My journey to Al-Mukalla was best summed up by a miserable cocktail of adjectives: long, slow, cramped, hot and uneventful. The scenery veered between grizzled coastline and pure Lawrence Of Arabia golden rippling dunes. Whipped up by wind the sand often encroached on the road, blurring its boundaries, as if the desert was digesting the measly presence of man. About the only thing which excited the other eight passengers in our car during the ten hour ordeal was an occasional sighting of mini whirlwinds, sucking and spiraling sand into the sky as they shimmied around the horizon. Half way through the morning we sped by a vast refuse sight which looked as if Aden had been out fly tipping in the dead of night. Our driver managed to communicate to me this was in fact a Somalian refugee camp. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

Lunch was at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere which doubled up as a forsaken village for a few lucky Somalians. I was the only citizen on the street without a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. My appetite suppressed by a foul stench emanating from the kitchen, I instead wandered out of the back of the restaurant to take a look at the mountainous scenery and try and locate an alternative toilet venue. On the bonnet of a rusting car were huge hunks of curing shark meat humming in the sunshine. Circling around them was a black and yellow swarm of hornets who took a momentary interest in my presence and sent me waddling back to our car conscious of a painfully full bladder.

Al-Mukalla at night was another faceless Yemeni new town, or at least my part of it was. It boasted all the features I’d come to expect - disused parks, closed broasting cafes, power-cuts and squalid no-star hotels. The ‘Funduq (hotel) Ash-Sha’b’ offered a variation on a time honoured theme. It had a free single room. Amazed I took it without question, only to regret my hasty deposit. A new low point immediately proceeded.

The once white sheets in my room were almost brown, squashed insects made for a fetching anaglypta cum pebble-dash wall covering and there was even a large open hole in the far wall where an air conditioning unit had once been. Such an open route for the marauding nasties of the night didn’t matter on balance, both doors to the balcony were off their hinges. The floors weren’t even Yemeni clean. Caked in a sticky grey tar like substance I took this effluent to be the combination of years of dead skin, shed sperm, humidity, dust and spilled sugary tea. Opening my rucksack I took out an atomiser containing ‘Jungle Formula’ insect repellent and set about giving the room a thorough dousing, sending resident flies, earwigs, spiders and mosquitoes into impressive tail spins. The management had no clean sheets so I lay out my sleeping bag, erected a portable mosquito net then went out in search of some well deserved supper.

Being unable to understand a single word the chef at the only local café was babbling, I was dragged into the kitchen and taken on a guided tour of the meager selection of ingredients on offer. I opted for something which looked suspiciously like diced tuna following the assurance that it was fresh ‘today’. Into the bargain I deprived a couple of bluebottles of their temporary homestead. Pan fried with some savage chillies it was better than I could of hoped for, though only a shadow of the kingfish served up the previous night. Back on the non-alcoholic beers I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the racy high-life of Aden. The best I could do in Al-Mukallah was to loose myself in Nigel Barley’s excellent book ‘The Innocent Anthropologist’, a warm and witty account of fieldwork in Cameroon which had helped to pass much of the day’s monotonous drive. Averting my gaze, so I could take a swig of the Swan Lite, I was astounded to find myself seated opposite another Caucasian.

Eric looked like Herman Munster. He was a giant of a man hunched over a small aluminium dish of kebabed lamb which he gingerly picked at. There was no symmetry to his face, mother nature had positioned his features at random. Eric’s smile was crooked, his nose lopsided, one eye was higher than the other, even his hair receded in uneven patches. I recognised him immediately as the only other traveller present on my flight to Sana’a two weeks earlier. We had no choice but to become friends, ignoring each other under the given circumstances would have been churlish. Eric was a professional photographer from Amsterdam who nurtured a private passion for travel work. Mutually excited by having the company of another like mind we talked shop for a couple of hours before agreeing to meet up and share a taxi for the journey to Say’un the following morning.

By the time I got round to hiding myself away under a mist of insect repellent and layers of netting I was keenly anticipating an exciting few days in the desert. I had a new companion and was nearing the successful completion of my self-inflicted mission. It had been Shibam and the area around Say’un which had attracted me to Yemen in the first place. Shibam was my goal. Contemplating this untainted Shang-ra-lah illuminated by golden sunsets I imagined its dusty streets and towering buildings. Savouring the moment, it turned liquid in my woozy state then disintegrated into a myriad of forgotten images.

