Where in the world is John Henzell?

“When we met in 1951 and decided we liked each other,” my father said, gesturing towards my mother, “we could never have imagined this.”

To the gathered audience of four children, one daughter-in-law and four grandchildren, he outlined the improbable turns reality had taken in the ensuring 58 years — that they’d have a daughter for whom it was normal to go shopping in Cambodia, that they would not only discover where Abu Dhabi was but would have a son living there, that a granddaughter would be scheduled to sing for the Pope as part of the Australian Girls Choir, that a grandson would play hockey… The list went on.

This was the first time all of us had been together, four-year-old Hannah having made her arrival since the last time we’d all gathered early in 2004 (notwithstanding a strong suspicion that she’d been conceived around the time of the last event!?).

But any gathering of all my siblings had been a rare event since we’d respectively left the family home over a 10-year span centred around 1980.

My nephew Jeremy (who now towers over me, niece Xanthe, and then my brother Steve, acting as jungle gym for Matthew and Hannah.
Since then, we’d shown a spectacular geographical divergence, culminating most notably when at one point the six of us were in five different continents. I attributed this to my parents’ enthusiasm for travel, which included the mind-boggling feat of taking us four children – then aged two, four, six and eight – on a seven-month trip around the world in 1964.

But the southern autumn of 2009 marked the point when both my mother and father earned what he joked as an OBE — the age of being Over Bloody Eighty. With the Easter break being between their respective birthdays, a month apart, we decided it was time for another gathering.

This is never easy. Easter is, after all, not that big a thing in Abu Dhabi and with the diverging holiday schedules of the Queensland, Victorian and Tasmanian education systems, there was a narrow window in which we could all make it to Brisbane.

There was only an overlap of a day and a half between when the last one of us arrived (my brother Andrew, taking time from his studies at the Australian Maritime College to become a chief marine engineer) and the first had to leave (my sister Liz and nephew Jeremy, headed to Shanghai for a week).

But at that age, my parents told me on more than one occasion, you could never tell how many more opportunities there might be. Of my mother’s longstanding cabal of bridge partners, she was now the only one who still had a husband alive.

Thanks to a combination of a healthy annuity and an even healthier wish for the day to be as stress free as possible, caterers were recruited to create and serve lunch for the eleven of us.

It was fun, in a way I hadn’t experienced for a while. We made sure there was some Boy Time, as my brother Steve, his son Matthew and I transported the table from my parents’ home to my sister’s, at which the lunch was organised.

But later there was time set aside for the usual pointless fun of making and testing paper planes.

And it wouldn’t be easter without an easter egg hunt. This being Queensland, rain forced the hunt inside. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the gathering had been in Abu Dhabi, but then in the Dhabs the easter eggs would probably have melted before they were found…

A bit of uncle intervention, along with cuzzie assistance, helped ease the age gap and lessen the sibling rivalry on the egg hunt.

So there was plenty for everyone and no tears before bedtime. Not even from the adults.

It was interesting seeing everyone again, the different directions and advances in our disparate lives, the realisation and acceptance that we’re a varied and flawed but ultimately functional family unit – just like almost everyone else’s.

Then it was time to head to the airport to begin the journey back to the Dhabs…

The highest peaks are known for often having a sting in the tail, a final difficulty which threatens to thwart a successful ascent.

On Everest’s Nepalese side, there’s the Hillary Step between the south summit and the highest place on the planet. On the Tibetan side, there’s the Second Step that has to be surmounted on summit day.

On Aoraki-Mount Cook, there’s the all-too-active icefall known as the gunbarrels, followed by the treacherous mixed rock and ice of the summit rocks. On Aconcagua, there’s the energy-sapping Canaletta just below the top.

And on Jabal an-Nabi Shu’ayb, the highest peak on the Arabian peninsula, there are eight soldiers with AK47s.

I should have expected this. After nearly a month in Yemen, seeing a Kalashnikov was about as noteworthy as the sight of a pigeon in Trafalgar Square.

And I knew that the Arabs, in as much as you can generalise about such things, tend not to harbour romantic notions about their highest peaks.

