I was sitting in the lobby of our little hotel in Al-Ghaidha, Yemen, waiting for my friends to wake up for breakfast. I was up an hour too early, thanks to my phone puzzlingly still being set to Oman time. It dawned on me suddenly that the complete lack of cell signal in Yemen meant my phone didn’t know where in the hell we even were. So much for automatically adjusting to the local time. This all seemed fitting, though, for where we were. The lobby was quiet, as the pleasant 6am morning sun filtered in.

A man in a long white robe waltzed through the hotel’s glass doors, carrying an AK-47.

“Salam!” he greeted me in a friendly tone, slinging the Kalashnikov casually over his shoulder.

“‘Morning!” I replied.

Nice people.

I was dressed in local clothes, a long floor-length skirt covered in Native American-style patterns, a pretty blue scarf draped around my neck that I’d sometimes tie around my head to hide my very un-Yemeni long hair, depending on where we were and who was watching. Hugging my waist was a huge golden-hued belt, a generous five inches tall, covered in intricate patterns and looking like I had just won the 1980s WWF championship via a particularly devastating piledriver delivered to Randy “Machoman” Savage, probably while he was asleep. Tucked into the belt was my Jambiya, a large, curved Yemeni dagger that slid into a huge sheath shaped like Gonzo’s beak. The sheath was vibrant turquoise in color, standing out in sharp contrast with the flashy gold belt and the studded wooden handle of my dagger.

None of this was fooling any but the dumbest of locals that I was actually Yemeni, since I am super fucking white. But the clothes showed a respect for their culture that the locals were constantly signaling their approval of with thumbs up and the surprised Arabic for “You look like a Yemeni!” And it served a dual purpose in terms of safety: I might pass as a Yemeni at a glance or from a car, which is always good in terms of not getting shot or kidnapped, and if I did happen to encounter a bad guy, he would be more likely to leave me be since I was showing respect and wasn’t one of the bad kind of westerners.

I had crossed into Yemen the day before over the land border from Oman with my adventurous friends Mike and Flavio, our friendly Omani driver taking us to the desolate Yemen border crossing. There our Yemeni guide and driver greeted us graciously as the border agents inspected our passports and hand-wrote into my visa that I was the 357th visitor to enter Yemen in 2021. In the entire country. For the entire year.

Yemen doesn’t get many visitors because it is in the middle of a civil war. Explaining this fully would require a flow chart and six cups of coffee, so suffice it to say a lot of different groups want control of Yemen and all of its beautiful dirt and goats, and the situation is extremely complicated. Stacked on top of its own considerable internal problems, Yemen is hosting a huge proxy war between much larger enemy states, here at the dusty end of the Arabian peninsula.

An Iran-backed religious extremist group called the Houthis controls north Yemen, where 70% of the population lives. This is somewhat analogous to the situation with the Taliban in Afghanistan. From there the Houthis (or Iran, maybe?) began launching rockets into Saudi Arabia and destroying Saudi infrastructure. The Saudis shockingly don't like this one bit, and so since 2014 have conducted over 19,000 air strikes against northern Yemen, with support from the US and other allies. These strikes been heavily criticized for the civilian death toll, and over 60,000 people have been killed over the course of the larger conflict.

The original internationally-recognized government controls most of of the south of Yemen, with much of it a confusing patchwork of... wait, the UAE controls this part? Why? Anyway, this is mixed in with regions of tribal control. Not all of these groups even want the original government back, many in the south want to secede and form their own country, as the south has only been unified with the rest of Yemen since 1990.

The mountainous north and west of the Yemen are where the fighting is now, making it possible for us to travel through the south in relative safety, or as safe as being in a war but not on the front lines can be. Yemen is still one of the most dangerous countries you can travel to right now, registering perhaps a hair above my recent trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Apologies to Somalia, the DRC and CAR, really we’re just splitting hairs here... you’re all very special.

Sitting on the floor in a restaurant outside of Seiyun, the local man who was sitting across from us and eating with his young son complimented me on my dagger and outfit, and told our guide that all I needed to be a full Yemeni now was a Kalashnikov and some qat. When he got up to use the restroom, he left his AK-47 sitting untended on the floor like it was a forgotten shoe.

