Maybe it’s just hype. Maybe they hired an ad agency. But everyone in Yemen thinks the best coffee comes from Ismaili.
Here’s the story: basically we were on the main road between Hodeida and Sana’a, and we were going to meet farmers in the Haimi growing area.
But we were flagged down and a turnout along the way by farmers from the Ismaili growing region (one of the most rugged regions, and known for intense coffee).
They insisted we come with them to visit their coffee farms, have a meal, chew qat, and talk. How could we refuse? Well, in YemenYemen has a coffee culture like no other place, and perhaps some of what we enjoy in this cup is due to their old style of trade...: Technically,..., you don’t. So it was an ambush, a kidnapping … but only in the friendliest of ways.
What we were about to see was some of the most rugged terrain, incredible stone terraces, most vertical roads (narrow too), a challenging hike, a great meal, hospitality, and no chance of getting back to Sana’a!
So it turned into a Yemeni sleep-over, traditional style, on the floor. I also found out that, unless D. was somehow channelingChanneling refers to the formation of small water jets during espresso brewing due to poorly distributed grounds. When high-pressure water is forced toward the espresso puck, the water... the prophet Muhammed in his sleep, the Yemeni are real sleep talkers. Imagine, I could have left Yemen and never known that.
Ismaili Travel Photos:
Yet the coffee in some parts had some of the best yield we saw, especially where there was some shade provided to the trees by the topography. In this image, I probably singled out the most heavily-laden branch of coffee in all of Yemen – deinitely not representative of the whole. Yemen The chat room. Well, qat room in Yemen (it is chat in Ethiopia). After dinner we retired fow many hours of discussion about coffee. Ismaili has only 20% of it’s original population. Rural life just doesn’t pay – many have moved to Sana’a. They make little off coffee and the costs are high. A bag of wheat that is 4500 in Sana’a costs 7000-8000 in Ismaili. A bottle of propane that is 450 in Sana’a costs 1050 in Ismaili. Yemen It was a late lunch in remote Mayan, and after the unexpectedly long hike we were very hungry. Lunch is dinner here, and they believe certain selections of spiced dishes “soften the stomach” to make the ensuing qat chewing ritual more enjoyable, I am not sure about that, but the food is awesome. It brings a new definition to “fresh and local”. All dishes are communal, and you use the flat bread (molouj) to grab morsels of lamb, goat, and rice. At this meal, a mixed bowl of lamb contained a morsel with the suspect rounded shape of … er, balls. I quickly grabbed another piece so nobody would offer them to me, and thankfully, Al Muhakri, picked up the offending part and took care of it. Whew! Yemen 
A friend called all shots of coffee cherry to be a kind of nature porn. I don’t think there is anything so obscene about photographing cherry, although it is the first thing every US roaster is drawn to when they visit origin countries, so images of coffee cherry abound. Hey, it’s beautiful, and it’s the source of our beverage, Yemen I am not sure what age the boys began to chew qat, but this photograph might tell you. Yemen It might be cultural, it might be something else, but when I looked at these images, I couldn’t believe how stern and intimidation everyone looked. Yemen I was surprised to find out that Mr Sowaid had not been here. I was more surprised to find that the village people could not recall any foreign visitors coming to this locale to see the coffee. They had visitors from Italy and France come to see the ruined church atop Mount Ismaili (Jabal Ismaili) but that is it. Considering this is the most fabled coffee in Yemen, that was a surprise. By this time we were certain there was no return to the car. We could never make the perilous hike in the dark, and yet our hosts did it, not once but twice, to go get our bags from the car! Two hours for each trip there and back! Yemen I handed out my camera and told them to take pictures. I think they understood I wanted a picture of everyone. Indeed, it worked out. Ali had me burn a CD of all my Ismaili images so he could give it to them, and they could all see their pictures. Yemen True qat chewing is indeed a ritual, in which the group all sits down as equals and talks. It can be intense, and you don’t have to tell a Yemeni to “speak their mind” because they will, especially after everyone has settled down to qat for an hour or so. Yemen You need to drink liquids because the qat is drying. This can, which I think was Mountain Dew, was so unusual to me, summing up the way that things seemed familiar here, but so alien too. Kinda sad I would experience that coincedence between “familarity” and “displacement” through a major brand, but that’s the way it goes. Yemen Nowhere did I see overripe coffee cherry on the trees here. They have a climate where they could “dry on the tree”. simply not pick the coffee and allow it to dry out on the branch. But I did not see this practice at all. It would be an interesting experiment to cup the difference tree-drying would make. Yemen can you take too many pictures of ripe coffee cherry? I think not. Yemen You can see the gradiant