In the United Arab Emirates, nobody had even been sure which one was the UAE’s highest peak, and when I went on an exploratory trip into the mountains of Ras al Khaimah, I found one of the local sheikhs had built a summer home near the top. If he’d been home, this would have been a more insurmountable barrier than anything Hillary had encountered on Everest.

At least it was well established that Jabal an-Nabi Shu’ayb was Yemen’s highest. And I knew that for all of its pre-eminent height – at 3666m/12,030ft, it was a little lower than Aoraki – it was not exactly the Matterhorn of the Arabian peninsula.

Like Australia’s Mount Kosciuszko, its ancient morphology meant the mountaineering challenges were minimal. I knew from Google Earth there was a road leading most, if not all, of the way to the summit. And I’d heard that the Yemen military had a radar station high on the mountain and I’d been advised by several people there was no way I’d get permission to climb it.

But with one full day left before I flew from Yemen back to Abu Dhabi, I figured it was worth at least making an attempt so I recruited Fouad, my driver on our tour through the Tihama region on the Red Sea, to take me to find out.

The mountain’s history should have been a warning for what was to follow, because this was a peak associated with biblical smiting. Jabal is the local transliteration of Jebel, the Arabic word for mountain. Nabi meant prophet and Shu’ayb was one of the holy messengers recognised by Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Back in the day, Shu’ayb had been sent by God to the people who lived east of Mount Sinai, the people of Midian and Ayka. The people of these lands were said to be especially notorious for cheating others through dishonest weights and measures. Shu’ayb warned them against such actions but they did not listen. Subsequently, both lands were destroyed by the wrath of God.

I was hoping for a slighty easier ride. And with all those Kalashnikovs around, I was not going to be in a very favourable position if some modern-day smiting was on the agenda.

Fouad and I drove out of Sana’a along the road towards the sea then turned off onto the side road leading up the mountain. When we spotted a soldier walking up the 10km access road, we stopped to give him a lift, in the hope of currying some favour and improving our karma.

But as we crested onto the shoulder of the mountain before the last 200 vertical metres to the summit, we could see a military installation ahead and some kind of radar device spinning around, scanning the horizon.

And between us and it, there was a roadblock with the aforementioned eight soldiers, one of whom we’d transported to this point.

I arranged for Fouad (who knew he’d get a US$20 bonus if I was successful) to translate for me. “I know the mountaintop is closed but after four weeks in your beautiful country, I have been impressed by Yemenis’ generosity and hospitality and wondered if I, who have come all the way from Australia to climb the highest peak in Arabia, might be allowed to briefly visit the summit?”

The soldiers indicated it was mafish mumkin. Impossible.

This was to be expected. Soldiers are not only not paid to think, but are paid to not think. Otherwise nobody in their right mind would follow an order to attack someone armed with guns and whose goal was to kill them. If you were paid to think and offered that scenario, you’d go: “Naaah” and head to the pub instead.

I asked to speak to the mudir, their commanding officer. But they said, as Fouad explained, that they would be in trouble even for calling their mudir. The kind of trouble was mimed by the soldiers by them crossing their wrists as if they were bound. No, they explained, they couldn’t even ask.

In other similar situations, I knew the solution was to wait. If there is a problem, I knew from the various times I’d travelled through developing nations, if you wait a solution will present itself. In India, a common tactic is to go to sleep, in the hope that the problem will have disappeared by the time you woke up.

We had tea, the soldiers visibly glad to be able to exercise the inherent Yemeni tendency of hospitality to strangers. We sat. We talked about other things.

But the answer never changed. Mafish mumkin, they said, crossing their wrists. I thanked each in turn then headed back down the valley with Fouad. “Mafish mushkallar,” I explained. No problem.

Fouad was philosophical at the rebuff, considering his translation skills were honed by the prospect of a bonus which was about a week’s wages for an average Yemeni.

“They were good guys,” he said. “They could have just told us to go back right at the start.”

And so ended my bid to reach Arabia’s highest peak.

On our second day in the Tihama region of Yemen, we stumbled upon the place of a particularly vicious form of institutionalised and sanctioned torture.

But this wasn’t the not-so-Felix Arabian version of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

The room itself was barely memorable, although clearly old. But in this mosque in the heart of the town of Zabid, a madrassa — school, in Arabic — taught the newfound skill of algebra, which had been discovered in this very room.