* * * *

Something dug into my dreams with a deep incision. I awoke with a loud grunt, still keenly feeling a pain which had been part of my turbulent sleep. Blood thumped round my head as my mind reeled in a muddled subconscious panic. Something was definitely wrong. Groping hopelessly in the darkness I ended up clutching the big toe on my right foot, the point where pain seemed to be emanating from. It felt fine as I nursed it, but when I turned on my torch I immediately panicked.
My hand and foot were covered in blood.

Something really had bitten me. I tried to think straight in a swirling vortex of fear. There were four possibilities and none of them appealed. I could take my pick between rat, bat, mouse or spider. I discounted snake due to the fact there was no obvious presence of venom. It made little difference to my hypersensitive state. One word lit up in my mind in gigantic red neon letters.

R A B I E S

There was a smear of blood on the mosquito net, a barely discernible rip and no sign whatsoever of my assailant. Pathetically I squeezed my toe and watched droplets blood gather one after another in tiny hemispheres above the bite. Propelled into an adrenaline fuelled consciousness I tried to rationalise my position.

I was alone, in the middle of an extremely poor autocratic Islamic Fundamentalist state, I had little access to money and medical services, all communication lines to the outside world were down and I had just been bitten by some unpleasant, probably diseased creature of the night.
Looking at the situation rationally I had only one viable option - to panic.

I took it.

After panic, revenge swiftly followed as a secondary reflex emotion. I set about my room armed, Boy’s Own style, with a Swiss Army Knife. Instinctively I wanted to kebab the little fucker that had just decided to turn me into a midnight feast. Wisely my assailant had long since vacated the scene of the crime, clearly not wishing to pick up the hefty bill which was now being levied. I was merely fast food, eat and run. All that came out of my orgy of destruction was the transformation of my room into a jumble of strewn belongings which had the appearance that I had just been visited by burglars, the police, or in this case, the rodent police. My chivalrous attempts thwarted I sat amongst the debris and started crying.

The problem was not ‘am I going to die?’ Death was now a pending formality in my over dramatic imagination. My main cause of concern was exactly how I was going to die. I ran through the scenario on fast forward. Rabies had outstanding cinematic overtones, a pure Crononburgian horror fantasy of a final trip. I remembered a hammy edition of ‘Casualty’ where an actor camped up all the symptoms. Hydrophobia, insanity, total seizures, lots of mad eyeball rolling, brains boiling in the skull, body wracked in agony and the demeaning need to chow down on all his nearest and dearest as they gathered outside his isolation ward to be with him in his final hours.

There was indeed much to look forward to.

At least compensation would be on hand in the credibility my lingering demise would bestow upon me. Rabies had kudos. It would guarantee me good press coverage, a few prime time slots on the news. Hell, I might even get something published!

‘EXCLUSIVE! Mad Mullah of Wapping tells all from his padded cell - The sex, the drugs, the gloves and the ravenous rodents. All this week in your soar-away Sun. GO MAD FOR IT.’
As I contemplated my forthcoming spiral to the grave I realised, in all honesty, a variety of options were probably open to me. Although tetanus lacked the sensational media pulling power of rabies it was an equally miserable end. There would be the inevitable problem of being interviewed whilst having a severe case of lock-jaw. I flirted with the prospect of Weils disease and even briefly entertained the morbid fantasy I might have contracted Bubonic plague. Only when I had completely exhausted every conceivable medical fatality did I actually try to do anything even vaguely constructive.

My first assertive action was to attempt to sterilise the wound, an idea which sprang into my pathetic mind a slow-witted hour and twenty minutes after I had been bitten. Paradoxically this quest for cleanliness involved a trip to the toilet of the Ash-Sha’b, an inadvisable venture for any individual to undertake, even if their body was in the peak of physical fitness.

As the power was down I let my sense of smell guide me down an interminable corridor. Opening a barely visible door with a treacle coated sticky handle I found myself confronted by five decimated cubicles, only two of which still possessed doors. These were hanging at irregular angles. Each cubicle contained a Western style throne loo vandalised past any point of repair. None of the toilets had seats, this was only to be expected, it was the fact that they all had large hunks of ceramic missing from their smooth ear-trumpet bodies which caught me off guard. In a masterpiece of bathroom planning each of the bowls had a shower fitted directly above them. They provided the only access to water, there were no taps or sinks in sight. The heads of these showers had long since been pilfered by former desperate guests, leaving behind nothing more than a Heath Robinson network of bent up copper tubing. Naturally there was only cold water on offer. To run this over my wound I had to first place my foot on the broken shards of a turd encrusted porcelain bowl rim, hardly a good start to the process of sterilisation. Then, gurgling out of the overhead pipe in coughs and splutters came the source of my cleansing, a brown translucent liquid the colour of week tea. As I bathed the cut, my mind toyed with the idea that I was probably exposing myself to cholera, typhoid, amoebic dysentery and bilharzia.

