Back to Yemen

My trip over to Yemen went as well as one could hope for a two-day and one-night string of flights. On my overnight flight from Atlanta to Germany I didn’t sleep very well, but I got to listen to an endless loop of Mozart’s greatest hits, celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth. Have I mentioned how much I love my Bose noise canceling headphones? They make a whale of a difference and I highly recommend them for anyone who has to spend any significant amount of time on those noisy airplanes. Anyway, the ride over the North Atlantic was bumpy the whole way – when I woke up as we were landing I noticed the odor of many filled airsickness bags and at least one missed – I was relieved to deplane. Going through Germany was new for me, and I now have a Germany stamp in my passport. From Frankfurt we went through Cairo on our way to Sana’a; I’ll tell you, it really brought back memories (which I’ve documented below.) Finally I arrived at the airport there in Yemen where they didn’t know what to do with the fact that I already had a visa in my passport – I think they’re used to just selling foreigners a visa on the spot rather than us having one before hand. They tried a couple of times to send me over to visa sales window, but I kept showing them the visa that I got Washington DC and eventually they found a guy in the back who knew enough to let me through after I explained to him that I was with the World Bank. By then it was nearing midnight and there were no taxis out at the front curb of the airport – which was a bit disconcerting. I finally found a taxi stand out on the far side of the parking lot. The lone cabbie was asleep and his friends had to bang violently on the windows to wake him up, at which point I wasn’t sure I wanted to ride with him after all. Then the car wouldn’t start, so his friends had to give us a push start. And then, as soon as we were rolling, the gasoline light on his dashboard came on – his gauge showed empty. Oh joy. But we did make it to the hotel OK after all. Whew!

As sleepy as I was that night, and as excited as I was to stretch out in a real bed, I couldn’t sleep very well; the nine hour time difference was insurmountable that first night. But, bright and early the next morning, I got a wake-up phone call from Jahid – our group was up and ready to hit the road and waiting for me. Oh joy. Our group consisted of Jahid (our GIS tech from Bangladesh), Amin (our Yemeni GIS tech), Ali (our hired driver who was packing heat – it looked like a .45), and Faisel (our “guide” from the ministry.) So I crawled out of bed, showered, ate a quick bite, re-packed, and we hit the road. Along the way, Faisel told me that he’d studied in Poland and that I looked Polish so I must be Polish – I guess I could try on Jackowski as a name. We drove about 200km south of Sana’a to Ibb, where we turned off the main road and drove another 50km over bumpy dusty roads to visit part of our proposed pilot project; I’ve got to say that the area we visited was so sparsely populated that I couldn’t imagine that the project would be viable. From time to time I found that I needed to translate the English between the Yemenis and our Bengali – the accents were too different for them to understand each other sometimes. That night we slept at a local hotel in Ibb; it was surprisingly nice, but non-air conditioned so it was really warm. Again, jetlag kept me from getting much sleep that second night in-country.

Dark and early Saturday morning I was startled awake an hour before dawn by the call to prayer – oh yeah, I’d forgotten. After I’ve been in a Moslem country for a while I find that I can sleep right through it. Bright and early on Saturday morning it was up and back at ‘em again, bouncing over more dusty bumpy back roads. “Praise the Lord and pass the Dramamine” is my motto. These areas were better populated, so maybe on the whole the project will be viable. Everywhere we went we were warmly received. At the end of the road we ate lunch with one of the local utility managers at his ancient home; the meal was served Yemeni style, like a big picnic on the floor where everyone eats out of common dishes with their hands. The food was tasty, but I suffered some intestinal distress on the ride home. I had to get the driver to find me a toilet – he said that it would be “Arabic-style” – I told him that in an emergency I was Arabic too. And speaking of fluctuating nationalities, at all of the checkpoints our Yemeni companions said yadda yadda Bengali yadda Kennedy yadda yadda. I couldn’t figure out why they were introducing me as a member of the Kennedy family, but later they explained that they were presenting me as a Canadian to avoid all of the red-tape and armed escorts required by the American embassy. I guess I can’t argue with that logic.

