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Every man a warrior, every home a fortress

Background: North Yemen is an almost perfect picture of medieval Arab life. It has a lengthy history, buildings are ancient, unique and spectacular, the people are fierce but generally friendly while social habits are curious, but until a few years ago tourists were not allowed to travel in this extraordinary country.
We have to thank Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait for the opening of Yemen to foreigners. When the government supported Iraq during the Gulf crisis, thousands of expatriate workers in Mid-East countries were sent home, cutting off one of the country's main sources of foreign currency.
Tourist dollars were the easiest and fastest way to replace the lost income. So, with the end of the Gulf War came the beginning of foreign travel and lthough the infrastructure for tourism is not well developed, the attractions are clear.

History: Yemen's recorded history started when it was known as Saba/Sheba three thousand years ago, on the main spice route from the east to Europe, and was rich and powerful. The Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon appears in both the Bible and the Koran.

Buildings: The most dramatic feature of the the country today, especially in and around the capital of Sana'a, is the buildings.
Sana'a, 2,300m above sea level, is considered to be architecturally unique and has received $224m from UNESCO for its preservation.
Many houses are over 400 years old, and most are built in the style of 1,000 years ago.
Five or six floor, brown mud and brick houses grow out of the brown land, like huge square vegetables. Each one belongs to a large family with eight or ten children.
Decoration is limited to white paint around the randomly placed, randomly sized windows. Of different shapes, sometimes of stained glass, sometimes with no glass, windows always start two or three metres above ground.
Combined with one metre thick walls and a small front door, these houses are cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and most important, they are very easy to defend.

People: Local people are as colourful as their homes. The men dress to kill, though usually not literally. Large, curved, silver daggers are the Yemen equivalent of the necktie, while Kalashnikov machine guns are carried with the same frequency as cellphones in Tokyo, only with deadlier communicative purpose.
The weapons the men carry are not just for show, but they generally keep their gunplay away from foreigners and are the perfect hosts. Inviting strangers into their homes for tea or sharing some qat with a curious traveller is not unusual.

Plastic: For a traveller the main visual flaw in the barren beauty of Yemen is plastic bags. Lightweight, pink, yellow and blue, they carpet streets and colour hills. Rubbish did not exist until recently because everything was used or degradable, but now plastic is used to keep qat fresh after it has been picked, and plastic bags from shops are dropped without thought, lying forever unnoticed by local people.

Qat: Qat is a another unique feature of the country. A narcotic bush, cousin to the coca plant in South America from which cocaine is produced, qat is chewed in some other countries, but not to the same degree as in Yemen.
The whole country seems to be fueled by this legal drug, with 90% of the population chewing it for up to 5 hours a day.
Afternoon or evening qat parties are a part of daily life where groups of men, or women - but not both together - gather on the top floor of a house, or in a cafe, or their workplace; they lean on cushions, drink cola, smoke, chat and chew the qat.

Leaf by leaf, they stuff their faces until their eyes are bright, their blood pressure is up by 20%, their conversation is wild and their cheeks take on the shape of oranges.
Newspaper articles argue endlessly about the bad and occasionally about the good effects of qat on the body, but what is indisputable is that Yemen is poor country with very little rain.
Most of the countryside is bare rock, with a few small plots of carefully, expensively watered land, yet 50% of this tiny land area is used to grow qat, since people would rather chew the leaf than eat.
Many families spend one third of their monthly income on this drug, but the government doesn't dare to mess with the habits of so many fiercely independent, well-armed citizens.

Coffee: Another source of fame for old Yemen is that it is the home of coffee. Stories tell that Ali al-Shadhili, resident of the Red Sea port of Mokha, in the 15th century offered passing Portuguese travellers cups of his home-made drink. They were so impressed with its energising properties that they took the recipe and a few sacks of beans back home with them. Over the next three hundred years coffee houses opened all over the world, but the sole source of coffee for Europeans during those days was the tiny town of Mokha, north Yemen.

Modern life is moving into this medieval Islamic society, and changes will happen quickly if the promise of huge oil fields in the south of the country is fulfilled.
Pepsi and Toyota have already arrived, so Starbucks, Levis, neon signs, concrete housing and even bigger, more colourful plastic bags cannot be far behind.

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