Such frivolous notions were cast aside.
These diseases were for wimps.
I had rabies.
I was top of the paranoid pops.

Back in my room I pondered about what I should do with the rest of the night. It was still only 4am. With the aid of some ‘rescue remedy’ retrieved from the portable pharmacy I managed to return to my bed and submerge myself in fitful dreams scattered just beneath the surface of the horror of reality. This time round I was armed with a Swiss Army Knife should my intruder return for dessert. The outcome of such a reprisal would almost certainly culminate with no apprehended criminal and me inflicting a deep stab wound on some part of my anatomy. As I dipped in and out of the present I remember thinking that perhaps I was the fall guy in some underworld Yemeni prophecy. While the Italian Mafia would send their victims to ‘sleep with the fishes,’ their Yemeni counterparts would have no such options in these sun baked desert climes.
Here, I guessed, one slept with the rodents.

* * * *

By 7am I was wide awake, on the street and putting into action a clearly formulated plan. Spotting a cranky old telecommunications shop only one step removed from Alexander Bell’s historic discovery I asked the dozing proprietor if he could hook me up to London. Confounding all expectations a minute later I was talking to Loveshrine. Locked away in the privacy of a small booth amidst a web of dusty wires I could imagine my girl at 4am, snuggled up in her crimson bedroom, her sleepy form overlooked by a giant pink foil shrine decorated with assorted Buddhas and precious objects. Her voice was thick and warm, my lifeline to sanity, only the antiquated receiver at my end gave it a dehumanised tinny edge. I wanted to convey a complex message of love, transport myself into her safe arms. Fate dictated otherwise. Still cranked up by the events of the night I dispensed with formalities, failing to even offer a cursory good morning.

“Don’t Panic,” I intoned, unwittingly mimicking Clive Dunn and launching into my tale of woe.
I needed Loveshrine to phone the Tropical Diseases Clinic in London on my behalf and find out exactly what the correct protocol was for a chap trapped in my current predicament. For five minutes I spat out a condensed version of my convoluted medical history, then as an afterthought I told the doubtlessly naked one that she was “gorgeous” and “sexy” before hanging up and settling my hefty bill with the now fully conscious and ear-wigging proprietor.

Eric was bang on time for our breakfast rendezvous. It transpired he’d already decided not to make the arduous trek to Say’un on the grounds that he wanted to photograph Al-Mukallah’s fish market. As a result of having more time he set about making sensible suggestions concerning what I should do in my quest for first aid. And so together we embarked on a salutary tour of Al-Mukallah’s threadbare medical facilities, an expedition which was well and truly off the pages of the Lonely Planet. Bizarrely this started from the confines of Eric’s hotel.

Being a professional man Eric was spending big whilst working, a perk which entitled him to all sorts of first class treatment. A lobby with wood panelled walls, a gleaming marble floor, a receptionist who spoke a smattering of English, air conditioning, a private shower, even exemption from being mauled by rabid animals whilst soundly asleep in clean sheets. I marvelled at his hotel’s swanky interior, such was the power of money. Enviously eyeing up my companion’s luxury surroundings it struck me just how far my standards had fallen in the two and a half weeks since leaving the UK, a conundrum which nicely highlighted one of the paradoxes central to my strange compartmentalised life. Einstein’s turned over a quarter of a million quid each year and yet here I was, on my only vacation of 1996, admiring my travelling companion’s £12 a night room, knowing it was well and truly out of my price range.

I explained my plight to Eric’s receptionist, furnishing descriptive passages with a few sketches of furry mammals with protruding teeth. Shaking his skull cap covered head he tut-tutted at my chosen place of accommodation. Westerners were a complete mystery to him.
What on earth brought them to Al-Mukallah?
A cab was ordered on my behalf to take me to a clinic where there would be a doctor who would be able to understand me and administer to my paltry needs. Eric and I waited for fifteen minutes until, inexplicably, a taxi with red fake fur upholstery turned up and ferried us to a badly whitewashed derelict concrete bunker, masquerading as a hospital, no more than three minutes walk away from where we were sitting. I could actually see Eric’s room from the porch of the clinic.

Inside I gave my details and a well rehearsed account of the previous night complete with sketches to a disinterested clerk. The building was stark, institutional and Yemeni clean with one meagre concession to the medical profession, there was a faint odour of disinfectant. A doctor who spoke a modicum of English was brought for me to re-tell my sorry tale to. Alone I was guided into his surgery which seemed to double up as a very primitive operating theatre and potential morgue. At the far end was a beaten up old aluminium trolley with a body laid flat out on its top, covered from head to toe with a cream blanket. I couldn’t tell if this was a patient catching forty winks in unusual surroundings due to overcrowding on the wards, or a recent stiff waiting to be attended to. I suspected the latter. Seated in a red plastic bucket chair I placed my foot on the doctor’s knee as he applied all manner of swabs and ointments. He wanted to know if I had any tingling, infection or numbness in my foot.

