Sitting on a concrete wall I gaze out across the broad anchorage that lies on the tip of the Arabian peninsula. There’s a wrecked Indian ship, hull upturned, a couple of ocean-battered yachts and a few distant container ships. Further away are the hazy mountains of Yemen’s interior and behind me is Aden, a great purple crust of a volcanic island attached to the Yemeni mainland by a causeway. This, I remind myself, is the Arabia Felix of the Romans, a land of fabulous mountain scenery and stunning architecture, the original home of frankincense and coffee, a place that has inspired towering stacks of sumptuous photography books.
The rock of Aden itself is lifeless in the early morning heat, the streets that skirt the crag are empty. Everything here is either broken or dilapidated: the worn adverts from the 1960s, the faded hotels with their empty cocktail lounges, the grand entrance hall for boat arrivals with its archaic signs. This viewpoint, I reflect, tells the story of how a town can lose its place in the tourist world and go from riches to rags.
Yousif, an out-of-work Russian-trained engineer who drives a taxi, points out the significant landmarks. “Just behind us is the Gold Mohur Hotel — that was where Osama bin Laden exploded his first terrorist bomb in 1992. You know, we used to have tourists in the late 80s and early 90s.” His finger moves on ... “In front of us is where the USS Cole was blown up in 2000. The 1950s and early 1960s were good for visitors — lots of ships — but that stopped when communism came. And over here at the head of the causeway is the Movenpick Hotel, looted in the 1994 war when the communists were finally defeated.”
I nodded. A memory of The Movenpick night club back in 1993 crossed my mind: the image of a blonde Ukrainian belly dancer gyrating on the table, an 11-piece Egyptian orchestra building up a fever, and a mixed crowd of tourists and locals drinking beer and going wild. Aden did have visitors then. It had a brewery too — the only one in Arabia. That world is long gone.
Yousif sighs. “Now we have pirates instead of tourists.”
It’s a bad, bad world, and Yemen has long see-sawed between the delightful and dangerous for its visitors. Having lived in the place, and visited many times, I’d come back to meet a party of intrepid British tourists coming across to Aden from Djibouti by boat with the adventure travel company Wild Frontiers. I wanted to write about how one reaches those difficult decisions: whether to go, or not to go; whether to heed the warnings, or not. Where is that tricky line between courage and folly? I also wanted to see if this lost corner of Arabia, one of the Earth’s most stunning landscapes and cultures, is safe to visit.
HOSTAGE-TAKING AND HOSPITALITY
Yemen has long been one of those countries that visitors treat with extreme caution, and not without good reason. In 1612 the first British visitor, Sir Henry Middleton, a director of the British East India Company, came to buy sacks of an exciting new commodity called coffee, but instead was bundled into captivity, rolled around and spat out, ruffled but unharmed, some months later. Others, like the Italian Ludovico Varthema, here a century earlier, were also taken prisoner, but treated regally. The Italian’s picaresque account captures both sides: the mysterious romance of the country, and its xenophobic brutality. Yemen was a place where hostage-taking and hospitality could become blurred.
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