At the time, Europe was having its famous holiday from civilisation, known as the dark ages. The Arab world was seen as the centre of learning and science.

When the Ottomans invaded in the 16th Century, they banned the teaching of algebra. The baton was passed to the West. Where it was used to beat generations of schoolchildren.

They claimed Zabid was the hottest city in the world. (They also claimed the madrassa was Yemen’s oldest mosque and that proved to be tosh) But in the middle of the houses, they built insulated and uber-ceilinged mafrejs to escape the regular 45degC days of summer.

Not sure what it says when it proved to be cooler in the courtyard on a spring day than in the mafrej…

When we arrived at the Red Sea, we found it isn’t actually red.

That didn’t especially surprise me. But it isn’t blue either.

It’s green. Not just green but a particularly bileous shade of green that I suspect reflects the state of sewerage treatment in the Al Huddiyah, a port city in the Tihama region on the Red (sic) Sea…

It was probably best that we didn’t see the hue of the water before we stopped at a fish restaurant. As it was, watching the immolated faces of dead fish was hardly condusive to appetites.

Let alone with teeth like this.

Salta is a lunchtime dish. In the evenings, it’s time for a bowl of fool. Beans, to you and me.

We headed to a famous weekly market in Bait al Figghy, which was even more medieval in tone. Including the public transport used by the locals.

The market was great, even if the camel working on an oil-grinding machine might not have been able to see it. Vibrant and varied but friendly and untrammeled by tourism. This was the start of three days where we didn’t see another white face.

One of the stalls involved blood cupping, in which people had the supposed bad blood sucked out of them by suction cups. No photos of that (for obvious reasons) but it was interesting to see how many of the half-dozen men undergoing it also had scars where they’d been cauterised, another popular Yemeni folk remedy for illnesses.

How else to celebrate selling a circa-1970 motorcycle than to take off your kuffiyeh and wave the money around?

Ever wondered what happens to the chicks that star in the ads for colour televisions?

The most surprising thing was when a group of young women gestured to us and asked us to take their picture. Until then, even just looking at hijabbed women was haram — forbidden.

But in the Tihama, they remained covered but seemed paradoxically more open.

You know you’ve been in the Middle East too long when you look at a hijabbed woman and think she has pretty eyes…

The showers in the hotel were, er, rudimentary.

This was after the Koreans had been killed by the suicide bomber in Shibam, so there was an increased presence of soldiers on the streets. Oddly enough, overweight and qat-chewing soldiers sitting on their Kalashnikovs did not do much to make me feel any more secure.

But the truth is that I still felt safer in Yemen than I do in downtown Christchurch on a Saturday night.

The village of Al Qaidah was on the road from Ta’izz to Sana’a.

(It merely means “the foundation” in Arabic, a far less politicised meaning than its current association in the West. It was the same with the Taliban, which means “the students” in Arabic.)

Some of the most ardent members of the Saddam Hussein Fan Club live in Yemen. His photo was often featured on restaurant walls and on cars.

We went to Ta’izz, another of Yemen’s former capitals. The Qasr on the top of the mountain was a favoured place by the locals to sit around and chew qat.

From this far above the city, it actually looked pretty rather than the ugly monstrosity it was up close.

Access was steep via the stairs.

But after three weeks in Yemen, it seemed normal.

Qat chewers.

An easier route up the back featured a road. The local kids had made a sport of using bits of plastic to ski down the stone paving.

Green eyes. The geneology of Yemen reflects its place as a crossroads between Africa, Europe, Arabia and Asia.

The old city in Ibb.

Prime real estate in ancient Yemen wasn’t based on grazing, on access to water or even on views.

An ability to defend against raiding parties was what made for a des-res in rural Yemen. And after a couple of days in the enticing and entrancing old city of Sana’a, I decided it was time to head out and have a look, starting with the fortified mountain village of Kawkaban.

I landed through good fortune in this hotel. This is a mafrej — the Yemen equivalent of the Emirati majlis, where men sit around and chew qat and talk about the day. But when visitors came, it became their bedroom.