That night, back in Sana’a, safe and sound and with a bathroom right in my hotel room, I relaxed in front of the Soccer World Cup matches. I was glad not to be living in Bolivia anymore where people are actually aware that the US team made such a very poor showing. We came into the tournament as the 5th ranked team in the world and then promptly got annihilated 3-0 by Czechoslovakia and then eliminated in the first round.

The next day we spent our day working in our office down in the basement of the Ministry of Electricity building; it was very peaceful and quiet – I think we were the only people working in the whole building. We stayed at work in the office until about 7:00PM, when we headed over to Old Sana’a to find the Kashmir scarves that my wife wanted me to bring home. Amin, our Yemeni, showed me a place outside of Old Town, but they didn’t have what we wanted. So I took him and Jahid to the place that I had found before (after scouring the whole of Old Town on a previous excursion) and we got what we wanted there. I found nearly all of the colors that we wanted – I think they look nice – and got a really good price on the lot (with brutal negotiating help from Jahid and Amin.)

On my last day I was to present a half-day seminar on everything that a power engineer should know about designing power systems – twenty years of information condensed down into four hours. The thing was supposed to start at 9:00AM, which is a good hour before most Yemenis show up for work, and go until 1:00PM, a good hour after most Yemenis knock off work. So, of course we started over an hour late – so I rushed through the material and we got through, on time, at 1PM. We had decided that Amin should help me with translation into Arabic, since almost no one speaks English, but he didn’t understand the technical points himself and couldn’t begin to communicate them, so we bagged that. That night I headed back to the airport and started my trip home, condensed into one 36-hour day (since we were traveling west, chasing the sun.) Whew!

Flashback: Egypt

My trip to Yemen this month started with the drive from home to Las Vegas, a flight to Atlanta, Georgia, then on to Frankfurt, Germany, a brief stop over in Cairo, Egypt, and then on to Sana’a, Yemen. It was a two day/one night odyssey, which was one night shorter than when I made the trip from La Paz to Sana’a last year. Anyway, as we circled the airport in Cairo, we flew over the pyramids at Giza; I hadn’t seen them since our family trip in December of 1999 and it brought back memories:

We flew home from Dhaka, Bangladesh, after a 2-1/2 year posting there, via Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where we spent a day exploring the old city and their ancient fort (and the amazing Disneyland beneath it) and a night prowling the sparkling gold market. Then we flew on to Egypt, where we split our time between Cairo in the north and Luxor in the south. Our hotel in Cairo was the old British officers’ club – creaky but comfortable. Of special interest was the rickety ancient elevator that took us from ground level up to the fourth floor hotel rooms. We had a guidebook, but knew precious little about Egypt, so on our first night in town I asked the hotel for a recommendation of a local driver to serve as our personal transportation and tour guide of the city and environs. As we walked around the city a bit that night it was a bit unnerving to hear all of the firecrackers going off around us – it was my first Christmas in the Middle East – the firecrackers sounded a lot like gun fire and it was hard not to duck every time they went off.

The next day we spent the morning at the Cairo Museum, where, among many other things, we got to see King Tut’s treasure and the mummy of Ramses II. Getting in to the museum turned out to be a bit tricky for me when the x-ray machine outside at the security checkpoint showed a clear picture of an automatic pistol in my camera bag; there wasn’t really a pistol in my camera bag of course, but the security guards showed me the picture and I had to agree that it sure looked like there was. That afternoon we headed over to the Christian quarter of the old city and explored the churches of Saint Barbara and Saint George, as well as the supposed house of Mary and Joseph when they lived in Egypt to hide the baby Jesus from the paranoid King Herod. For dinner we followed the locals to a restaurant that seemed popular – unfortunately we couldn’t read the menu, but fortunately our waiter understood our sign language enough to just bring us what our neighbors were eating – it looked good and it was.