of pink-to-rose-coloration of this ripening cherry. Ideally it would sit a few days longer, but cup-wise it would probably be fine to pick it at this stage. Yemen A heavy mill stone from Denmark at Mayan town. I believe they use this for coffee, as well as grains. Most often, the coffee is milled from dry cherry husk at the collectors, often in Sana’a. But I presume it sometimes done in the village. Yemen We slept soundly on the floor, our hosts ensuring we had ample blankets. Next morning they would not let us start without some hot coffee. We sat and took in the view. If you live in the mountains of Yemen, you have a view, and one that would be worth millions in the US, frankly. Yemen In Mayan, another young guy that helped us carry our stuff. Yemen Here’s a better view of their “mill” for grain and coffee. Yemen A last view of Mayan, where we were treated so well, as we depart at 7 AM. Yemen Terraces for coffee in an otherwise steep rock wall. See the figure in the image for scale. Yemen Along the little diverted stream channel, a little shelf in the rock provided a safe place to propagate coffee seedlings. It seems ideal, within easy reach of water and somewhat protected from the foraging goats. Yemen Pictographic painting along the trail back to Bani Atiah. Yemen By propagating their own seedstock, the unique Ismaili Dawairi heritage continues. Yemen It’s difficult to point a camera here and not take a great picture. Okay, I’ll fess up, I have an masters in photography, and I bought a new camera just for the trip. Still, I doubt there is a tourist that goes to Yemen and does not return without fantastic pictures. Yemen Again, a good portion of the town was there to see us depart. I admit a certain comfort to return to the car and no longer be quarry or American specimen or curiousity. Yemen On the road back, morning light created dramatic profiles of the sawtooth ridges of Ismaili. Yemen We made it back to Bani Atiah, but had to pause a while to wait for Mr. Al Muhakri. It was such a steep hike back up the trail, I was out of breath. The altitude was in full effect too. Yemen 
Here was something dramatic and new – stone terraces that were not only walls, but tiled with stone on top, all around the coffee. Yemen These types of all stone terraces made the coffee look like it was “potted” by stone, and gace the whole assemblage the appearance of a stadium with cement benches. It was just amazing. Yemen 
As we climbed the tall houses started to give the appearance of high-rise appartments, the way they were perched atop such steep mountains. There was something oddly urban about the scene around me, like being in a towering city of skyscrapers, as if the mountains were buildings themselves and the abodes were just penthouese on top. Yemen At the very pinnaccle of Jabal Bani Ismaili, Husn Al-Mukhar, the town that has an an ancient Christian church and castle. It is 2200 meters, too high for coffee cultivation. Yemen My feeling, of being in an urban environment even though we were so far from it, seems aided by the fact that the “natural” and “built” environments are oddly merged here. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of human habitation have sculpted the hills with man-made details that, with a little imagination, blur the line between human and non-human creation. Yemen While most houses are stone, some are earthen, which also blurs the divide between what is “natural” and not: on one hand the mountains are sculpted, on another the artificial structures are made of, well, mountain, or the material moutains are made of. Yemen Right along the roadway were some convenient terraces. We got out to have a closer look at these plantings, which were South-facing in the full sun (as is much terraced coffee, as opposed to the valley coffee of Saihi, which also has some shade tree usage.) Yemen As I mentioned, the stone cobbles on top of the terrace, all around the coffee trees, made it look like potted plants. There is also more space between these coffee trees than any other origin I have seen. I don’t think they have the water to support any more trees than this, thus the low density of the plantings. The stone on the top of the terrace helps prevent evaporation. Yemen The coffee in Ismaili, at least everything I saw, is Dawairi type of Mokha seedstock. That explains why all the Yemeni coffee from Ismaili I have seen always has a particular appearance, rounded, small, dense seeds. Yemen Over and over I was struck by what an amazing and singular place this was. To live like this must be even more remarkable if you leave it. Being from Yemen is not the same as being from any other place, I would guess. If you are from Cincinnati and move to Baltimore, there are going to be many familiar things. If you are from Ohio and move to Frankfurt Germany, language, culture and history would be so different … but there’s familiar terrain, conveniences, McDonalds. B ut if you live in the moutains of Yemen and move almost anywhere else, I think you would feel like someone from outer space. I know I felt that way being here, in Ismaili Yemen A dramatic ridge lined wth homes in Ismaili Yemen The first problem with the road wasn’t how vertical it was, but how narrow it was. The old Toyota’s could make it through, but this newer SUV type Land Cruiser