Fahia, on the left, was the owner of the house and his story was fascinating. He was 24 when he married an 11-year-old girl from the village and by the time she was 20, she had seven — seven! — children. By 20!

When his oldest daughters began to turn 11, he said men in the village approached him about marrying them but he said he didn’t want that to happen. Now his two oldest daughters are about to go to university to study medicine, because Kawkaban doesn’t have a doctor.

In one generation, this family had made the leap from an almost medieval lifestyle to a 20th Century one.

The plateau on which the fortified village sits offers good hiking. To get to a wadi I wanted to walk down, I joined the Yemeni equivalent of the commuter train — joining the teachers who walk up to two and a half hours each way to their schools.

The valleys were unexpectedly lush. The local kids were a little too used to tourists, but they selflessly helped me with my Arabic vocabulary… particularly words like “galam” (pen), “suura” (photo) and “filoos” (money)…

Qat is a mild narcotic which is chewed by 90% of the men and a good proportion of the women. Its use features a twofold problem of destroying all productivity after lunch and of dominating 70% of irrigation in Yemen.

I tried it but it felt like chewing down on a camelia in my granny’s garden, and I kept swallowing it accidentally, which is a major faux pas. Only Ethiopians swallow Qat, I was informed.

It was pretty conservative, as you’d expect of a rural area. Even the donkeys wore veils.

(Actually, I have no idea why this donkey had a veil. I suppose it was something to do with flies rather than Muslim piety.)

I went for a four wheel drive tour organised by Fahia, which included this spring town at the base the plateau. This was by far the most fresh water I’ve seen since leaving New Zealand.

The genuineness of most Yemenis was demonstrated when I had to argue with Yahia because he’d charged me too little — YR3000, NS$30, Dh60 — for a one-day guided tour.

There were some more ridiculously photogenic forts. This one was the granary store for the plateau because it was the most secure against Ottoman or Yemeni raiders.

I suspect OSH didn’t have a lot of say in construction of the access route, but I figured fatter people than me had gone up the steps without them falling down.

But it wasn’t too bad, once you were on it.

This was the Lisaan, Arabic for “the tongue”.

I suspect this guy was sponsored by the Yemen Tourist Board.

By now I’d adopted the Yemeni habit of wearing a futa, which they’d begun using as an idea borrowed from Indonesia.

(I should confess that the level of courage depicted in this photo has much less to endorphins than it has to do with Photoshop)

We went on to the village of At-Tawila, with yet more ridiculously vertiginous and photogenic architecture.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses here were very determined.

I think the Yemenis would be flummoxed if you asked them to design a house for a flat site.

At the next table at lunch, the locals were armed with their Kalashnikovs.

Yemen has 21 million people and 60 million guns!

Fahia later mentioned he had 18 Kalashnikovs in his home, three of which were his. Possession of one was almost a symbol of reaching manhood.

Did I mention that Yemen was picturesque?

The view from the archer’s window at an At-Tawila Qasr (castle), showing how easy it would be to dispatch the pesky Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The locals were friendly. Their demands for pens, money and pictures lasted about a minute and then they became kids again.

A local girl showed Miki how to dress like a Bedu Yabaniya — a Japanese Bedouin.

The views from the top were incredible.

We moved on to Manakha, site of yet more fortified mountain villages.

Some of these mountain villages survived 600 years of attempts to storm them, succumbing only when the attackers were able to enlist the help of aircraft during the civil war in the 1960s.

This village was one in which Jews lived peacefully with Muslims for hundreds of years. Once Israel was founded, most of Yemen’s Jews migrated. Some stayed but in the last couple of years, anti-Semitic attacks have caused the final few to either relocated to Sana’a or to move to Israel.

There was a star of David over the door and the year is 1268 in Koranic years, or 1818AD.

Fort? Did anyone say fort?

Or picturesque?

There was a third sect of Islam that started in Yemen, blending the rival Shia and Sunni sects and favouring education and openness for men and women. One of the founders died here so they constructed an improbable tomb and mountaintop mosque.

Most of the sect later relocated to India but the diaspora now stretches worldwide.

The openness of the sect’s views included allowing kaffirs — non-believers — like me to enter.

…via a steep but safe route up the back…

Words don’t do justice to the old city of Sana’a.

