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I recently decided, on an impulse, to join a group of friends going to Yemen, barely knowing exactly where it is. It lies between the Red and the Arabian Seas. Hearing about the mud tower houses in the desert, stone dwellings in the mountains and conical clay huts in the Tihama had seduced me. The Republic of Yemen, I discovered, was only formed in 1990 when the western-oriented north and the ex-communist south united, making this part of the world more accessible to travellers attracted by a fish-and-chips-free zone. But I had little idea of what it would be like.

DAY 1
We take a stroll out of the Alhammad Palace Hotel towards the centre of the capital, San’a. Two men kiss each other repeatedly on the cheek in greeting, others stroll languidly hand in hand; there are no women to be seen. The medieval houses rise like sculpted cakes, the decorative window surrounds resembling dripping white icing. Most of the men wear red and white check turbans, sarongs and swashbuckling jambiyas, ceremonial daggers worn at the waist. The one or two women I do see are veiled from head to foot in black. A madman shackled at the wrists and ankles shuffles through the juice bars and fruit and vegetable displays in the souk. My friend Luke beckons us down some stairs, towards the frenzied sound of drumming, into a dark cellar lit by bare swinging light bulbs. Men squat on the floor, cheeks bulging with qat, dealing narcotic leaf. The midday heat and the drumming create a charged atmosphere that nearly makes me swoon.

DAY 2
We set off in a Toyota Land cruiser with a non-English-speaking driver called Hussain, heading for the Hadhramawt, the largest of the governorates into which the country is divided, which extends from the coast of the Arabian Sea to the southern deserts. We make a detour to see Baraqish, the original capital of the Kingdom of Ma’in in the fourth century BC. At a distance it is a spectacular semicircular ruin, but close up looks more like a pile of rubble. When we reach Mar’rib, Hussain leads us to a restaurant where tribal men have laid down their AK-47 rifles (this region is still not fully under government control) to eat grilled chicken, garlic beans and delicious flat bread. No women eat inside, although a female beggar sits on the doorstep collecting leftovers. Kitsch paintings of Mecca and the desert and a heroic portrait of the president, Ali Abdullah Salah, decorate the walls. The father of Prince Naseem Hamed - the expat boxer so revered that he appears on the postage stamps - is being interviewed on the flickering television screen.

In the afternoon we visit old Ma’rib, an almost deserted mud town set high on a hill. Dark, eerie windows in the baked towers look like the eyes of Antony Gormley sculputres. An unveiled peasant woman dressed in red scavenges among the decaying houses for firewood and a three-legged donkey lies exhausted on the road.

DAY 3
At 5am, an armed and angry Bedouin boy, devastatingly handsome in a white turban, awaits us in his Jeep. He will charge us the astronomical sum of $250 for transportation and protection across “The empty quarter” - a stretch of desert. The boy listens to loud, Arabic music, studiously ignoring Luke and me, squashed together on the front seat. By 6am, long shadows play on the ribbed sand of the dunes. His reckless driving makes my stomach dip and dive as we race for five hours across the desert before reaching the ancient town of Shabwa, built from granite volcanic rock, where the derelict houses are sculpted against an awesome backdrop of black mountains. Later we pass Shibam, which guidebooks call “the Manhattan of the desert”: a town of medieval mud skyscrapers, which from a distance is indeed not unlike the New York skyline. Driving on again is like entering a different country, tropical and lush. Groups of women veiled in black are bent over in the bright green fields, wearing pale conical hats.

DAY 4
Wake up in the Guba Palace Hotel in Tarim, in a bedroom with pistachio-coloured walls and window panes of multicoloured glass. With its two swimming pools and its peeling paint, the hotel is an oasis of gaudy colonial splendour. Tarim is a dusty desert town, full of men playing lazy games of dominoes or chess. They don’t wear daggers, or chew much qat (it is not grown in the region, and was severely discouraged under the communists). Goats, chickens, and donkeys wander through the souk, and again I am struck by the beautiful studded and decorated doorways. One of our group, Annabel, buys seven hats, four lumps of frankincense, three scent bottles and two pieces of myrrh.

DAYS 5,6,7
I am struck down by acute gastroenteritis. My friends appear like angels at my bedside to wipe my forehead and bring me Coca-Cola. Finally, a handsome Egyptian doctor fits me with a drip that pumps fluids into my dehydrated body.

DAYS 8,9,10
The highlight of the long drive to Mukhalla is a bevy of baboons squatting in the lunar landscape. In an ancient mountain village we stop and watch the men at work in the valley below making bricks. Annabel buys some expensive honey, believed to be an aphrodisiac by the Yemenis who claim that a teaspoon a day keeps a man virile.

The port town of Mukhalla is filthy and pungent, packed with modern concrete buildings and full of men wearing western jackets. Nothing like Freya Stark’s description of 1935: “Tall houses every shade of white and grey…a naked crowd with brilliant loincloths and turbans…” We stay at the Hadhramawt Hotel, next to the sea but rather pricey a room. I meet an engineer, who speaks English and answers a question that has been troubling me: “A girl,” he says, “puts on a veil when she feels like a woman.”

We spend a day on the beach, mesmerised by a large school of dolphins, and ignoring the proliferation of buildings along the coast being developed as hotels.

DAY 11
Back in San’a, where our travels began. Before we leave for the Tihama, Hussain invites us to his house for lunch. We remove our shoes at the front door then sit on the carpeted floor, lined with hard cushions and bolsters. Fenugreek stew and doughy bits of bread dipped in a herby soup served with chives are brought in by a dutiful son. Hussain’s daughters, wife and mother sit in another room. When we say goodbye, the little girls and old lady remain unveiled, but Hussain’s wife hastily covers her face.

It is a long winding drive to Ta’izz, high up in the mountains. It’s a cosmopolitan town, with lots of cafés and shops. Many of the women are unveiled and I could almost imagine living here. In the morning we visit the magnificent al-Ashrafiya mosque, a white building at the top of the old town with minimalist-style arches and tall, narrow walkways that keep it cool The view of the mosque roofs over the city is voluptuously evocative of the ‘Arabian Nights’.

DAY 12
We reach Al-Khawkha, the biggest fishing village on the southern coast of the Red Sea, where beautiful unveiled women wearing long patterned dresses are walking through sandy palm groves. We sleep in a pentagonal hut with a straw roof in a primitive “tourist village” by the sea. As we walk past yellow, red, and turquoise fishing boats the next morning, we see flamingos, sea eagles, sandpipers and ducks. It is hot, but a perfect wind blows.

On to Zabid, one of the oldest towns in the Yemen, which is third on the Unesco World Heritage list, after Shibam and San’a. We are immediately surrounded by clinging children with infected eyes, all of them named Salim or Mohammed, eager to show us round the town. We try to lose our boy guides by walking fast through the maze of small white brick passageways searching for the decorative brick facades supposedly hidden in the courtyards of private houses. The Unesco cash hasn’t yet made a visible impact on this rotting town.

DAYS 13, 14
En route back to San’a we drive along the dried-up Wadi Sari and see weaver-bird nests, girls in colourful dresses carrying firewood on their heads, and boys selling bananas. The dwellings have changed from clay huts to the differently-coloured and -patterned stone houses of the mountains, and the temperature drops considerably as we reach the town of Thilla, situated above a sloping basin of terraced fields, where we eat our last lunch. As we near the end of an astonishing journey, it’s as though we have visited several different countries within one. Hussain finally succumbs to the national pastime and, in celebratory mood, goes off to score some qat.

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