Travel and Design

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I don’t stumble every day upon places on this Earth that look like  they  do not belong here. Socotra Island is one of the weirdest places I have ever seen photos of, and no wonder it has jumped the queue to the first positions of my “Places I want to go to” -list .

credit: Jan Vandorpe

It looks more like a movie set for one of those weird SF movies, that have nothing to do with the real world: a place where the trees that don’t look like melted candlesticks,  look like opened umbrellas  .

credit: Jan Vandorpe

credit: Jan Vandorpe

This is what happens when a piece of land, preferably an island, is isolated from the rest of the world for a massive period of time and the plants loose all their good common sense and evolve into things that one can hardly relate to. This must be the “galapagos” in the Indian Ocean.

A tree must look a certain way, or at least to have certain features to be called a tree, but these are rather resembling cactuses in my schemas, than they do trees. The name is appropriate : cucumber tree!

credit: Jan Vandorpe:

These reminds me of a time when I was 4 years old and thought that potatoes grow on trees like apples do, since every other fruit of a certain size  seemed to do just that . But in the mean time, I have seen a potato plant and now I know better. Neither potatoes nor cucumbers grow on trees, nor do money for that reason . So back to the point, a CUCUMBER TREE, really? that grows on the moon? Something seems fascinatingly wrong! That’s not everything , on this same island, that I have never heard about until recently, they have another tree that has a name out of a fairytale: the Dragon’s blood tree.

credit: Valerio Pandolfo

So much for the “Dragons only live in fairytales” talk.

Socotra is very little developed, no real infrastructure and not any resorts that I could google myself to. I’ve read in a New York Times’ article, that they only have a handful of flushing toilets on the island.   But after these kind of pictures,flushing toilets or not,  Socotra will probably be isolated and overlooked no more (if that didn’t already happened). It will probably be engulfed in mass tourism in no time, even if it is a part of Yemen, a land that is on the “dangerous countries to travel to”  list , a country where buying  a Kalashnikov for around 100$, is said to be be a much easier task than finding a flashing toilet. (the article is quite old so hopefully things have changed).

Sailing to it, is probably out of the question too, since you will be just the perfect sitting duck, for the pirates, off the coast of Somalia. So, flying there would probably be the sensible thing to do.

Island of Socotra is on the UNESCO world heritage -list , and rightly so.

to be continued…..

G.

P.S: Another interesting article : The land that time forgot  http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2006/apr/16/yemen.observerescapesection

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socotra

Jan Vandorpe, the photographer that has taken these amazing photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22334898@N00/sets/72157594458832922/

with the mandatory fishy smell:

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- Old business and the new business of kitsch “all you can eat ” pirate ships  aimed at tourists.

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that’s that with El Kantoui, moving on…

G.

We dived in two different places in Tunisia , one of which was in El Kantaoui with Center de Plongee d’El Kantaoui (kantaouidiving@planet.tn). The equipment was in good shape and our local guide/ instructor Walid was very helpful and a pleasure to dive with (especially under water where he could use more of his diving capabilities and less of his vocal ones ).

After a 20 minutes boat ride, close enough so we could still see the Port el Kantaoui we reached our diving spot : a big reef with some underwater caves at a depth of  approximately 12 m.

The place was OK for one dive, with lots of boring sea grass and lots of well trained fish that closely tailed the instructors and their BCD pockets stuffed with bread. Even if there was not a lot of fish elsewhere, we were constantly engulfed  in a cloud of fish waiting for their diner. So we conformed and fed the “pets”, some of them eager enough to mistake my finger for their meal. A fun activity to feed the fish and look them strait in the eye at the same time. I realized that the fish around there do resemble pigs to some extent.

The caves an tunnels were good training for me since I haven’t dived in a while and there were a few interesting things to see : a worm here and a starfish there, but by far not the richness of marine life with corrals and lots of different species that you see elsewhere.

http://www.unep-wcmc.org/marine/seagrassatlas/I/med_seagrass_beds_pgVI.jpg

All in all a pleasant dive, even if very experienced divers would not consider the place a primary destination for diving. I would certainly recommend the diving center  since the other dives we had in Mahdia were small scaled disasters.

to be continued…

G.

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It is quite a sight to sail into the Port El  Kantaoui in Tunisia. If this is your first time on Tunisian soil, you will probably conclude that Tunisia is just a piece of Andalusia  that has drifted away towards Africa without anybody taking notice.

But Tunisia is no piece of Spain, and Port el Kantaoui looks like this because it was build  as an up-marked resort in the 70’s for well to do tourists. The recipe for the place was Andalusian style houses with white walls and narrow cobbled streets,lots of flowers and palm trees , all in close proximity to Mediterranean water and sandy beaches.

It is a custom built vacation village & marina complex for tourists, no more no less! As the Lonely Planet put it , it is “a strange combination of the southern California mall, the Italian piazza and the Tunisian zone touristique”. It has everything a regular tourist wants :the beach, restaurants, bars and the mandatory souvenir shops, pirate boats, charter fishing boats, glass-bottom boats, amusement parks, water park and even a zoo and an aromatic garden, all in close proximity to the hotel or the villa you are staying in.

I can say that it has little Tunisian in it, that it is inauthentic, that it could be renamed to Disneyland, but the truth is that its artificiality is what attracts both the tourists and the Tunisians to come here for a holiday  and walk the cobbled streets with the white washed houses. There is no garbage laying around, no stray cats, no untended flower beds, everything is  well taken care of  and the price of things mirrors exactly this. It is like the ultimate vacation village for the beach lovers and sun worshipers!

I neither like it, nor hate it, and one day in this kind of environment was more than what I wanted to spend here. The main reason for being in El Kantaoui was the diving. And it did have a nice sailboat port!

More about the diving in one of the next posts!

G.

The story goes that  Islamic prophet Muhammad had a cat named Muezza, and one day when he was summoned to prayer , rather than disturb his cat, that was sleeping on his robe, he choose to cut off the sleeve. (link). There are other stories in the Hadith (a collection of his reported sayings) about a cat that saved Mohammed from being bitten by a snake, and a woman that was sent to hell for starving a cat!

Cats are supposed to be considered  pure , and mistreating a cat is seen as a severe sin in Islam.

Despite the preferential treatment the cats should get in an Arab country, the story on the ground is a bit different! Most of the cats I’ve met were dirty from scavenging through trash, full of wounds from fighting for the limited space in the medinas, some of them sick and most of them with kittens.

I met several taxi drivers that refused a ride because of a cat, and people letting a kitten to die in the middle of the well traffiked road,but also other Tunisians that abandoned their car in the middle of the road, in order to run and tell a colleague  vet  to help a suffering cat, so the Tunisians love of cats, from what I’ve seen, is a relative thing.

A cat ornament from our hotel:

G.