Sure, it’s one of the oldest continually habitated cities in the world. And it’s been given UNESCO World Heritage Status for its architecture. And there’s no Soviet-style concrete building styles sullying the mud-brick lineage.

But it’s more than that. For me the appeal was that it’s a living city in which people are going about their day to day lives rather than being an artificially preserved Disneyland kind of experience.

The fourth storey of my old tower house was a fine place for people spotting.

At sunset, people converge on the rooftop terraces to watch dusk descend over the city. I found this marble was a new way to witness it and appealed to my contrarian nature!

The evenings here were magical. It was the best time of day to experience old Sana’a, as kids played soccer in the streets and people went about their business.

Until 10 years ago, the streets were unpaved dirt.

Salta. After underwhelming cuisine in Hadramaut and Socotra, this was worth waiting for. These dishes are carved from soapstone and turn from a light grey to black as they absorb oil from the cooking. It’s brought to the table with the thermal mass of the stone causing the stew to continue bubbling for about 10 mins.

I went for a tour of the fortified mountain villages outside Sana’a and the Tihama coast on the Red Sea. Then it was back to Sana’a, where I snaffled an even nicer room in the Funduq (hotel) Dawood.

My room was the one with the open window on the fourth floor.

Just as a crescent moon was rising.

In Sana’a, I pondered the pharmaceutical options of the traditional chemists in the old town. I’m not sure it would be a good idea to buy both the first and the third of these together.

Of course, the men were not left out.

Sana’a airport is shared with the military. A couple of fighter jets would take off, then a commercial flight, then another couple of jets, then my flight back to the Dhabs.

If you wanted to deliberately blight a destination’s tourism prospects, you could hardly do better than to place it in the pirate-plagued seas off the coast of Somalia and have it administered by the people who gave the world Osama bin Laden.

And throw in some serious military hardware, from when the Soviet Union was here…

But then to make things fair, you’d give the island a unique ecosystem from being isolated from everywhere else since the Miocene, making it the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. And you’d give it a beautiful climate, white-sand beaches and crystal clear water.

Soon after arriving on Socotra, I set off to climb the highest peak. This was a venture of discovery as much as mountaineering since I wasn’t entirely sure which one was the country’s loftiest mountain…

It seemed appropriate that it be a sea-to-summit ascent. And how else to start a sea-to-summit than by a conch call? (Calling, presumably, all fat bastids)

After leaving a coastal lagoon, the apparent route wandered through date palms fenced off with palm fronds, old fishing nets, wire and anything else they could find.

There was even a trail heading in the right direction.

If a goat’s head is covered, it doesn’t mean they’re going for a merry walk through the lowlands of Socotra. It means it going on a one-way journey to the market.

The local kids took time out from swimming in the truly fetid creek to greet me.

After sweating like a bastid for several hours, I made it to an altitude that featured the famous Dragon’s Blood Trees. The red sap used to be sold as dragon’s blood and is used as incense. Frankincense trees were also found on the island.

After sleeping overnight halfway up, I came upon an unexpected plateau. I’d thought it would be all granite spires, based on how it looked from below.

And if you took every bit of hospitality offered, it’d take about a month to cross the 40-odd farms on the plateau.

Ahmed Salam offered me tea, food and a place to sleep. Down in the main town, the Socotris were learning that tourists are like ATMs for which no card or PIN is needed but up here, the essential hospitality and generosity of the Socotris remained strong.

This seemed like it was going to be the highest peak on Socotra, which was going to be an, er, interesting challenge.

Then the clouds cleared and I realised the highest peak was much easier but back near where I’d started that morning. I quickly worked out I didn’t have enough water left to attempt an ascent.

Dammit! But if I had to choose between getting to the summit and meeting people like Ahmed, I’d like to think I’d still go for the plateau.

I headed back to Hadibo, the unspeakably ugly main town on the island, and rejoined the more conventional tourist trail, which included visiting a massive cave system.

At the start of the cave, there was a natural font fed by drips every minute or so from the roof high above.

I’m not entirely sure what bit of the laws of physics meant this became a small pool rather than just another stalagmite but I have to say that on a blisteringly hot day, I was very glad to take advantage of the opportunity to splash my face.