That night we stopped by the train station to buy our tickets for the night train to Luxor, which was an adventure in itself. As we found in both India and Thailand, train stations are prowling with helpful “guides” who will steer you away from the ticket booths in the train station itself and over to travel agents across the street, who will sell you the same tickets for an added commission. Also, in all three countries we’ve found that the ticket booths for the overnight trains are well hidden, tucked away in the back where they’re really hard to find. The guidebook told us that the ticket booth in Cairo was at the back of the train station. We looked all over and when we couldn’t find it, we asked a train station employee if he could direct us to the ticket booth. He took us out the back of the station – so far so good – but then started across the street to a travel agency. Argh! Betrayed again. Fortunately, as we stopped at the edge of the street, I looked back and spotted the ticket booth upstairs in a building behind the train station. So we ditched our helpful guide and jogged over to the real ticket booth. They were surprised to see that we’d found them, but willingly sold us the required tickets for our night train to Luxor the next night.

On our second day in Cairo it was Christmas day. Because we were on the road it was of necessity a low-key Christmas. However Santa Claus managed to find us OK. We fashioned a “Christmas Tree” out of one of Annie’s green t-shirts draped over the hotel’s fake flower arrangement. Santa Claus brought the kids small souvenirs from Dubai, that were easy to fit into our existing luggage: a key chain for CJ, a miniature brass lamp for Annie, and a spoon for Katie. After our little Christmas celebration, our contracted car and driver picked us up and we hit the road. First he took us out to the City of the Dead, the huge cemetery just outside Cairo. The tombs in the cemetery are mostly underground crypts where they stack successive generations of dearly departed like cord wood, which continue to shrink over time, making room for the next generation. Then we went out to see the Sphinx – it was more impressive in person than any photos I’d ever seen. From there we were within view of the pyramids. Our driver recommended a camel ride out to the pyramids, but we wouldn’t have it – it sounded like a touristy scam to us – but about halfway into our walk out to the pyramids, our kids started fussing because it was a lot further than it looked and EVERYONE ELSE were riding camels! Just then an Arab guy came riding out of the desert on a camel and offered us a ride – as I was negotiating a price for a ride, the tourist police came up and started throwing rocks at our potential camel ride – they said that those guys were not licensed to give rides and that they were “bad guys.” But as soon as the police turned their back, the guys came back out of the desert and we hastily made a deal and mounted up on two camels and one horse (there were five of us.) After exploring the insides of one of the huge pyramids (they only open one at a time), we mounted up again and our illicit guides took us out into the desert to circumnavigate the pyramids (see the great photo above.) When we got back to the parking lot our camel jockeys wanted more money than we’d agreed on, and we weren’t in a mood to be taken, so we ended that portion of the trip on a bit of a sour note. I guess I’d take the licensed camel rides out to the pyramids if I were to do it again. From there our guide took us out to Saqqara. Wow! I didn’t even know that all of that existed. Saqqara should have been a day all by itself. I took pictures at several places where the sign said “no” but the docents said “please do, for a tip.” That night we caught the night train for Luxor; we went in two adjoining first class sleeper rooms.

If Memphis (now Cairo) was the political capital of Egypt, Luxor (then Thebes) was the religious capital of Egypt. We spent a couple of days visiting the temples in Luxor and Karnak, connected by a long straight avenue lined with sphinxes, the embalming museum, and the Valley of the Kings, where all of the spectacular tombs of the pharaohs of Egypt were hidden. Before visiting Egypt I had no idea of the quality of Egyptian artwork – I’d always had the impression that Egyptian artwork was stiff and two-dimensional but boy was I wrong – I’ve never seen such detailed, realistic, and life-like representations before in my life. Touring Egypt gave me a whole new impression of the country and made me wish that I’d done some homework before our trip. But it was very enjoyable and I am looking forward to going back someday. Anyway, as we went to Karnak to visit the temple there, it was noon and our kids were hungry, so we went to a little lunch place right outside the temple. When we saw the American-level prices on the menu we got up to leave; the waiters stopped us and asked us what was wrong and we told them that the prices were too high. So then they asked us where we were from and we said we were from Bangladesh. So they produced a different set of menus with “local” prices; so we stayed to eat. We got a kick out of the local version of the menu offering eggs: escrampled, poiled, or botched. We stayed at the Karnak temple all afternoon and even stayed for the light and sound show that night.