I replied in the negative.

Around me a sparse selection of medical paraphernalia, which would have belonged in a museum back home, diverted my attention away from my wound. Clapped out nondescript monitoring machines, oscilloscopes with spaghetti junction wiring hanging out of their backs, a rusting oxygen cylinder attached to a battered disposable mask (which was unlikely to be disposed of for years to come), and, the focus of the room, a cheap vinyl covered operating table situated like a sacrificial alter in the middle of the chillingly empty theatre. The doctor’s main light source came from an archaic rock-n-roll 5K, mounted on a pantographic arm, which bathed the operating table in a heavenly shaft of light. For many like the mute cadaver at the end of the room it had probably provided the last dazzling vision in this life before the anaesthetic took hold and dragged them under.

I immediately felt better.

Getting sick here was not a viable option.

To receive a tetanus shot I was escorted into another room even more arcane. Here there were a selection of locked, glass fronted drug cabinets, entirely free from the presence of drugs. Presiding over ceremonies in the pharmacy was a large, brutal looking, unveiled middle-aged woman. I immediately guessed her nationality because she had her head buried in Russian Text book. My doctor rummaged through a couple of drawers then disappeared to search for my booster shot elsewhere.
“Ruski?” I enquired of the silent woman in the white coat.
“Why, yes” she replied in surprisingly good English, accompanying her words with a warm smile.
“Where from?”
“Kiev.”
I informed her that many years ago I’d visited Moscow and St Petersburg and had the most wonderful time.
“You speak Russian?” she asked enthusiastically.
“Spaciba, Pejelsta,” I chirped parrot fashion, reciting my entire Russian repertoire in under five seconds.
“Nothing else? I long to hear anybody talk to me in Russian. Anything will do.”

Twelve years ago I had known how to say, “do you want sex on the carpet” but I figured that this was probably wasn’t the moment to try and dredge it from my memory. Besides, there wasn’t a thread of carpet to be seen in the pharmacy. My mute response didn’t seem to affect my favoured status, my humble “please, thank you,” had won me a maternal friend. Concerned for my safety she softly confided in me;
“You don’t want to get sick here. Here is dirty. Not clean like back home in Russia.”
All in all things were not looking too good.

Returning with a little glass vial my doctor tried to make me feel at ease by getting me to recline on a rickety old bed. The plastic curtain he drew around me for privacy was covered with dried blood stains. Someone had burst a major blood vessel in the preceding weeks with spurts reaching up to three foot above my head. About as un-relaxed as one can be I sprang up from my enforced horizontal position and followed the action over to the other side of the room to check clean needles were being ferreted out for my consumption, hawk like observations which were deeply resented. I made no apologies, I was in no mood to be trustworthy. When I enquired about a rabies jab I was informed there hadn’t been any cases in the vicinity for nearly two years, consequently there wasn’t any serum available. Obliquely I was told to be on my guard for stiff necks and headaches, like knowing the symptoms of my impending death was really helpful to me. Now my hypochondriac imagination could work overtime at reproducing the initial stages of my demise.

Once the needle was primed my pants were dropped and the whole business was over in seconds. My shot-putting angel in white hovered over my posterior either wanting to get a close up look at my luminous backside and dangling scrotum, or knowing it might be useful as she could then act as a material witness on my behalf at a later date, should things get out of hand. Her presence turned out to be unnecessary, the doctor got a direct hit first time.

Eric wanted all the gory details over coffee in return for services rendered. We crossed the road and ambled back towards his hotel, this time without the aid of a taxi, whilst I made good with some exaggerated descriptions. The whole Al-Mukallah incident was brewing into the kind of traveller’s tale everybody loves to hear.
Does anybody really want to read my pretty pretty descriptions invoking the majesty of Sana’a? To my cost I’ve tried and failed to reduce locations like Pegan down to the printed page.
Who can distil the essence of a country with mere words?
Only the very, very best.
Give me a bad bus journey any day of the week. We all love dissertations on disasters and discomforts befalling to others. Rodents and hospitals go down a storm in this category. Everyone can relate to this kind of hard luck story. All Al-Mukallah was missing in terms of a truly good misery yarn was a delinquent bowel movement.

I resolved to rectify that situation in my remaining hour.

