There was only one hotel in the capital, Sanaa, and it was booked up with European businessmen trying to sell junk to the Yemenis. I had to sleep on a cot in the dining room and be up before breakfast. The ruler back in the day was a despot known to his less than loving subjects as 'Ahmed the Devil.'  He liked to nail subjects who displeased him to the palace door.

One of Yemen's frequent civil wars was raging around the walled, medieval capital between royalists and Shia tribesmen. At dusk a ram's horn would be blown and the city gates barred.