 | DAY 6 |
Ma'rib |
'Arsh Bilqis, the Throne of Bilqis. Bilqis is the Yemeni name for the Queen of Sheba who reigned in 10BC.
Mahram Bilqis, or the Temple of Bilqis, with man asleep below one of the pillars. Apparently the pillars are half buried in the sand.
Himyarite writing on the walls of the Great Dam of Ma'rib, from the 4th century AD.
A Bedou village right behind the old dam.
Lounging in the Bedou tent, we relaxed on their hand made goat hair carpets, drank some tea, and discussed the usual round of politics.
Amer, on the right, and his family.
Amer and I by the New Dam. He remained with us for the remainder of the day.
A girl that innocently held my hand as we wandered through the ruined mud skyscraper. Never spoke a word, her gaze was intense enough for me. |
The sites were dissapointing. The Bedouins at the dam were nice. We visited them then they hung out with us for the rest of the trip. They were nice, took some pictures that we promised to send back. Sitting inside their tent, my head still exhausted from so much Arabic yesterday, I kept wandering off in my mind. I was sitting on their hand made carpets from goat skin, wondering how a goat could have such rough hair. I wanted to itch my legs, I wanted to keep my legs from falling asleep, I wanted to lie down and rest. I could think of anything but the conversation at hand. Aida was in full form and went into the usual Palestinian politics with our hosts. They brought out some cheap perfume to spray us with (a custom I had never heard of before) and Aida was smart enough to say that she was allergic, and I was too slow to come up with an excuse, so I felt dizzy throughout the day until the smell eventually evaporated. Amer and his family walked us around his little "village," a collection of tents really that they had put up behind the old dam. They seemed to move every few years. We tasted his fresh made laban (yogurt) which was still fermenting, we met an old lady who they said was losing her mind. I think Aida snuck a picture of her even! They showed us their goats. They were so proud to share with us their life. It was so heart warming. We went to the new dam with Amer and his family and friends. They shot their rifles, entertained, like little children, at the echo of the bullets whizzing through the sky. It was unbearably loud (and boring). After fixing up some papers (through the wastas - connections - of Amer, Abdel Karim and others) and going back and forth to the police station and haggling over the cab ride, we finally got the two front seats on the taxi. Aida and I were on top of each other, but lucky enough to have one of the only operational windows in the car! Again because of the attempt to keep tourists out, even exit permits were needed from this province. Having had no entry permit, we had to rely on our newly made friends to get us some fake ones. They had to specify the drop off point in Sana'a for which the cab driver would be held liable if anything were to happen to us. Since we didn't know the address of the friend we were staying with (who lived in a trailer camp off site from his company anyway) they came up with a hotel name. The cab ride was endless with the slowest taxi driver one could ever imagine! He constantly would check out his hair and his teeth from the side mirror (neither of which he had to bother for, his teeth were green with qat and quite decayed, and his hair or what was left of it, was always messy), leaning completely out of the car while taking curves, swaying the car all the way into the other lane - on a curve! Many times Aida and I thought we were going to either crash onto an oncoming truck or fall off the cliff. The only grace was he was driving at 20 k/hr, so it wasn't like we were going to crash! A cab ride that is supposed to take 3 hours took us 6. Now it's hilarious looking back but it was frustrating. When we got to Sana'a, he refused to take us anywhere but the Sheraton Hotel because that's what our "fake" paper from this morning said. Abdo (a friend of a friend who works at the same company as Aida, and our fathers before her, some twenty or thirty years ago) came and picked us up and we signed a "release form" to the slowpoke taxi driver to rest his mind... We went back to the CCC Camp and had some fish dinner at this awesome local place – every person gets an entire fish of their own, skin, head, the whole thing; it's cut split open and laid on the wall of a clay oven and served with a hot sauce. It's strange to see "modern Yemen" – I don't like it as much. It's not as exotic, as mystical… certainly not what I came to see. From that respect it seemed like any other Arab capital. |