye-how rude!) and we hung around reading and spearfishing for the rest of the day. The following morning, we managed to talk one of the army guys into letting us use his gun to shoot some dogs. Regrettably, we missed (notice I'm not mentioning any names here...but there is a video of a certain someone missing 6 or 7 consecutive times). Afterwards, the guy (can you believe we had the bad luck of having a hadrami lend us his gun) got us to pay for the bullets. We had to pay like nine hundred riyals for the nine bullets we used...we discovered later that it was actually only like sixty riyals a bullet...but the guy went dog hunting the next day (presumably with the bullets we paid for) and since he was a really amazing shot, we figure he was probably a bit more successful than we were, and that it was a most excellent investment. Anyways, that night we ate in style: used the army guys' gas stove to fry the fish and cooked the macarona and then tossed a bunch of fried tomatoes and onions in it. Probably the best meal we had while at the turtle beach...it was really good.
Heading out the following morning was not fun. We loaded up our backbacks around 9 and started walking out to main road. Hot. Very hot. The breeze which had sustained us while we were on the turtle beach deserted us when we entered into the hilly terrain between us and the road. It was also uphill part of the way. All right, it wasn't actually very bad at all, but as the only semi-irritating thing we had to do on the trip, it's worth mentioning. After about half an hour, some pick-up came by, and we hitched a ride to the nearest town. This was pretty cool, as I got to hang on the back the entire way. Anyways, after that, our trip was fairly uneventful...we slipped past a few checkpoints without the army guys noticing us, but then had some police car chase after us when someone realized that foreigners had gone through without being checked. After that, we had an army guy ride in the 3 seat back with us, which was not cool. Once in Aden, we found a hotel, ate some good food, and the following morning I got a bus back to Sana'a.
Short list of things that saved us on the turtle beach:
Andy's broken kettle.
Josh's spearguns.
Andy's deodorant (excellent for starting fires)
My mom's cookies.
Granola Bars.
The Barbos.
Macarona.
The wire which we found and were able to convert into a grill.
The Yemeni guys who allowed us to use their gas stove when we got sick of the fire.
The water the Yemeni guys gave us.
Tuna.
The full list is a lot longer...but I can't remember all the other things. Needless to say, we felt very saved afterwards.
Most commonly used yemeni phrases (mostly by us, but some by other people):
haba haba (bit by bit)
mafish mushkalla (so we're trying to do something impossible and/or stupid-no problems)
ba9d al-Eid (this applied to just about everything)
muta9bareen (we're hitchhiking 'cause we're cheap)
weyn a-tareeq l-[insert place name here] (Please don't tell us where the bus stop is. We want the road. Yes, we're crazy. Now can you *please* just tell us where that road is!)
Josh Power took a lot of pretty sweet pics, they're probably posted somewhere on my facebook profile page...
posted by Jeffrey at 4:37 PM
3 Comments:
Hey, cool trip log! I had some fun hearing about your journey into independence with Yemeni police :)
I read this on facebook and I was deeply amused. Sounds like a classicly amazing Yemeni trip... with a new twist. Awesome. Wish I could have been there. I also wish u had made it all the way to Socotra. That place rules!
I really liked this post, I laughed alot, Abo-Walad, haba haba, and hitchhiking.
And Insha'Allah, in your next trip - after the revolution- the police will be forced to stop domination over us.
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