| Escaping Yemen |
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Page 1 of 3 Sometimes the worst trips bring wisdom.
By Pico Iyer
 Photo by Adam Brown The virtue of travel, I told myself, is that it forces you to give up; there’s no place for the illusion you have at home that you’re in control of anything. It makes you a believer, even if you don’t know whether it’s God or Allah or the Fates or just the night that you’re petitioning. The only thing that gets you through these moments is faith. I told myself all that, but I wasn’t believing it. One thing I had no faith in was the crackpot ideas I came up with at 1:43 A.M. on a mountain road in Yemen, trying to escape the country. In theory, I should have been glad to be fleeing the stricken port of Aden. I had gone there, crazily, to retrace the steps of a 15th-century Chinese admiral who had led his eunuch navies in large ships across the world, to India, to East Africa, and even to this forgotten port at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula. On arrival, I’d found a country laid waste by 40 years of civil war.
Never, in a lifetime of travel, had I
seen a place as blasted as Aden. There were few shops in sight, no
luxuries, and certainly no diversions. Goats roamed the main street,
and black-clad old women knocked at the windows of the occasional
car. One bloody conflict had followed another, with the British, the
Soviet Union, the people of northern Yemen; when a local offered to
show me the sights, the only thing to see was the cemetery. |
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