Qat is the leaves of a shrub that grows in Yemen and Somalia, and the locals chew it like it was going out of style, or like they were heavily addicted to chewing the stuff. If you chew the leaves for a few hours they give you a high somewhat like drinking a massive amount of coffee, making you euphoric and very alert. The dude who left his machine gun on the ground for the kids to play with told me I needed to get some qat because in chewing it, I would fly away to a beautiful place. The plant is a controlled substance elsewhere and is considered a real drug in all but a few countries in the world, and it’s hard to argue against this when you see the way the lives of the locals revolve around chewing the stuff, devoting most of their very limited income to scoring their daily foil-wrapped packet of leaves and stems.

The next time you see footage of men fighting in Yemen, look for the baseball-sized lump in their cheek. It will be there. That's qat.

Wearing the local clothing is not without its challenges. It took us a few days to figure out how to wrap the skirt around us so that it wasn’t constantly falling down, and to tie the head scarf so that it didn’t look like you were some kind of homeless qat addict. Until you figure that out, you’re dependent on your driver dressing you daily like you’re a helpless little kid. Flavio had somehow got out of the scarf store with the huge plastic anti-theft device still attached to his head scarf, so he also had to wrap that up into the whole shebang in a way that didn’t look too ridiculous.

Walking in a floor-length skirt is also awkward if you’re a boy and not used to such things. At one point we sat down on a cinderblock wall to take in a city’s river view and I promptly fell headfirst off the goddamed wall like a skydiver leaving the plane, all from trying to squat down without being able to bend my legs in the usual ways. And this is without even getting into the complications of trying to wear a huge curved dagger over your crotch in such a way that you don’t stab yourself right in the balls every time you sit down.

I also managed to break the WWF championship belt that was holding my Jambiya up, and we had to pull over and pay a little boy on the side of the road to sew it back together for me. “You look Yemeni!” he said to me in Arabic. Thanks kid! I’m glad you didn’t see me fall off that wall.

Almost without exception, our interactions with the locals were very positive. In certain areas, Mike and I were advised to say we were from Turkey rather than the US. Which is completely unbelievable if you’ve ever met someone from Turkey, but these people don’t travel and don’t know a resident of Turkey from a turkey, so that all worked fine. Time and time again, locals would notice us on the street and come up to enthusiastically welcome us to Yemen, which was beautiful.

The only exception came in the city of Al-Mukalla, where we were walking down the street in the baking sun when a motorcycle thundered by and the driver cried out “Death to America! Death to Israel! God is great!” in Arabic. We happened to be walking past a police station with soldiers stationed right in front of it at that exact moment, which the motorcyclist quickly realized with an “Oh shit!” glance to the side before he cranked the throttle, speeding away with a fist defiantly held high in the air. This was more funny than anything, once it was clear he was just a loudmouth with really bad timing.

The security situation in the country was very intense overall, with military checkpoints seemingly every ten minutes on every road we traveled all the way across the country. The checkpoint soldiers varied from very welcoming and polite to “merkabah” as our guide would call them the second we pulled away. “Fuckers.”

There was a preposterous amount of paperwork involved at the checkpoints, various permissions explaining that we had the right to be there, from all the different organizations whose territory we were passing through, and some percentage of this was inspected at every checkpoint we passed through. Every fourth time or so we’d have to hand over our passports to be inspected, something which fascinated me because I was pretty sure none of these soldiers could read English, or in the case of Flavio’s passport, Italian.

None of this was really for our benefit, since understandably tourism isn’t on Yemen’s radar at all, but it was kind of comforting none the less. In 2009, four south Korean tourists and their guide were killed in a suicide bombing while photographing the mud city of Shibam at sunset, and their relatives were attacked by another suicide bomber when they came to investigate a few days later. A year before, two Belgian tourists had been killed when their convoy was ambushed, and a year before that eight Spanish tourists were killed in a car bomb attack. So I wasn't exactly unhappy to see an overabundance of security.

Throughout the trip, we were forbidden from sharing any photos until we were safely out of the country, since if something ended up on social media and the wrong people saw it, the photos would give away our location and we could end up getting kidnapped. Which I generally try to avoid while traveling, unless it’s by an eccentric billionaire who wants to buy me a house full of toys and raise me as his already-adult son.

We spent most of our early days in Yemen just driving west, crossing the dry arid expanse from the Oman border, through endless rolling nothing.

We entertained ourselves by noticing things like the fact that the nav on our Toyota Noah minivan had been loaded with a map of Japan... and Japan only. So no matter where we went, we were comforted knowing exactly where we were, in Japan, at that moment, as the nav dutifully tracked our progress across the land of the rising sun.

