Socotra, March 24
Started
The arrival on the island is confusing. The capital, Hadiboh, is in great turmoil and has only half finished houses, vacant lots and rutted road. It is best to escape as quickly as possible. But how to organize your stay? Socotra is not really ready to welcome visitors. There is no tourist office, public transport is scarce and there are only three hotels and an area equal to the half of Corsica. The information is exempt by local guides who obviously feel a need to shift their services, including advice and rent a 4x4 in order to use the tracks not carossées. The daily fee is 80 dollars a day ... A French who has his subject well Potash explain that in fact only the eastern part of the island requires a 4x4. Other interesting sites in the west and south are accessible taxi or hitchhike. We therefore join with a couple of Russians, that we unearth a guide for $ 150 three days. This is starting to take shape.
Camping at the foot of the dunes
We attack beautifully with the range of Arseh, a series of dunes built by the winds of summer, which spring from the sea to go over the top of the cliffs.
The camp is organized at the edge of a stream of fresh water, around which grew a modest vegetation that clings to the sand.
At our first dinner menu, a grouper that we buy a fisherman and we're toast, small luxury unexpected with aromatic wood.
While the stars light up one after the other over our heads, we realize that, because of the lack of pollution and, more generally, human presence, the beach is teeming with life: fish inhabit the creek in serried ranks of hermit crab shell rubbing noisily against the rocks and half a dozen crabs lying carelessly around our stores.
Hiking on another planet
Tomorrow is hiking in the mountains. We are surrounded by native plants that are unlike anything known. Socotra has been separated from Africa and Arabia there are twenty million years, serving as a refuge for flora and fauna that have disappeared elsewhere, a victim of herbivores, competition from other species and climatic hazards. There are lemon and fig trees of Socotra, to the tunes of Adenium chubby baobab curiously crowned with pink flowers which are also called pink desert, a kind of big natural bonsai unidentified twist in all directions and, far, overlooking the landscape of cliff tops, the umbrella of the famous dragon, the emblem of the island and Yemen in general. It's like being on another planet.
After a good hour walk, we get a huge opening in the mountain.
Until then, I thought that was tantamount to caving use corridors, squeeze through cracks and eventually crawl into the mud until the ceiling is raised. Not here. The cave, which we climb for two miles to a pond is like a large airport lounge. Hanging from the ceiling, huge stalactites let go for millennia drops the residual limestone form below monstrous stalagmites whose shapes remind me of the buildings "biomechanical" from Geiger's Alien series.
Progressing in the darkness of the Gothic cathedral burial, I say we get much more beautiful for the dragon lair skittish, whose blood would flow under the bark of the famous dragon. It would also an ideal companion for the phoenix, the legendary host of the island since antiquity.
Diving multicolored
After dinner in a family Suqutri followed by another night on a beach, we spend the next day to Di Ahmri, a rocky outcrop overlooking a diving area protected. Just back in the water, I discovered a meeting of colorful fish to graze occupied a magnificent coral green, yellow and purple. Some wear rainbow colored sky and a parrot, others look like discs vertical yellow, black and white with a funny mouth trumpet, some friment with grooves and electric blue I fix three particularly bizarre or four very thin body and inordinately extended, perhaps four feet in length for two or three fingers thick, which are more like seahorses stretched to fish. Not to mention a large turtle that I am close to flatten the bottom of the water making him the blow of the attack on diving duck, an octopus with a good meter that fled before I reach to grab the tentacle, and last, but that I do not see the shore, a manta joker who thinks he is a dolphin and increases the air somersaults. Unfortunately, my camera is not amphibious, so I can show you what happens outside of the water.
absence of fish, here is an Egyptian vulture.
