Apologies for taking a while to put this up - I got sick from something I ate (and since this is Yemen, it could have been anything I ate) and have been under the weather. But here goes...
We set out from Sana'a Thursday morning, driving southwest through the mountains ringing the capital for hours, stopping once for a break at a police outpost on a cliffside, the bathroom of which was the disgusting wrongness of Hell given physical form. After four hours of driving, we rolled into the southern city of Ibb and ate lunch on the floor of a restaurant that, for reasons left unknown, had been swathed in astroturf. As we were ajnabi (foreigners), the waiter immediately carried out an armload of Cokes, because that's what Westerners drink, of course.
Ibb was the seat of an emirate until 1944 when it was enfolded into Yemen, and among the older men at least it seemed there is still some resentment of Yemeni authority, and especially distrust of foreigners - we got more stares than usual and as we were leaving an old men with henna in his beard (generally a bad sign for Westerners - dying one's hair with henna is traditional when a conservative man reaches a certain old age, and it often dovetails nicely with xenophobia) came up to our bus yelling. He was nearly impossible to understand with a cheek full of qat, and as he screamed something about the CIA, Iraq, and foreign dogs, masticated qat saucers hummed out of his mouth.
After pulling away from the out-of-his-mind-high septuagenarian, we drove a few miles into the hills of Ibb to the town of Jibla. The hillside town was mostly built up centuries ago by Queen Arwa, who ruled until she died at the age of 92. We made a stop at her mosque and, in a nice change, were allowed inside (generally non-Muslims aren't allowed inside mosques, but this rule really depends on the liberalism or conservatism of the area and the local congregation). On the downhill, cobble-stoned walk back to our bus we experienced the light drizzle of our first rain in Yemen.