We stopped occasionally to get a photo of a fishing village or to admire the view from an overlook, as the desert just kept on being desert.

I passed the time adding to my collection of photos of the world's most fucked-up cars.

If you needed something a bit less post-apocalyptic, Yemen has you covered for new cars as well. Now available in white!

There were fun stops along the way for coconut water...

Some too-cool-for-you chips...

And a stop to see our lord and shavior:

We passed through countless little villages, catching glimpses of daily Yemeni village life as we rolled through.

And occasionally stopping to do a little light reading...

We marveled as we went along at the gas shortage in Yemen that resulted in comically long lines at the gas pumps, stretching 40 cars back up the side of the road.

Our driver seemed to always know where the "black market" gas stations were where we could skip the lines, perhaps for a price.

After our first few nights spent in appropriately small and local hotels, we had a night at... improbably, the Ramada.

Wait, this can't possibly be an actual Ramada, right? Hey! They have Ramada stationary!

This lovely beach hotel seemed to be occupied entirely by foreigners who have to work in Yemen for some reason or another. Which was a good thing for the hotel, since Yemen doesn’t really get the tourists necessary to fill up Ramadas. Sure beats a cinderblock shack out in the scrubby desert, I suppose.

We were standing on the balcony, overlooking the hotel’s busy pool and the waves pounding the shore just beyond, when Mike announced “Our guide did well! I hope the internet’s-” and then the power instantly went out for the entire complex. Ah, Yemen.

We were also very excited that this hotel had toilets. I think they’re going to put that quote on the Yemen tourism posters now. We were thrilled to open the bathroom door and not see another of the ever-popular flushable holes in the floor.

Later that night, I was working on my laptop when Mike said “Well, I think I’m going to go to sleep. If you’re going to keep working can we shut off the lights-” and instantly the power and all the lights in the entire hotel went out.

Unfortunately for us, Mike can only control electricity with his magic.

Eventually we reached Al-Mukalla, a bustling port city of 300,000 people and the capital of Hadhramaut.

Walking around in Al-Mukalla, we stopped in a shop for our guide to buy his wife a present. I enjoyed the weird shit inside the shop.

Is that a child's roll-aboard suitcase... and an elephant? AND Legos? Yes. Yes, it is all of those things ot once.

Down the street, I was taking a photo of some goats eating trash when one of the locals came up and questioned our guide in Arabic.

“They don’t have goats where they came from?”

Clearly we were just as strange to these folks as they were to us.

Mike asked an old man walking two goats down the street if he could take a photo. Sure, the old guy agreed in Arabic. For a price.

I think he was those goats’ agent.

We drove by one little boy on the street who was wearing a TRIUMPH IS A HABIT tee-shirt, which made me laugh out loud.

We left Al-Mukalla and finally- Oh thank God. We're still in Japan.

After the long journey through the brown we finally reached Wadi Dawan, the most beautiful part of Yemen. This dreamy valley cuts across the Hadhramaut region, with a green valley floor that stretches to steep cliff walls on both sides of the massive canyon, with gorgeous traditional mud brick villages crawling improbably up the valley walls.

The most famous of the villages is Haid Al-Jizil, which sits perched on top of a butte like an island in the middle of the Wadi. A single family occupies the village and I imagine has really loud birthday parties.

We spent the night in little cabins looking down over Haid Al-Jizil, watching the sun set onto the village below as the shadows grew long and ominous across the valley floor.

Deeper into the valley in the village of Khayla, you'll find the beautiful Buqshan Palace, which is MUCH more colorful in all the photos you'll find of it online, which were all apparently taken the very day it was painted. Never the less, even if it no longer looks like some kind of Dr Seuss cathouse, it was still a big beautiful highlight to visit.

Careful walking through the low doorway though, I hit my forehead so hard THONK our guide called back "Watch your head!" from down the hall. Thanks so much, that's such helpful advice NOW.

Even more beautiful than the inside of the palace for me, though, was the view from the roof and the village all around us.

Other buildings in the village attempted to compete with the palace's former candy-colored glory.

No trip thought the Wadi would be complete, however, without seeing the Witch Hat Goat Herder lady. Getting a photo of her was a bit of a challenge as you had to snap one through the car window as we raced by and before she could find a good-sized rock to throw at our car.

But come on lady, you can’t expect us to not take a photo of a witch herding goats.

