Treasure Island and the twenty-first century

Yemen Observer: http://www.yobserver.com

Treasure Island and the twenty-first century

Posted in: News Varieties
Written By: James Robertson
Article Date: Apr 1, 2008 - 12:36:14 AM

The dragon’s blood tree is a distinctive of the Socotran landscape. The sap is used as an ancient medicine.

A foreigner grows accustomed to stares in Yemen. Not malice, mind you, just the benign curiosity with which one may regard a visitor from a world you have only seen on television. The remote Yemeni island of Socotra is no different.

When arriving at Hadibu airport, the only one on the island, there is a lazy, tropical air as two sinewy Socotran men wearing mawaz, their traditional dress, heave the cardboard boxes of fruits and vegetables onto an ancient one-way conveyor belt which dumps them unceremoniously at our feet.

The arrivals terminal is crowded with Socotrans awaiting packages from the mainland, and they eye us lily-white tourists with a keen interest. Goats nibble idly beside the airport building.

Very little land on Socotra is arable; most is unsuitable for agriculture, beyond small gardens. Many locals engage in subsistence fishing and use goats for milk and meat. Links to the mainland are tenuous; the airport opened in 1999 with weekly flights to and from Sana’a and Aden, but even these are suspended in the middle of the year, when the island is buffeted by strong winds and rains.

Fahan, our driver, a roguish local kitted out in a kefaya scarf and a mawaz skirt, picked us up at the airport doing battle with his beaten-up old Toyota. He needs to, since the roads on the island are mostly a primitive rocky affair. He wrestled it up a hill crest for a spectacular view across a bursting blue bay framed by monstrous sand dunes, rock huts, and fishing boats idling in the light surf. Brightly clothed children run along the road waving; this really is an exotic, pre-oil Arabia.

In the beginning, when all of the world’s continents were locked together in one giant landmass, Socotra was probably unremarkable. However, About 6 million years ago, it broke free of the grip of the African mainland to seek its fortune as an island.

Since then, more or less everything on the island has evolved independently of the plants and animals found elsewhere on earth. A United Nations biology team found 700 species of plants and animals that exist nowhere else on the planet.

Even the people are different. Their language is Socotri, an ancient south Arabian language distinct from Arabic, their skin is darker, and their dress reflects the island lifestyle with vivid dark greens and reds.

Socotra is blessed with an abundance stunning, unspoiled beaches.

Socotra endures as a time capsule with few of the ills of the modern world. There is no urbanization because the people are subsistent and partially nomadic; there is no pollution because there is no industry; there is no conflict because everyone has enough food and land, and there is no oil; there is little disease.

Due to the sheer remoteness of the place and the fact that its mother country, Yemen, has attracted little tourism, Socotra has stayed mostly off the tourist radar. However, its profile has recently come up on many reputable travel lists and was featured on the shortlist for the recent New Seven Wonders of the World and was the New York Times travel destination of the year in 2006. The pristine beaches, clear water, mountains, caves, and monstrous sand dunes are still the haunt of the odd stray goat and wandering herder.

So far, Socotrans have resisted mass tourism and the painful development that comes with it. Conservation programs led by the World Bank have helped keep it that way, preserving its natural beauty with responsible conservation programs.

The government has been wary of tinkering with the place at all. A new ring road is being constructed, but this seems unnecessary and unwanted.

Yet, it seems likely that it will eventually be marketed more intensively to Europeans and Gulf Arabs, but this would come at great cost to the slow, rhythmic, un-modernized pace of life.

The inhabitants, 40,000 at current count, are happy and content. They wave unreservedly to strangers and the men greet each other by touching noses. It comes from a rhythmic, stable island lifestyle and dependable food sources – goats and fish. People know, or are related to, most people they come into contact with, rather than the brusque anonymity of city life.

It has not always been as isolated. A new study suggests that Socotra was a thriving ancient trading center which developed between 1580-1322 B.C.E.

Mohammed Said Abdul, a researcher from the Geography Department of Aden University, claims that the Socotran archipelago was well known as a center of incense, spice and frankincense production, due to its favorable location in the Gulf of Aden at the confluence of the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and East African trading routes.

Socotra may yet prove to be a bellwether for all of the looming crises facing mainland Yemen. It mercifully lacks the urbanization crisis, but the water and food scarcity will be aggravated as the population further expands.

Already, climate change has reared its ugly developed head. The Dragon’s Blood tree, the umbrella-shaped species that yields a red medicinal sap when cut and the most distinctive of Socotran flora, is in decline. It grows today not in dense forests but in scattered areas. Younger saplings have trouble germinating, which may be caused by the decline in mist cover on the island, or possibly from over-grazing by the ubiquitous goats.

The future of Socotra may see a return to globalization from its ancient past, trading this time not in spices but in tourism. The number of tourists annually has reached 2500, and even this figure is a strain on local infrastructure and sensibilities.

Development and tourism will happen anyway; better the authorities stay a step ahead of the trend, and sort out conservation and infrastructure details now.