My thoughts returning to the dim and distant concept that I was actually ‘on holiday’. I realised that I was running out of time and needed to push on to the Hadhramawt if I was going to have time to do any of the sights justice. Eric suggested he would catch me up the following night. I was to book him a room at the Twin Towers hotel. In Say’un during his absence I promised I would avoid staying in the cheapest hovels I could find and refrain from biting any passing strangers.
Outside Eric’s rented paradise Al-Mukallah’s citizens were wading through the thick heat of late morning, sucking down the black desert air. Limply I joined their street weary ranks weighed down with a heavy rucksack. Crossing the road was enough to drench me with perspiration, walking to my taxi departure spot reduced me to a caricature from my rabid imagination. True to form I watched a full vehicle burn rubber out of town as soon as I arrived. Gloomily I prepared for a lengthy wait.

Writing and drinking endless chais from nearby food-stalls I killed time. Keeping my imagination busy was all important, I needed to avoid it dwelling on the subject of hospitalisation. Sadly, in this instance, the pen was not mightier than the ward. Within two hours I had resurrected the paranoia of the previous night and successfully created all the symptoms the doctor so usefully told me to be on guard for. My toe tingled, my leg was numb, I had shooting pains in my stomach, my neck was stiff, my head ached and, surprise surprise, my bowels had turned to water.

Waking my driver from what looked like a peaceful sleep, he was lounging over the front seats with his feet sticking out the window, it was indicated there would be at least another half an hour before departure. So far we had only attracted one further passenger and he was asleep in the boot. When I made it clear that I needed a serious dump my driver simply shrugged his shoulders then pointed at the ground. Piles of human excrement dotted the parking lot. Suffering from stage fright I clenched my sphincter and returned to Eric’s hotel. Here the receptionist ignored my pleas and refused to let me use his facilities unless I paid for a room. Even holding my stomach and groaning failed to break his resolve. Almost delirious I swallowed my pride and headed back to the Ash-Sha’b. Asking here wasn’t necessary, I simply barged my way up the stairs and picked the least shattered porcelain bowl.

I was only just in time.

Squatting amidst the putrid squalor I felt an uncontrollable anger rising within me. In true British style I resolved to see the manager and make a formal complaint.
Enough was enough.
As luck would have it all four members of staff were lounging about the lobby doing nothing. It was nearly qat o’clock. Puffed up with righteous indignation I sorted out who was in charge before letting rip. I mimed being asleep and waking up with a start, showed everyone my picture of the rodent and my bandaged toe, next I made good with the hospital receipt before rounding events off with the sternest expression of deep unhappiness I could muster. Predictably this complaint failed to have the desired effect. Everyone around me dissolved into peals of helpless laughter. One chap was so overcome he had to go outside and get a couple of mates in to share the joke with. A command performance was requested for the newcomers. Finding myself the object of such mirth was the final straw as far as Al-Mukallah was concerned.
“Go fuck yourselves, you deserve this cesspit,” I ranted at my persecutors then stormed out to increased gales of hysteria.

By some extraordinary reversal of fortune the taxi was full on my return and waiting for me so it could depart. As a mark of respect I was even offered the executive position of riding shotgun on the front passenger seat. A kindly man in white robes with a giant bushy beard and glasses, who could have been Alan Ginsburg’s Muslim son, moved over and gave me a warm smile which I begrudgingly returned through gritted teeth. Before I had time to collect my thoughts we were heading out of town. I could safely say I would never, ever be coming back. I would rather single-handedly lick clean the toilets of the Glastonbury Festival for all eternity than return to Al-Mukallah for a lazy weekend. My last views of its outskirts were obscured by the lamentable condition of our windscreen, two severe blows on the right hand side had crazed the glass into a snowstorm of tiny glistening shards. All that was holding the thousands of fragments together was the laminate and a mass of stickers. As the blows to the windscreen were made from the inside of the vehicle it occurred to me the only logical implements to have made them were the heads of former passengers. The car was devoid of seat-belts. Realities like these no longer surprised or concerned me. I just closed my eyes to forget about them.

It was then that the most extraordinary thing happened. As my head lolled about in semi-consciousness I felt it taken by delicate hands and placed by my neighbour onto his shoulder. Such an intimate act of human kindness offered to a complete stranger melted my twisted insides. Gently the top of my head just above my ear was caressed with light reassuring pats. It was an innocent, assured yet masculine embrace which reached out in unconditional friendship. I luxuriated in its warmth, almost moved to silent tears. From being a reviled outsider the polarities once again flipped in an instant, suddenly I felt completely accepted by, even assimilated within Arabian society.

I slept deeply.