At last some luxury.

After eating dust and a variety of peculiar looking dinners and sleeping on the floor or in a tent we arrived at Tarim and a hotel, although basic, offered quite a bit of luxury: beds!
The old colonial hotel of Qasr al-Qubba even had a pool of sorts. We did our laundry (not in the pool) and hung it out to dry on the roof of the hotel and settled in. Marianne, one of my fellow travelers had a whole ritual. In every place we spent the night she placed little candles and sticks of incense that she would burn to remove any foul or musty smells which most places had. If you peered through half-closed eyes it made a rather nasty little room look acceptable. I think we even found a little bottle of something to drink which made a nice change from bottled water.

The hotel, which resembled a frosted cake looked more South East Asian and we discovered that many Yemeni from this area had emigrated to Indonesia and Singapore and had brought the style back home with them. We stayed two nights in preparation of our journey through Wadi Hadramout and made the most of it.