Hajjah

The drive into Hajjah is the kind that makes you go quiet. The road switches back on itself again and again, climbing through terraced fields that somehow cling to slopes I wouldn’t want to walk up, let alone farm. And then the town appears above you, stone houses stacked along the ridge like they grew there rather than were built, the whole thing balanced against a drop that made my stomach do something unpleasant every time I looked over the edge.

I remember standing at the edge of town in the late afternoon, the light turning the stone the color of dried apricots, and just not saying anything for a while. Lia gets tired of me doing this — going silent in front of a view — but Hajjah earns it. There’s a logic to how the houses are stacked, tallest and narrowest on the outcrops, wider ones tucked into whatever flat ground exists, and none of it looks planned so much as negotiated, generation after generation, with the mountain itself.

What I didn’t expect was how social the town felt despite being so physically closed-in. Every alley seemed to open onto a small gathering — men sitting on stone benches chewing qat in the late afternoon the way people back home might sit at a cafe, someone’s radio playing tinny music from an open window, a group of boys daring each other to walk along a low wall with a genuinely terrifying drop on one side. Nobody paid much attention to us beyond a curious nod, which suited me fine. I wasn’t there to be noticed, just to look.

I talked to a shopkeeper who’d never lived anywhere else, and he laughed when I asked if the height ever bothered him. Said he’d grown up running those alleys and only really noticed the drop when visitors pointed it out. That stuck with me — how a place that looks impossible from the road is, for the people who live there, simply home, with all the ordinary rhythms of home layered on top of the vertigo.

When to go: Aim for the cooler months of winter, when the highland air is crisp and the switchback drive up isn’t competing with summer haze that can blur the views.