Not far from the city of Seiyun sits Shibam, an ancient town made up of mud-brick skyscrapers, the skyline of incongruously old 11-story buildings looking like some kind of proto-Manhattan. Built in the 1500s as protection from Bedouin raiders, these buildings are amazingly still standing without the benefit of stone or concrete. A Unesco World Heritage site, the EU is funding the preservation and restoration of this amazing town.

Shibam is, largely, why you risk all kinds of craziness to go to mainland Yemen in the first place. This is something very few people get to visit and experience these days. When I’d visited Socotra Island in 2020, we’d had a layover in on the mainland in Seiyun on the way back and my friend Raoul and I spent a long time trying to convince/bribe one of the airport employees that he should let us skip the visa line and slip out of the airport so we could take a taxi to Shibam, which was tantalizingly and torturously only 15 minutes away from the airport. But it might as well have been a million miles away, as the airport employee kindly explained.

“You do not understand. You will die.”

So... like what if we throw in a Pepsi?

Now I as finally here, for real. We walked through the alleys of Shibam in a daze, taking in the tall buildings all around us.

The mud buildings have to be maintained regularly to prevent them from crumbling in the rain like you’d expect a skyscraper made out of mud to do. The buildings are coated in an oily paint that repels water, and while we were there a dude was hanging off a roof on a swing repainting one of the buildings while his wife nagged him from a nearby window.

The town’s museum was covered in a different kind of paint, black paint thrown on the front door in the middle of the night by Al-Qaeda as a warning that boys and girls shouldn’t be in the library together at the same time or whatever the hell they got into a paint-based frenzy over.

Reaching through a strange little hatch beside the door allowed you to unlatch the lock and let yourself in.

Going up into the skyscrapers is a surreal experience, being on the top floor of a building that’s nothing but mud, wondering how stable anything is that’s holding you up. Well, they have been here a while and haven’t fallen down yet… that’s a good sign, right? Today’s not the day is it?

We were blessed with several views of Shibam from outside in addition to our tour inside the city, we got to take in the sunset shifting the color of the buildings and lighting up the windows like candle flames while dozens of local boys played soccer in the huge sandy field in front of the town.

Mike informed me that if anything terrible happened to him during the remainder of the trip, to let his family know it was all okay because he got to see Shibam. I knew how he felt.

On the last day of the trip, we casually stopped by our driver’s house to pick up his AK-47. We were the furthest west we were going to go on this trip, and thus the closest to the action, and our guide wanted to have the gun with us in the car in case there was trouble. This kind of thing is really chill in Yemen. When you go through any of the military checkpoints, they ask you if you have any guns. If you say yes, this isn’t a dealbreaker at all. They say okay, that’s cool. I think it’s more of a “how’s the weather” kind of thing to make conversation more than an indication that you shouldn’t have a machine gun in your car.

I was, however, a little concerned that our guide was being careless with the gun. Sitting in the back seat, he pointed the AK at Mike in the front seat. “Take a photo, it will be funny!” Uhmmmm. The rifle was unloaded and the clip was removed, but I still felt uneasy. I grew up around guns and this just isn’t something you do, you always treat a gun like it’s loaded and could go off at any second. I’m guessing they don’t hold a lot of gun safety courses in Yemen.

We drove way out of town to the Sufi shrine to the prophet Hud in Kabr Nabi Hud, a huge, eerie and abandoned ghost city that sits empty for all but a few days every year, when it is suddenly flooded by thousands of Muslim pilgrams.

Standing in the hot sun outside the domed burial shrine, our guide handed me the Kalashnikov so we could take some photos with it. I asked him where the safety was and he looked at me quizzically. I couldn’t tell if he’d never been asked that before or if he was worried I was going to flip off the safety and start shooting it. I’d never held an AK-47 before, but it felt too light to be loaded. The clip was likely empty. But I wanted to make sure the safety was on before we started fucking around with it, just to be on the safe side. It didn’t have the red safety button near the trigger I was used to from the guns I’d shot growing up, instead there was a long metal latch near the stock that slid up or down to lock the gun.

I’d debated about whether or not I was going to shoot a gun on this trip, I’m not a huge fan of guns but I was still curious what this famous gun shot like. But I was also concerned about getting randomly flagged in the airport to have my hands tested for gunpowder residue, which happens occasionally and would be a really bad look coming out of Yemen if I tested positive. Might cause me some problems. We weren’t going to start shooting up the shrine anyway, so I didn’t need to worry about this right now.

