Travel Tips

My first foray into the South Western Highlands was Ta'izz, possibly the world's busiest small city. Its streets were bursting with people, cars, motorbikes, street vendors and their, market stalls. It was pandemonium, made all the worse by being sited on the flanks of a mountain, meaning every venture involved a hill.

Being late in the day I booked into the first hotel I could find. The oddly named 'Hotel And Wings Kingdom' offered nothing more than an airless, windowless cell, struggling to make the one-sheet category.

Hotels are uniquely categorized according to the number of sheets on the mattress, often reflecting the hotels standards in general. So there were no-sheet, one-sheet and two-sheet. Id stayed in all three to date. One of my best, and only buys in Yemen was a huge, brightly coloured double bed sheet I picked up in Sana'a. If they couldn't provide, then I had my own.

This place had a dirty, cold shower in a different part of the hotel on a different floor and my night's sleep was interrupted hourly as a cockroach would make a dash in the dark across my bare chest scarring the life out of me.

I climbed to the top of the city to visit the mosques, described as 'exceptional' and 'remarkable'. I wasn't exactly expecting Istanbul's Blue Mosque, but still, they were just ordinary, plain mosques. The National Museum was closed, being a Friday, and the 'interesting old suq' didn't feel that old and wasn't that interesting. It would seem I'm becoming increasingly hard to impress these days.