Socotra’s cave safety rules were a little rudimentary. The guide was happy for me to rely on his solitary torch but I had my own, still a long way away from the minimum of three light sources I’d always relied on for caving.

The cave had lots of funky formations. The locals claim it extends 2-3km back into the hillside but the main chamber would barely have been 1km long.

We headed down to a campsite for fish and rice. After which the Socotris universally adopted a horizontal disposition until the heat of the afternoon had abated.

I headed to Qalasiya, a white-sand lagoon on the western end of the island. This was pretty close to being paradise.

For reasons known best to Darwin, the crabs competed to create the biggest pile of sand from their burrows, even though each high tide would destroy their efforts and prompt them to start again.

Although, to be fair, compared to some alpha-male traits in the human world, this is relatively tame.

We adopted the Socotri ways of dealing with the afternoon heat.

Did I mention it was a nice place?

I headed into the hills again, to see the funky flora that comes from Socotra’s isolation from every other land mass for more than five million years. This thing was straight from Dr Seuss.

It takes hundreds of years for Dragon’s Blood trees to grow this big.

Thanks to the improved grazing that comes from development, new Dragon’s Blood trees were being killed by goats before they could reach maturity, so replacements were not coming through. The Yemen authorities now ran a nursery.

Socotra had a high number of indigenous birds to match its funka flora, but by far the most common was the Egyptian vulture. Might have something to do with the dead goat in the middle of Hadibo.

I spent the last night in Hadibo before flying to Sana’a and wandered through the back streets of town, where the kids made a desultory attempt to beg for pens and money before reverting to their natural state of being kids.

Socotra was shukirr. (It’s the only word I learnt in the unique language of the island. It means “beautiful”)

Our soldier slung his Kalashnikov onto his shoulder as he exited the car in the village at the end of the wadi.

“Can we walk here?” we asked, although the communication wasn’t nearly as elegant as that and consisted of the Arabic words “mashaa” (walk) and “mumkin” (possible) and some infantile miming.

“Tamaam,” he replied. OK.

And so it was that we set off on foot into ancestral village of Osama bin Laden.

Everywhere else in Wadi Hadramaut, the vast and lush canyon system in the midst of the eastern Yemeni deserts, we’d been able to travel independently, albeit with police checkpoints.

Not here. I’d been told Wadi Daw’an, an offshoot of the main canyon, was even nicer than the rest of it but was off limits to tourists. An Australian guy I met in Mukalla said the previous week a guy who spoke fluent Arabic, looked like a local and dressed in the Hadrami manner had been turned back at the police checkpoint at the start of the Wadi.

But after a couple of days in Sayun, Kors — a Dutch NGO worker based in Mukalla — and I made friends with the tourist police at the Sayun Palace and they issued us with a permit to visit the wadi with one of their approved (and, I suspect, kickback-paying) taxi drivers.

As soon as we turned off the main highway and into the much quieter Wadi Daw’an, I knew this was a good idea. Without all the commercial traffic and without the tourist taint of places like Shibam, it immediately felt more appealing.

The scenery was the same as the rest of the Wadi, which seemed to be a mix of film sets from two different Hollywood movies. The flat and alluvial valley floor was like a Lawrence of Arabia set with date palm groves, mud-brick forts and kuffieh-clad Arabs riding camels, but the gorge itself seemed like it was straight out of a John Wayne western amid the desert mesas near the Grand Canyon.

The style of the villages were different too, here built in terraces halfway up the canyon walls rather than on the valley floor.

We went through one of the regular police checkpoints, where our permit was carefully scrutinised. Soon after that we went past another checkpoint, this one next to an army base where we collected our Kalashnikov-wielding soldier. He proved to be likeable and quiet, which are attributes I find highly appealing in companions who are armed with automatic weapons.

At first it seemed he didn’t want us to leave the car except for a couple of roadside photo stops, such as at the road sign showing we were entering the enticingly-monikered Daw’ani village of Rehab. I’m sure he and our driver still have no idea why we so amused by the fact we went into and out of Rehab twice in one day.

But he gradually warmed up. At one stop, when I asked if it was OK to take his photo, he misunderstood, unshouldered his Kalashnikov and handed it to me so I could pose with it.

