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Ta'izz

From Zabid I caught a minibus to nearby Hays, a market town at an intersection on the main road. One way went to Taizz the other went to Al Mawka which is where we supposedly get the term 'mocha' from. Apparently coffee was 'discovered' in Yemen, something about a goat, anyway you wouldn't think it as every coffee I've had so far has been beyond shite. I long for Nescafe. The tea's not much better.
It took a while for the taxi to fill up in Hays. To the extent that the driver had to cruise up and down the main street to fill the remaining seats. Again I didn't mind. I could easily fill a day watching the goings on in market towns. Eventually we got going and headed back into the mountains.
The annoying thing about shared taxis is that they stop on the outskirts of the larger towns and you have to pay almost as much again to catch a taxi to the city center. Overcrowded minibuses usually don't bode well with backpacks.

Taizz had nice setting in the mountains but it wasn't great. It was the first place in Yemen that kids had persistently asked me for money. I was trying to find a path to a fort on the mountain and stared collecting kids along the way. They couldn't seem to get their heads around the fact that I had no idea what they were saying. Even after saying "ma atkallum Arabi (I don't speak Arabic)" they persisted only getting more frustrated as I pleaded my ignorance. Even words that I did understand like ''baksheesh and 'floos' I pretended not to understand just to piss them off, more for my own amusement than anything else. The sun was setting and I started back down the mountain with by now a dozen or so kids in tow. The situation for thm was getting desperate. Soon I would be back in town and the presence of adults who wouldn't tolerate it. They started pulling at my shirt, reaching into my pockets and going for the zips on my backpack. Some played the sympathy card and acted (poorly) sick, hungry or even dying. Then an adult came into view and they disappeared. The man apologied and invited me to share a tea with him. In a first for the middle east or anywhere for that matter it was served with condensed milk. He asked the usually questions about me, Australia, Islam and America in Iraq. No Saddam Hussein posters this time though.
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