I visited this country 10 years ago. It was an idea I'd had for some time, to visit a country off the beaten tourist track. So I asked a colleague who was used to unconventional tourism if he was planning any of these trips, and he said yes, that he was thinking of visiting Yemen with two other colleagues. So, the four of us went there, with nothing in mind other than getting to know this country that was completely foreign to us and to 99.9% of Westerners.
Booking the trip wasn't easy, however. First, because shortly after deciding to go, there was an explosion at the American embassy, and we became somewhat apprehensive. We knew it wasn't a calm, risk-free destination, but the concrete news of attacks made us reconsider. At the time, Al-Qaeda was at its peak, and reports of kidnappings in the country, attacks, the risk even just of speaking to women, and a particular case of violence against a Yemeni doctor after a patient died, sparking the fury of the family, gave us a mix of fear and, simultaneously, an almost uncontrollable curiosity.
We even changed our plans to visit Libya, imagine that!, but the bureaucratic difficulties with entry visas led us back to the idea of Yemen, where it was much easier to enter.
About a month before departure, with the trip already booked, a new attack made us fearful. A group of South Korean tourists had been attacked by a suicide bomber (a child, actually) while observing the city of Shibam, the so-called "Manhattan of the Desert" for its unique architecture. I think 6 people died in that attack. The South Korean government sent a diplomatic delegation to the country to investigate the attack and provide support to the remaining citizens and families of the deceased. This delegation was also attacked as they left the airport, although they suffered no damage. The site of the attack was still marked by a patch of burnt tar on the road, which our Yemeni guide later showed us.
Once we arrived in Yemen, the reality proved to be different. In fact, it was a country where one sensed a tense atmosphere, but not necessarily a dangerous one. The biggest impact it had on me was the apparent chaos of the way of life. The traffic, the markets, the restaurants…everything seemed chaotic. And poor. Very poor. But the beauty of the city of Sana'a, the observation of a lifestyle radically different from what we were used to, the regression to city scenes that seemed almost medieval, diverted our attention to a world we had never witnessed and which, for me personally, left a mixture of perplexity, discomfort, and amazement.
During our stay, we didn't witness anything that truly made us uneasy. We stayed in an extremely basic hotel in the Al Haj-ra mountains, north of Sana'a, where the silence was absolute, with almost no comfort, in isolated hotels where it would have been easy to kidnap us. We walked through streets where we were the only foreigners, and sometimes we even crossed paths with European travelers, including a Nordic couple with a small child, believe it or not! We met a French teacher who worked in a nearby country (I think it was Djibouti) visiting an Ismaili sanctuary alone, a Swede traveling the world alone, some Eritreans visiting, some Italian women traveling alone, and the daughter of a hotel owner, also Italian, the son of the doctor who emigrated there many years before to become the Shah's personal physician. We heard news of some kidnappings further north through a phone call from home, and when confronted with it, Abdul, the guide, said yes, it had happened, but they weren't tourists, they were foreign workers and they were kidnapped because they knew their routines well and it was a way of putting pressure on the government that the tribes knew well.
In fact, kidnappings were generally carried out by tribes in dispute with the government; it was a way of pressuring them to obtain some kind of advantage, and usually the people were treated well and ended up being returned unharmed. This, however, required us to register our movements with the tourist police; they wanted to know all our movements within the country because, as telecommunications and police logistical capacity were limited, this was an effective way to know where we were "for our own protection." Obviously, I had never been in a country where they forced me to say in advance where I wanted to go…
We also knew that within Yemen there were practically no-go zones. In the north, near the border with Saudi Arabia, and in the interior, the so-called Empty Quarter, an unpoliced, desert area, thought to be a refuge for Al-Qaeda terrorists.
As for theft or petty crime, that was something I'd never seen there before. We could leave our bags outside the Land Cruiser where Abdul had transported us all week knowing nothing would happen. There's a code of honor and a natural fear among the locals of stealing, as the penalties can be quite harsh, and the people were, naturally, hospitable and curious to meet us.
Currently, Yemen is closed to foreigners and a brutal civil war is raging, with many casualties, famine, and the destruction of buildings whose two-thousand-year-old architecture left us astonished. At the moment, there is no tourism; obviously, the situation was complicated 10 years ago, but today it is completely impossible, for different reasons. Today, Al-Qaeda doesn't exist, but there is a thirst for power that doesn't hesitate to punish, above all, the children, who, as we passed by, begged us to take photographs, which they loved to see later.
I'll just leave you with a few images of an amazing destination, of unique beauty, and one that I hope to visit again someday.