Pirates, Prostitutes and Being Alive
17 Mar
I’ve travelled to some godforsaken places, but the idea of being alive was never once questioned. Bugs, heat, natural disasters, ex-guerrillas, guns (not pointing at me), stampedes, you name it, I’ve done it.
But I feel like this is the first time I very nearly wasn’t.
The plan for Yemen was always to hit up Sana’a, the city established by Noah’s son, Shem; then head for Shibam Hadramaut, the “Manhattan of the Ancient World”, with its ancient ’skyscrapers’. Friday and Saturday I was living happily with a Yemeni family in Sana’a, and went to buy my bus ticket for Shibam.
At the bus station, I had a strange feeling about it, although I didn’t know what. My guide and I decided to head for Aden instead, as he also felt weird about going to Shibam on Sunday. Neither of us really knew why we wanted to go to Aden, a town more known for the bombing of the USS Cole, its proximity to the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden, and the proliferation of.. well, pirates and prostitutes. We decided to head to Aden first, rest up for the night, then go up to Shibam the long way around… for some reason.
After 8 harrowing hours in a bus, all of which I was fully covered in a balto (some sort of burqah), we got off and I found myself disappointed by the town. We couldn’t find a decent hotel. In one, after I’d given up and gone upstairs to shower, the man at reception rang up and I heard my guide shouting at him in Arabic, and he dragged me out of the hotel, cursing. The man at reception had phoned up to say please ask the lady to come downstairs to me, by herself. While checking out several other hotels, they all wanted to confiscate my cameras and my passport… and when I went to check out the rooms, I knew why. They were all whore-houses. Sitting at a shai shop, random Somalian men came to talk to me and I realized that for the first time, I was scared. One of them said: I want you. I walked away very very slowly.
After three hours of Aden hell, I’d given up and settled into a nice-ish sea-view hotel room when the phone rang and my guide started crying.
A bomb had gone off in Shibam; we were supposed to be there.
To make things worse, a tour guide whose hands I’d shaken just the day before, when I was lying down taking a nap on the rooftop verandah of a hotel in Old Sana’a, died in the blast. Together with four Koreans. I know if I’d gotten into that bus and if I had arrived in Shibam on Sunday, I would have most likely insisted on going to take photos of it from that very spot it happened. Instead, I was busy fussing over shitty hotels, wondering what I was doing in a pirate town.
Now I’m just glad I’m alive.
Four days to Dubai, five to London, seven to Barcelona.
I absolutely adore Yemen and I wish these things didn’t have to happen to such a beautiful country.
