Mocha ‘liquor’ run

The liquor run down to the original coffee port of Mocha in North Yemen was aimed at obtaining the means to some light relief, to what was then certainly one of the harder (but also potentially one of the most interesting) postings of the day. Across the Red Sea was the port of Djibouti and it was from here that the ‘merchandise’ would start its journey to North Yemen, where a limited amount of it was bought by the small expat community, and thereon up North into the more lucrative and much larger Saudi Arabian market.

I say ‘ much larger’ as sometime later we actually had a representative from Johnny Walker visit Yemen to specifically look at ways to ‘smooth the wheels’ of what is understood to have then become a very lucrative smuggling route! (Apparently, the square shape bottle used by Johnny Walker was greatly preferred by those taking it carefully across borders, as it tended to both stack well and was also much less likely to roll around and cause noise when compared to the normal round shape bottle used by other whisky makers). Somehow, and I can’t quite recall how, we would become aware that ‘merchandise’ was due to arrive in Mocha.

At the time (1975/6) Mocha was an almost derelict village with literally only a handful of tumble down mud houses and a few half buried minarets left. In its heyday, of course, it had been a bustling port handling the export of local coffee and had thus given its name to a particular blend now drunk by millions worldwide.

We would normally set off from Taiz in the Bank Land Rover for the 2 to 3 hour drive (the time taken normally depended on when the track had last been graded and also on the number of punctures suffered). We had a shopping list which covered not only our own requirements, but also those for the small number of other expatriate residents of Taiz and would also be looking to get enough to last us the typical 3-4 months before the next lot would arrive. We would also generally try to borrow a pet dog from one of the other Westerners living in Taiz, to assist us to get through the usual police checkpoint on the route back - traditionally, the locals were afraid of dogs and so, when the policeman stopped us and opened the back door of the Land Rover to inspect the contents, the dog would growl and bare its teeth prompting the policeman to (normally) slam the door shut and run away!

The drive down was, for the first part of the route, on a very rough and slow going track through the mountains and wadis and then, once we had hit the Tihamma plain, across a very corrugated dirt/sand track to the coast. As everyone who has driven on such tracks knows, the secret to as comfortable ride as possible is to get the vehicle up to a certain speed, typically around 80 kph, and to then try to stay on the top of the corrugations, rather than go up and down over each and every one of them.

Upon arriving at Mocha we would typically be met by a boy who would run up, hop on the side of the vehicle and say ‘whisky, beera?’ If you then nodded, he would jump onto the front wing, sit down and start directing you through the village and along the beach. When we reached the place where the ‘merchandise’ was buried, he would signal us to stop and would jump off the car, retrieve a shovel from its hiding place and start to dig up his stock which he had earlier hidden in various sacks. The problem was that, having been lowered from a dhow off shore and then brought in by the tide, before being picked up and buried, the bottles and cans had often been broken/punctured, so you had to inspect each and every one of them to make sure that it was filled with its original contents and not luke warm sea water!

Having done this, we would negotiate payment for the consignment and, once agreed, pack half a dozen cans each in ice that we had specifically brought down in an ‘eski’ for the return journey and set off back home, hoping that the dog would do his bit when we came to the police checkpoint on entry to Taiz

Vaughan Dennis

Footnote – my next posting was Dubai and although all we had to do there to buy our stocks was a five minute drive down to African & Eastern or Gray Macks, it never really tasted as good!