Bobbi and I traveled to Yemen in 1977. We had moved to Saudi Arabia in the summer of the previous year and were exploring places to which we could easily travel from there on the many college holidays we got in those days. We were living in Dhahran and there were flights from there to Shiraz that took only 45 minutes as the crow flies. We had probably been there a couple of times before we got around to arranging our Yemen trip. To do that we had to go to Jeddah from Dhahran and make our way to the Yemeni embassy there. It was on back street (I'm thinking a dirt lane with trash blowing about) where when we went to apply for the visa there was a donkey on its back struggling with its legs in the air that everyone was ignoring. When we returned a few days later to pick up the visas, the donkey was still there, just barely alive, and no longer struggling. Sad, but such things beset the senses in Saudi Arabia every day.
Visas in hand, our next step was to book flights to Sanaa where on arrival at the airport on the edge of the city, we had to find our way into town and find a hotel (we always used to just go there, park Bobbi in a tea shop; she was pregnant with Glenn) and I would go looking for one, nothing fancy, just clean and cheap and in the center of things. No one booked online back then (online? what was that?).
Our next order of business was to report to an internal security office in Sanaa and be registered into the country. We were reminded to return there when we wanted to leave to arrange for our exit visas. We were accustomed to having to secure exit visas any time we wanted to leave Saudi Arabia, but I'd never had to get an exit visa to leave any country I had ever visited as a tourist (apart from on an earlier visit I'd made to Sudan in around 1973-4).
But the country was delightful. The architecture in Sanaa was beyond compare. We took most of our pictures there (judging from what survives), just point-and-shoot to capture the street scenes, but this was back in the says of film, when photographers were constrained by costs of developing film, and availability of more film once you'd shot through your rolls. The whole zeitgeist of photography changed when it became possible to take limitless digital photos, but when traveling the old way in 1977, we were were not so blessed.
We were in Yemen for a couple of weeks. We found plenty to do in Sanaa but we also made a trip around the country, traveling on buses when available, or in shared taxis such as this one, stopping at Taiz and Hodeida en route. We took pictures of that trip as well, but haven't come across them yet.
Bobbi and I always negotiated for the front seats. I sat between her and the driver and Bobbi took the window seat next to the door. We were offered a lot of khat on these trips and never had any problem with the drivers or the other passengers.
Here are some pictures taken around Sanaa, starting with the gate to the old town.
Photo 1 (the numbers correspond with the photo number as stored in Google Photos)
Photo 2
Photo 3
Photo 4
Photo 5
Photo 6
Photo 8
Photo 9
Photo 13
Photo 10 - Where's Waldo in this picture?
Photo 17
Photo 7
Photo 11 apparently taken from the rooftop above
Photo 18 not sure what this is a picture of, maybe Taiz?
Photo 14 These next two were possibly taken where the car was stopped (the one with Bobbi standing next to it; I think it may have been near the way up to a village at the top of the mountain.)
Photo 16 I just present these here to present the complete the set of pictures that we found in this slide deck, 50 years after we took them.
Why are we posting these here? We posted them on Facebook where one of my Webheads in Action acquaintances Michael Birch expressed an interest in sharing them with a Yemeni friend, but did not want to do so without permission. We gave him permission to share the pictures, and he wrote us:
"I forgot to tell you after sending Bobbi's pictures to young Yemeni friend. He calls them gold dust, and he's probably right. So rare and so full of meaning to him as an exile."
I replied
"Hi Michael, if we're sitting on a pile of old deteriorating slides that are gold dust to someone, we'll figure out a way to share them. You could put us in touch with your Yemeni friend if you like. It's so sad what's gone on there."
So this post is in fulfillment of this promise.
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