After we left the shrine, as we drove away our guide looked nervously out the back window of our van. He didn’t say anything, but I noticed him switching out the empty clip from the Kalashnikov for one that was loaded. I asked him what was going on.

“That car behind us, it shouldn’t be there. The holiday celebration was yesterday, there shouldn’t be anyone but us here. They have Saudi plates, this could be trouble.”

Uhm, oh yeah?

“If they drive up on us, I will have the driver let me out. You guys will speed away and I will deal with them. I’ll shoot out their tires and then we’ll talk.”

Ohhhh. Okay. Good to know what the plan is.

Thankfully, the Saudi car didn’t try to overtake us or whatever else cars do to each other out here on the desolate back roads of the Yemeni desert. We made it to the Sufi tombs we’d planned to visit outside the village of Einat without incident.

Among the many graves here was the tomb of a famous Sufi leader. Al Qaeda had destroyed part of the surrounding cemetery because they were offended by the upright gravestones, when everybody knows gravestones should lie flat on the ground, like God intended.

We paid our respects inside the tomb, and upon leaving I was once again annoyed that I had to awkwardly squat down to put on my shoes and tie them again. Damned skirt! Wait up guys- Oh well, I’ll just have to catch up to those slip-on shoe motherfuckers.

I was walking out of the shrine complex and toward our van, the guys about to get in the van ahead of me, when a gunshot rang out.

Holy fuck!

Is somebody shooting at us?

I froze and scanned the horizon all around us. We were completely alone in the silent desert. There were no more shots. Well then where did-

I looked at our van and could see gunsmoke curling slowly and eerily up out of the open door. Oh shit.

The gun had gone off inside the van.

I jogged over to the van and apprehensively looked inside. I wasn’t sure if what was happening was done happening.

Our guide was sitting in his customary seat in the back row of the van. And there was blood absolutely everywhere. Splattered on the ceiling and the back window. Running down the back side of my seat in the next row up. The air inside the van was acrid with the stench of gunpowder. Oh shit. Our guide shot himself.

Our driver was standing, stunned, by the open door of the van. Mike was pacing behind me, breathing fast and shallow, a ball of nervous energy as he muttered "ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod" under his breath, not sure what to do. We were all frozen in fear because we weren't sure if the gun was done going off and we didn't want to be next. After a long pause Flavio and I got into the van and tried to figure out what we needed to do now.

I got a closer look at all of the blood in the back seat. Oh wow. We need to get to a hospital. Like right now. Our driver, normally cool and collected, was irrationally trying to clean up some of the blood with a tiny wad of Kleenex. All three of us began to yell at him that he needed to drive to the hospital right away. He didn’t speak any English but eventually understood what three people yelling “Hospital! Hospital! Hospital!” meant. We piled into the van, trying not to get too much blood on us, and pulled away.

As Flavio slid the van door closed, I suddenly noticed the bullet hole going straight through the door. Oh shit.

“It just missed me,” Flavio marveled. “By half a meter? I was about to get in the van when it went off, my ear is still ringing.”

Flavio was almost too calm. He seemed to be disassociating slightly from what was going on. He’d seen the guide’s face the moment it happened and thought it was some kind of joke, then saw the awkward smile melt into a grimace of pain.

Our driver sped through the back roads toward whatever the hell kind of hospital they have out here in the middle of nowhere. I thought of something our guide had said a few days before, that you don’t want to go into a hospital in Yemen, where the cure was often worse than the disease. You were likely to come out with an infection or some new disease entirely. Well, I hope he was wrong about that.

I turned around in my seat as we bumped along the road and made sure our guide was keeping pressure on the wound, so he wouldn’t lose too much blood. I couldn’t see the details in all the blood, but it was clear he’d shot himself in the left hand. Luckily it didn’t seem to be bleeding much any more, I imagined the muzzle flash had cauterized the wound to an extent, luckily since I had no idea how far we were from the hospital. But our guide was in agonizing pain. I handed him a plastic bag he could throw up into and he asked me for pain killers we didn’t have. As we sped through the landscape, he laid down in the back, moaning and cursing in Arabic.

“I’m so sorry I scared you guys,” he said weakly, which immediately brought tears to my eyes.

“We’re okay, don’t worry about us. We need to make sure you’re okay now,” I replied.