From the beauty of the Socotra
beginning of this trip, I sometimes feel that our guide is bored with us. He always responds with a lag, dragging its feet, as his every move. And then, seeing him with his friends, I realize that this is general indolence to Socotra. Basically they are a little Caribbean, these Arabs. Moreover, they seem to have quite a few African and Indian blood. Dull skin, fine lines, slender body, they are very beautiful. They are very elegantly and marheb silly, kind of long skirts close to the Indian dhoti. When they greet each other, they shake hands by bringing it to their face and then rub each other nose like the Eskimos, it's very cute. They are also much more relaxed than the Yemenis of the continent, even their language, Socotra, less raspy than Arabic. With men so beautiful, women should not be bad either. It also tells me that the Saudis come here to recruit their wives. The girls, in any case are chewable. But once they reach ten years, no longer see their face. A few years ago, they still wore beautiful dresses to the little colored square neckline and a simple scarf on the hair. Today, thank you to the influence Wahhabi, they are almost hidden beneath all this sinister assembly shapeless black veils that opens in the best case, only to discover his eyes. Anyway, with much good will we can also see the fetishism of the outfit. History to stretch my ideas, I suppose these naughty naked under their hijab, unless this is their little bottom alluring me to hear the rustle in black fabric.
White Sand Sea Turquoise
Well, I stop hurting me. Much rather talk about the landscape of the island. Now my only flanked by two Russians, I go camping Qalancia to, on the western tip. Imagine a white sandy beach overlooking a perfectly powdery gradient turquoise sea that spreads its lazy ripples to the shore. All this, of course, completely deserted apart from the presence of a fisherman came to stock up on bait.
We attrappons a dozen white crabs that we boil, but they are too small to satisfy us and we end by abandoning them to the vultures, obviously very interested.
Finally, we headed on wild oysters spared from Socotra, because it is forbidden for Muslims to eat raw shellfish. These people therefore deprive sex before marriage, for women, wine, ham and oysters also. Both of masochism is breathtaking, although they must find some pleasure in frustration.
The next day we go by boat to explore the steep cliffs of the coast where nesting hundreds of birds, including some apparently rare.
Night dipped into a canyon
week elapsed, but I feel so good on the island that I extend my stay for three days. Only this time, which is not to displease me, I'm going to stop Diksun the center of the island. It is a great plateau dotted Adenium and overlooked by the massive granite Haggier. I meet all these girls.
The plateau is crossed by a dried up river, the Wadi Doro. I travel for two hours, spanning the rocks washed away by floods and photographing in passing that overlook the dragon, scaring on my way goats and lizards.
Below, the girl offered me kohl.
the evening, I set up my sleeping bag on a soft green grass patch next to a natural pool where birds come to drink. Disastrous idea. I woke up around midnight by the moisture of the grass that has penetrated my sleeping bag. While shivering in my sleeping bag wet, I can not find the sleep of the night. In the morning I am warm with the first rays of sun and finally having trouble falling asleep on a rock, but Socotra wakes me to invite me to tea with his family. Impossible to refuse. Children are happy, I spend the morning laughing with them faces and introduce them to the trip-hop.
Plays
lonely Then I'm off to Omac, south of the island. After following a series of tight haggling with drivers who take advantage of the lack of transport for hitchhikers to extort huge sums of Western, I reach this huge beach lined with bushes and take my quarters in a tent located in the middle of an enclosure of palm leaves, perfect for preventing incursions of goats. Alone in the camp, I'm enjoying the quiet to finish reading the wonderful memories a gentleman pirate Edward John Trelawney, the best kind of story. Having completed the Collision of English frigate, the looting of Chinese junk and stopovers epic in Mumbai and Mauritius in the early nineteenth century, I continue with the brilliant Japanese Chronicles by Nicolas Bouvier, visions extensively documented , affectionate yet critical of the archipelago, from its birth to its mythological transformation of the postwar period. Goats, too, are interested in my books, but the taste of paper that attracts ...
Departure History
conclude my trip in style, I recrossed the island from end to end, fell on the remains of a beached whale ...
... and spend my last night on the dive site Ahmri Di, where I greet the fish before my flight to Sana'a. Then it's time to leave for Ethiopia, the cradle of humanity, the only African country never colonized, the last sanctuary intact tribes of the continent, home to a church dating from the fourth century, the promised land of the Rastafarians and homeland of the most beautiful women in the world, legendary destination among all of my dreams for years.
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