had no chance. Yemen What it came down to was moving rocks by hand … not too many but before we discovered the narrowness, Mr. Sowaid put some nice scratches into the side panel of his car. Fact is, as one of the big Sana’a exporters, he had never been to Issmaili before! (Al Muhakri, the man with first-person contacts in Ismaili, had been here). Yemen We reach the town and the town reaches us … I mean, everybody in the entire place has surrounded our cars. I feel like we were successfully hunted, the roadside trap was laid, and, with hospitality, we were snared. We are the quarry. Yemen Everywhere I go in Yemen, I seem doomed to photograph the fronts of bulidings, the doors, the windows. As an out-of-towner, all these things facinate. Yemen We are bound for this town, but must climb and traverse quite a ways to reach it. Yemen As we draw closer to our destination we stop to shoot a few images. While many villages have coffee drying on the roofs, I notice blankets drying here in this town. They value cleanliness over coffee, I can see! Yemen Many of the doors are time-worn wooden structures, but even these new metal doors and the unusually colorful pain (given the earthen tones of their surrounds) are so interesting. Yemen Everywhere is qat. It has been grown in Yemen for hundreds of years, but for some reason it did not compete with coffee for space and resources until lately. It might be that qat chewing has taken on a less formal role, and thus consumption has increased even more than population (which is definitely higher too, in Sana’a). Yemen The Qat trees were all around. They are really quite nice, between 1 meter and 4 meters (rarely). I guess the older ones are better. Qat can be harvested 3 times a year, and the prices are nearly 10 x coffee. You can see why it is such a popular crop. Yemen It’s easy to see where qat and coffee meet in this frame. Qat seems to be grown on the higher terraces than the coffee, and it might have to do with the water availability. I understand that qat requires more water than coffee. Yemen So when we reached our halfway point, we could see the Mayan village we were headed too. The way they live in Ismaili, in many parts of the Yemeni mountains, one thinks of ancient American cultures, so the name Mayan was interesting. (I don’t think there are any pyramids in Yemen!) Yemen So we started off on a walk, which I thought would be a brief tour of the coffee plots, a return to the car and a trip back to Sana’a. Nomatter, the trail was steeper than anything we had encountered. Don’t trip! Yemen Along the way, we passed incredibly steep coffee terraces. Yemen Duane looks back, as we walk past the ruins of former homes. Ancient, probably … but unlike such ruins in the US, they were probably occupied 20 years ago too. Yemen Another View of Ruins Yemen So I spotted these houses and we seemed to be headed there. As it turns out when we got there, it was just half way to where we were actually going, a cluster of homes called Mayan village. Mayan? Yemen This terraced coffee, in a shaded nook on our path to Mayan town in Ismaili, had a much better appearance than the coffee with more sun exposure. This is likely due to the fact that shade conserves water, and water is so scarce in Ismaili Yemen Water Holding Pond, Mayan, Ismaili. Water is life here, and they have a spring source that feeds their village. But their water resources are largely unprotected and unconserved, losing so much to evaporation and absorption into the soil. Yemen This image represents actual production of a healthy Mokha coffee tree much better… Yemen Dawari Coffee Cherry, Ismaili, Yemen. All coffee we saw in Ismaili appeared to be Dawari cultivar, a small round bean heirloom Moka plant with green tips (new leaves);. Both Shibriqi and Tufahi have bronze-colored new leaves. Yemen House and coffee terraces below, between the towns of Mayan and Bani Atiah, Ismaili Yemen Old tower house between Bani Atiah and Mayan village Yemen On the pathway to Mayan from Bani Atiah. The facade of a coffee farmers house. Yemen One of the many people who accompanied us on our hike in Ismaili Yemen Ismaili is the name of an Islamic sect, but I was told that was not the reason for this regions name. I find it a little hard to believe. Oddly, Harasi, the region we visited the day before, is also a cultural group with a distinct language, from Saudi Arabia. Coincidental? It makes me curious. Yemen Mountain solitude in Ismaili Yemen. Yemen A closer view of the same ruined tower home, Bani Atiah, Ismaili, Yemen Yemen Teenager with Jambir, Mayan, Ismaili Yemen He helped me carry my bag as we traversed across from Bani Atiah to Mayan. Mayan, Bani Ismaili, Yemen Yemen Mayan town, Ismaili District, Yemen. No, it’s no relation the Maya of the Americas. We traversed very steep terrain to get to the town, and then found it was too late to return. We slept on the floor that night. Yemen Above Mayan, more houses on the hillside Yemen A young calf, at Mayan town Yemen Settling down for qat chewing at Mayan, Ismaili, and soon the entire village starts to arrive. How many people can this room hold – we shall find out! Yemen We retreated to different room for enjoying the qat, and as it grew dark, Mohamed (always with the cigarette) and Ali Sowaid cut an interesting profile. Yemen