And when we reached the town at the end of the wadi, Al Khurayba — the home village of the bin Laden clan — he was fine for us to walk, although he was always within a few metres of us and had his Kalashnikov ready at all times.

The village seemed no different from most of the others in that part of the wadi — a series of mud-brick houses set against each other in an impossibly picturesque (and defensively advantageous) organic style. The streets were twisting paths and we followed one up, traversed across at the cliffline to another part of the village and then returned via a madrassa, the village school chorussing with the voices of excited children.

There was nothing to indicate this was the provenance of the bin Ladens, a family who until the events of 2001 in New York and Washington, had been far better known as a Saudi construction firm that still advertises on Yemeni television.

And in any event, Osama bin Laden is just one of a huge number of Hadramis to venture into the wider world to make their, er, name.

A couple of evenings before, I’d been sitting drinking coffee at the informal local men’s dominoes centre located in the dusty main square of the 2500-year-old village of Shibam and ended up talking to one of the Hadrami diaspora. He was based in Saudi Arabia but explained that while there are about a million people now living in Wadi Hadramaut but there are now six times that many living in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia who can trace Hadrami bloodlines.

The previous day, Kors and I had visited Tarim, a city famous for the dozens of once-opulent mud-brick palaces built by the diaspora when they came home from making their fortunes in the far east. The most famous of these was As-Sayed bin Sheikh al-Kaf, famous for his Singapore hotel, who in the 1920s built a huge and ornate palace in Tarim.

The architectural style was best described as pick-and-mix and I suspected it was the cultural equivalent of the hideous McMansions that plague the exurbs of modern western cities.

The Al Kaf Palace was a crumbling shadow of what it must have once been but enough remained to give an indication of what can be done with enthusiasm and mud. “See this,” an enthusiastic attendant explained as he gestured towards corbels and cornices in the ceiling, “All mud.”

Outside, we walked past a dozen or more similarly ornate structures, all also rotting away. We poked around in one, Kors demonstrating a faith I did not share in the residual strength of a partially collapsed palace just off the main street.

For all the forbidden and guerrilla appeal of Wadi Daw’an and the crumbling opulence of Tarim, Shibam remained the biggest drawcard of the area.

And for good reason. All the other defensive encampments in the valley were nestled against or halfway up the rocky walls of the canyon. Shibam was on a remnant of rock that allowed it to look down on all sides to lower ground, while still being right next to the grazing and crops of the valley floor. Being such valuable real estate, when land on this little defendable piece of real estate became in short supply, they began building up.

A millennium before Manhattan was to follow the same dynamic, Shibam had eight to ten-storey towers built from mud. Little wonder that early 20th Century visitors from the West dubbed it “the Manhattan of the desert”.

Arabic architecture overall is predominantly geared around privacy, followed closely by being good in the heat. Mud towers take a bit of maintenance, but this girl was not interested in being sequestered away from the rest of the world.

Dusk was the perfect time to be there. This was the only place where I ran into tourists in any quantity in Yemen, a factor which was to play a part in what followed.

Just like in the other Manhattan, Shibam had been having a bit of a hard time but people still paid a premium to live there.

We had a tour of one of the houses — or at least the male/public section — from a man who was hoping to sell us antiques from his shop on the ground floor. We didn’t buy any antiques (apparently, it’s an Arabic word which means “made in a factory and then buried in mud for a month then unearthed and given a claim of 18th Century provenance”) but the tour was really interesting.

This was on the rooftop terrace, looking across the Wadi to the Bronx of Shibam.

An evening Quranic madrassa — Koran school — for the Shibam kids.

The full moon made for atmospheric scenery.

All in all, I loved it. The best part was with the exception of a couple of the dodgy antique shops, people still lived their normal life there rather than creating this Disneyland version for the sake of tourists.

Which made what happened next a little hard to take. A couple of days after watching the sunset over Shibam I’d flown to Socotra, where I received an email from Kors.

“Dude, did you hear the news?” he wrote. “Four Koreans got killed in a bomb-attack in Shibam. That’s really f@#$ed up!! What if it was the group of Asians we met? Take it easy out there?”