My mind ran through the possible outcomes that we might have to deal with now. God, I am so glad he didn’t shoot the driver. We’d have been really screwed if he’d shot the driver, none of us three know where we are or where the hospital is, and we don’t speak Arabic. I looked out the front of the van and realized the driver had a hole in the sleeve of his shirt. That’s weird. I looked closer and saw that he was bleeding. Oh Christ, he did shoot the driver!

Thankfully it was just a scrape, the bullet must have just grazed his elbow. I was glad in that moment that the three of us happened to be so well-traveled, Mike and Flavio having been to more places than I have. A regular group of tourists would probably be freaking out right now, and making the situation worse. Where is this hospital?

Then I remembered the checkpoints. Oh my God, if we have to pass through an army checkpoint on the way to the hospital, what are we going to say? It’s been hard enough to get through these things when none of us were shot. We may never get out of this country.

By some lucky break, there were no checkpoints on the road we took. Maybe the driver knew this already. Finally we arrived and parked hastily across the street from the hospital.

“Wait here, don’t come in with me,” our guide insisted. What? Are you crazy- Then I realized why he didn’t want us to come in. If there was some kind of inquest about the shooting we’d have to stay and serve as witnesses, instead of flying out of Yemen the next morning. How long would we be stuck here? A day? A week? I don’t think we even have the visas for that, let alone missing our flights.

Our guide and driver got out of the car and started toward the hospital. I looked in the back seat- wait, what is that on the floor? It looks like a- I did a double take.

That can’t be real, it looks like a rubber-

It was our guide’s finger. I did a triple take. After realizing there was no way there could be a rubber toy finger on the floor of the van, I still couldn’t believe it was our guide’s finger. It was too light in color, like an albino’s finger. Then I realized that was because there was no blood in it. Oh God, this is so surreal, but it’s really happening. I yelled for our driver to come back.

He didn’t speak a word of English, and kept looking at me like I was crazy as I tried to explain that he needed to pick up the finger and take it inside with them, so they could try to re-attach it to our guide’s hand. Eventually he grabbed a Kleenex and picked up the finger, I think more to get me to leave him alone than out of any expectation that the finger could be saved.

After several minutes the driver came back out and handed Mike his phone. Our guide was on the other end, explaining that we were to continue on with the day’s tour, and he would rejoin us later. What the fu- Before I knew what was happening, we were driving away. It was insane, but there was no way to explain to the driver that this was insane, or to change the plan. We motored away.

I felt a sense of relief as we rolled down the desolate highway, our guide safely deposited in the hospital. As long as we could get our PCR test and keep the gun from going off again we were going to get out of here in the morning just fine. I looked up the road ahead of us and noticed the checkpoint. Oooooooh shit.

I already forgot about the checkpoints.

I scanned the back seat as we pulled up to the dudes in uniforms who were holding machine guns. Oh man. Our van looked like the car in Pulp Fiction after John Travolta accidentally shot Marvin in the face. The back seat was covered in long streaks of blood. There was blood splattered on the window. There was blood on the ceiling. The blood-drenched AK-47 was still on the floor, in plain view.

By some miracle, the soldiers barely glanced in the car as our driver handed them our transit papers. They were more interested in us and why we were there than they were in why we were driving a rolling crime scene.

We sailed on through and within minutes we were pulling up in front of a restaurant for a late lunch.

We got out of the car and immediately noticed there was blood seeping through our driver’s shirt. Good God, what now? We stopped him and pulled up his shirt. There was a large wound on his lower back, which was concerning, but it looked more like a big scrape than an entry wound for a bullet. Maybe? What in the hell happened? Did the bullet tumble after it went through the door and somehow bounce off of him twice? That’s one magic bullet. I looked over at the door of the van and there were two huge holes where the bullet had gone through the door.

Oh. I think the bullet shattered when it hit our guide’s finger, went into the door as two splinters, and came out as who knows how many fragments. It may have even bounced off the cinderblock wall the van was parked next to before the various fragments hit the driver. That would explain how he somehow has four different holes in his shirt, one a long serrated tear like a bullet went through it sideways.

Now we realized why the driver had been acting so strangely, trying to clean up the blood instead of gunning it for the hospital. The poor guy had been shot and he was in shock.

Thankfully none of the many wounds seemed to really be actively bleeding. We sat in the restaurant in a haze while our driver told the story to the owner of the restaurant. A local teen came over and animatedly started asking us questions in Arabic, none of which we understood at all. Based on his gestures I think he was asking if we’d buried our guide’s finger after he shot it off. Dude, go away.