The next day we visited the Valley of the Kings, we headed over to where we knew the ferries were that would take us across the Nile River. As we approached the dock we were, of course, accosted by a helpful “guide” who started showing us to an empty boat. Fortunately from there we spotted the real ferry and ditched our wannabe guide and boarded the ferry. He yelled at us that we thought that we were so smart but that we weren’t really. No duh, but we do our best. On the ferry ride another Helpful Henry struck up a conversation – he was offering his taxi for a tour of the Valley of the Kings. I was dubious, but the price seemed about right and he spoke English. When we got to the other side, it turned out that he didn’t have a taxi – he just negotiated a price with one of the taxis parked there and handed us over. Taken again, darn it. The tombs and temples were spectacular – we visited King Tut’s tomb just because it was famous and then a couple of other tombs recommended in the guidebook. Unfortunately Leslie got sick that day; especially unfortunate was the fact that her medicine was in her bags that we’d left behind in Cairo. So we asked our taxi driver, who spoke very little English, to take us to a pharmacy. There we found that the lady pharmacist didn’t speak or read English and misinterpreted Leslie’s very clear drawings, so she just let Leslie behind the counter where she found her own medicine by the generic name in English on the packages. Whew. That night we boarded our very comfortable night train for the trip back to Cairo.

My daughter Annie remembers the next part of the trip: “As we stepped off the sleeper train we’d taken from Luxor to Cairo, we had no idea that it wouldn’t have been in the main central station in Cairo. The conductor had knocked on our door to wake us up and told us it was our stop. So we got off and the train left. It was about four o’clock in the morning and still dark. I knew right away something was wrong. It was way too quiet for the station in Cairo, and too empty. No one was in the station except for us and two guards. It was very spooky. We looked around for a way out and as we did we realized this was not the Cairo station. We found our way back to the track and found the two guards. Where were we? It turned out we were in the Giza station, outside of Cairo, the stop right before ours, but not our stop at all. What were we to do? They advised waiting for the next train and riding that to Cairo. The next train that came by, however, was an army train stuffed full of soldiers. It didn’t stop for us and I was glad of it. It was a very long train and all the soldiers that were by the windows were staring at us. I was getting very weirded out by that point. After that train left we waited for another while, but it seemed like years. Finally a decent train showed up and we climbed aboard. It was a regular train so we couldn’t lie down to sleep but we made do. At last we were back in Cairo and incredibly tired, but safe and intact. And that was our adventure getting “lost” in Egypt.”

That last day in Cairo we tried to take a taxi out to see the “Alabaster Mosque” that is covered in the alabaster scavenged from the pyramids. But we couldn’t make our driver understand where we wanted to go, and none of the pedestrians that he stopped and asked could understand us either. But, as we wandered around the streets of Cairo not knowing how to get to our original destination, we happened to pass through a musical instrument making neighborhood, so we just got out of the taxi and started shopping hand-made lutes (yes, we bought one.) Searching for dinner we found a nice place, and since we couldn’t communicate verbally they let me go into the kitchen and point to several dishes to serve us – it was all very yummy. That night we caught a plane from Cairo to London, and then to Paris, France. It was New Year’s Eve 1999 and we were going to ring in the new millennium at the Eifel Tower. But that’s another story for another day.