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The Rural Party Everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE, you see these horses depicted, the ensignia of the rural party that dominates the provinces in Yemen. |
Super Fly They wanted a picture in their truck. |
Lunchtime We stopped for lunch In Manekah. Even at a simple roadside place, the food was great, mostly because all the meat is butchered right there... |
Lunchtime See? |
Take My Photo No. 232 Not often that the older fellows wanted a picture, but he did. he was sitting at the table next to ours. |
Lunch is served. If alone, I wouldn't have the courage to stop at any old place like this, and be assured that I wouldn't get ill. As it was, I had no stomach issues, even slight, the entire trip, whereas a long trip in Central America almost always has some gastronomic discomfort attached. |
Coffee Cowboy Since I had the good camera, Duane benefited by getting lots of great pictures of himself. What did I get? Huyh? |
Great Bikes Yemen is filled with great micro motorcycles, 2 strokes and such. I wanted to get a bunch of pictures of them but didn't, except for a few like this. |
Take my Picture No. 444 Need I say more |
Tired and Sleepy Some downtime for a tired mule. |
Not sure about this one... Tourist hotel - I don't think so... |
Watch Out, MOMA Next to the tourist hotel in Manakah, Yemen (pop. 300, not including the mules) was the Al Hajrah museum of Art Treasures. |
Lively decoration The toyota pickups were mostly decorated like this, with great, bright painting. |
Al Hagarah On the way to Haras, Yemen, you pass this especially imposing town, Al Hagarah. By the way, there's always a variety of way to spell things in Yemen. I was given the names of Al Hagrah, Al Hajrah, and Al Hagarah for this town. |
Amazing Views in Harasi On the way to the Haras growing area, towns and terraces |
Flat Land Even arable flatter areas of land are terraced. |
Citadels of Harasi: Haras is another coffee region within a few hours of Sana'a. They have great coffee here, and more of the crop is terrace-grown than what we saw in Saihi the day before. |
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Amazing Views in Harasi More dramatic houses. What views from these abodes... |
Amazing Views in Harasi Another cliffside town. |
Amazing Views in Harasi Amazing Views in Harasi |
Herder Rare sighting of the fairer sex. In the rural areas they ware straw shade hats over their veils. |
Amazing Views in Harasi Yet another castle-like outcropping of homes. |
Gart, Haras, Yemen The town of Gart is where we were headed on this trip. |
Yemen Shibriqi Mokha Coffee Cherry These trees were the Shibriqi clutivar and had lost of cherry, relative to Yemen at least. |
Nasser Hussin Nasser was to be our host in Gart. He must have been hillarious, because he kept everyone in stitches (well, everyone who understands Arabic). More on him later. |
Roadside Coffee Along the way, there was some very convenient coffee trees (a rarity in Yemen!) So we stopped. I doubt coffee farmers from other origins could believe that any coffee could be grown in such a surrounding environment. |
"Heavy" Production At any other coffee origin, this tree would be either removed, heavily pruned to increase next year's production, or fed a lot of organic (or non-organic) fertilizer. But in Yemen, that's a lot of coffee cherry for a tree. |
Shibriqi Mokha You can see this branch has already been harvested once, and is ready for it's final harvest. Average pass on trees is 3 times. The final pass is often a low-quality "strip pick" of all remaining cherry. |
Shibriqi Mokha Good even ripening here, especially for Yemen. |
Devanning at Gart After a long drive on the dirt road, D gets out at Gart. |
Women Scatter Basically, the women tend to disappear when the Yenkee heathens arrive. I tended to be respectful of the fact they didn't want t be photographed ... 99% of the time at least! In terms of headscarves, all women have them, and according to Ali, the degree to which they had themsleves is a personal, or family matter. Few have their faces exposed, many have just their eyes exposed, and an equal amount have a fine black veil that covers everything. In fact, in Sana'a I saw a woman who wore glasses outside here complete veil, a very unusual look, like a black blob with glasses. |
What are the rules ... I always asked before photographing and almost always showed them the picture afterwards. People seemed quite delighted with this. It seems fine to photograph younger people. |
Gart Is Amazing Gart ... what kind of Yemeni name is that. Sounds like a cross between Garth and Bart. But what an amazing place this section of Haras is. |
Castle or Village? There is something so medieval about the towns in Yemen, built to defend against attack, from an era when it was "every town for itself". This makes for an architecture that, to Western eyes, is incredible. |
Gart Edifice |
A Heap o' Stones ... but each squared off jsut for the purpose, probaby by ancestors. Since the towns are low on population, there is a surplus of ruined walls and homes to use for building material. |
Narrow Walkway A narrow passage in Gart |
Happy or sad ? This picture seems to have elicited one smile and one frown, but they both enjoyed the results when they saw them. |
Cute Puppy I saw lots of cats in Yemen, but there were some dogs too, like this little guy... |
White House of Gart I believe the white buildings are religious, because you would see them occasionally among the homes, but I did not ask Mohamed or Ali about this. |
Shed with a View Even the humble little buildings are beautiful. |
Dizzying Heights Our hosts wanted to lead us on a hike to the lower area of the town ... we'll call it Lower Gart, but I was the only visitor that ended up making the knee-busting walk. |
The Path to Lower Gart We followed a steep, narrow, rocky path down to the village. I am not sure the significance of the sun pattern, but I saw it often. |
Coffee, not Qat Coffee on the terraces far below. Unfortunately, one way to tell it is coffee from a distance, and not qat, is the green-yellow appearance of the foilage due to lack of water and/or nutrition. |
Desert Blossoms On the way down, some beautiful flowers, including this. |
Flowering Euphorbia There was also a flowering plant that seemed to be a Euphorbia, as well as a fruiting cactus with Beavertail-like nodes. Coffee growing amidst cactus, another seeming contradiction that exists in Yemen. |
Adenium obesum? I was sure I had this plant in my cactus collection at home. It's fairly common, Adenium obesum. Mr. Sowaid said it was not native to the area but I looked it up upon my return and it seems to be native to parts of Africa and Arabia. |
Coffee Drying As we got closer I could see the coffee drying on the roofs of the village below. They do not have space for "drying patios" like Central America, so the roofs are a convenient place, as well as another limitation on volume. |
I can see coffee now ... As we approached Lower Gart I couls see that many of the roofs had coffee drying. Indeed, this is the middle of the Yemeni Harvest (October-December) so it makes sense. |