After lunch we managed to communicate through charades to the driver that we wanted to skip the rest of the day’s itinerary and just go back to the hotel. He still insisted that we visit the Seiyun Palace, and I realized it might make both our guide and driver feel better if we did at least something from the day’s itinerary, since they were so worried about our trip being ruined and likely concerned that we’d end up leaving terrifying reviews.

OK. Nice palace, nice view. Can we get the hell out of here now? You’re still bleeding!

It was all crazy and not crazy at the same time, since we couldn’t care less about sightseeing in that moment. But the guide and driver both had to be terrified that their careers were going to be over if word of this ever got out, which is why I’m not mentioning either of them by name as I write this. I considered not writing about it at all, since there aren’t that many guides (read: two) who lead westerners through Yemen and someone could easily connect the dots to who the nine-fingered Yemeni guide is.

But ultimately I decided it’s my story to tell. It was his carelessness that caused the whole thing, and it was sheer dumb luck that he didn’t hit one of us with that bullet, so I don’t feel like I owe it to him to carry some kind of secret to protect his business. If anything it’s probably better if people know so they can make an informed choice to keep themselves safe when traveling in Yemen.

That was the great surreal irony that came to my mind as we got further from the incident: We went to one of the most dangerous places in the world, but the biggest threat to our safety ended up being the one person who was there to keep us safe. Crazy.

After the fact, we looked through our photos from the day to try and forensically piece together what had happened. How did the gun go off? Wasn't the safety on? “Zoom in and you can see it's on in this picture from the Hud shrine.” But when we got to the photos from the tombs... no safety. Ah, he took the safety off when he was getting ready to shoot at our imaginary Saudi pursuers, and forgot to put it back on. The trigger must have caught on something when he was climbing into the back seat of the van.

The most troubling detail in all of this was the realization that the safety lever on an AK-47 has three positions, not just two. Safety on, semi-auto, and fully automatic. If the lever had been one click further down who knows how many bullets would have come spraying out of the car when the gun went off?

My original intention was to get this blog up soon after we left Yemen, so I wouldn’t have to tell this story over and over again, reliving something that was pretty traumatic in the moment. But going to mainland Yemen is so rare, so on the edge of what's even possible with adventurous travel, that the instant people heard I’d been there, all of my travel friends and acquaintances (and frankly anyone I even met the entire rest of the year) wanted to know how I had managed to go to Yemen and who was the guide I had used. I couldn’t give them that info without telling this whole story as a warning, so pretty soon I had told it two-dozen times and whatever trauma there had been was gradually worn away.

The funniest part is that every travel friend I dutifully told the story to as a warning followed up immediately with: “Wow! So. What's that guide's phone number?” So yeah, my friends are crazy. And I ended up referring our guide a ton of new business. So I guess it all worked out for everyone in the end.

That night at the hotel, our guide finally returned from the hospital while we were eating dinner, his hand bandaged and his pinky completely gone, but in a buoyant mood. They’d given him the option to fly to Cairo to try to have the finger reattached, but the cost would have been exorbitant, and I would question how successful the attempt would have been, with the likely powder burns to both ends of the finger.

The guide was in a chipper mood, no doubt aided by pain killers, and projected an insouciant “shit happens” attitude about the entire affair, which troubled me a bit. Shit happens a lot less often when you have the safety on, dude. I like to think this was just for our benefit and that he really did internalize something from what happened that will make him more careful going forward.

“I told the doctor I smashed my finger on a rock, but he didn't believe me.”

Either way I was struck by how losing a finger, an event that would be absolutely catastrophic for me or anyone else I know, seemed to be a relatively drab daily occurrence in Yemen. The doctor didn't believe him because he'd likely seen plenty of fingers shot off in a country where machine guns are more common than seat belts.

The driver had managed to seep blood through three different shirts, seemingly in denial that he’d been shot. We finally managed to give him some bandages and convince our guide that the driver needed to have that wound cleaned and looked at, in case there were still any bullet fragments in there.

The next day, after dropping us off at the airport early in the morning for our flight to Cairo, our guide and driver were headed back all the way across the country to the border with Oman to pick up another tourist. All three of us tried not to imagine how the next tourist would feel, being picked up at the border by a bandaged, nine-fingered guide in a van with huge and very obvious bullet holes through the door.

Welcome to Yemen. The safety is that latch on the back of the gun.