Yemen

Western Asia

At the south-western corner of Arabia, Yemen holds the mud-brick towers of Sanaa and the walled city of Shibam, though its mainland is closed to travel by a long civil war. Its one reachable destination is Socotra, an Indian Ocean island 380km off the Horn of Africa whose isolation produced a flora found nowhere else on earth, including the umbrella-shaped dragon blood trees. Socotra is served by charter flights separate from the mainland and run by local island operators; the country as a whole remains under standing do-not-travel advisories.

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What you can do in Yemen

Trekking / Hiking

SocotraJan Feb Mar Apr Oct Nov DecSocotra is one of the most biologically isolated places on earth, an island cut off from the mainland for so long that about a third of its plant species grow nowhere else, which is why people call it the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. The signature is the dragon blood tree, Dracaena cinnabari, a slow-growing umbrella of a tree that bleeds red sap and forms whole forests on the misty Diksam plateau and at Firmihin. Alongside it grow bulbous bottle trees and desert roses clinging to bare rock. The way to see it is on foot, over several days, walking the plateau and the wadis and sleeping in simple camps, with side trips to the white sand and turquoise of the Detwah lagoon near Qalansiyah, the limestone chambers of Hoq Cave, and the freshwater pools and frankincense of the Homhil reserve. There are almost no other tourists, the guiding is entirely local, and the landscape looks like nowhere else. It is a hard place to reach and a harder country to enter, but for its own sake Socotra is one of the most extraordinary trekking destinations anywhere.

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Trekking