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The coast is so totally
different from the interior of Yemen; it is hot, of course, but also
staggeringly humid (your camera lens steams up as soon as you step out of an
air-conditioned hotel). The people are different too, darker skinned
and, reassuringly, less heavily armed! We were unfortunately unable to
visit the turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs at night, again "for
security reasons", but still managed to enjoy some bizarre goings on from
the local crab colonies which suddenly appeared from beneath the beach at
dusk, leaving conical mounds of sand to mark their excavations.
From the coast as you
drive inland you climb through the Abd al Gharib pass, a spectacular series
of hairpin bends, to arrive on the desert plateau, beyond which the Wadi
Doan, through Khailat Bugshan and the fantasy Lego hotel, then onto Wadi
Hadramawt. According to our guide (hence of questionable veracity) the
road has only been built for a few years, so it must have been a tortuous
journey to bring fuel and other goods from the coast to Say'un, but then it
is said that the Sultan of Say'un in the 1930's had transported a Rolls
Royce piece by piece by camel and reassembled for his use on the couple of
miles of track around his estate.
For some strange
reason they seem to be rather pro-British and assure us that they were all a
lot happier as a British Protectorate; firm but fair seems to be the
consensus! |
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