It’s close to boarding time at Abu Dhabi airport, and the queue snaking from the gate comprises a remarkably colorful crowd. There are men in spotless white thobes and women veiled in silky hijabs, of course, but they’re joined by a motlier bunch: selfie-clicking 20-somethings yapping in Russian, Italian, and Afrikaans; Chinese families dripping in designer gear. I spot khaki-clad European retirees clutching giant camera lenses, and a posh British lady who seems freshly plucked from her Notting Hill townhouse. It’s not the crowd I had expected to find on a flight to Yemen.
But Socotra isn’t the Yemen you see on the news. Closer to Somalia than Sana’a, this remote outpost in the Arabian Sea has largely escaped the civil war that’s torn through the mainland. Steeped in isolation for centuries, its 60,000 residents speak a language older than Arabic and talk about their island as if it were a different country altogether. As a biodiversity hotspot with one of the world’s densest concentrations of endemic plants and wildlife, Socotra was once the preserve of intrepid archaeologists and die-hard birders. Now, its alien landscapes and Jurassic-era flora have lured a new crowd: drone-flying, hashtag-happy Instagrammers, eager to collect proof of their presence in paradise.
I don’t see any of them for days, though. Despite the increased interest, notoriously touch-and-go flight connections leave from Abu Dhabi (a result of the UAE’s influence on the island) just twice a week, logistically capping tourist numbers at around 4,000 per year. Lodging is another bottleneck. Hadibo, the island’s dusty capital, has just two hotels that could generously be described as “adequate.” Most travellers make do with basic campsites.
But I’m not one of them. My stay—a roving luxury camp run by Socotra Island Expeditions—feels like the Ritz by comparison (and commands prices to match). Its spacious bell tents come outfitted with cotton sheets, private bathrooms, and a Bedouin-style majlis lounge layered with hand-woven rugs and Persian cushions. Aided by camels, a battered pickup, and a heavy dose of logistical gymnastics, the camp moves across some of the island’s wildest corners.
At the helm is Sean Nelson, the tour outfitter’s founder and a former British Marine Commando, who has spent months scouring Socotra for the best trails and wadi pools. He first landed here by dhow from his adopted home in Oman, bunking down on a deck packed with goats and Captain Pugwash-style barrels. “Arriving by boat was a wonderful thing,” he tells me as we rattle past valleys carpeted with date palms en route to our first campsite. “The island loomed out of the haze like a mirage—it was impossibly evocative and romantic.”
His words resonate the next morning, when I unzip my tent to the white-noise roar of waves pummeling an empty beach along the island’s eastern tip. In the distance, great white dunes tumble down limestone cliffs, glowing amber in the morning light. I walk barefoot to the glassy sea, crossing only the tracks of goats and fist-sized hermit crabs hauling their borrowed homes. Moments later, the camp manager arrives with a French press of Yemeni coffee and a breakfast of hot flatbreads baked in the village up the hill.
With the beach camp as my base, I spend the next few days exploring the coast. My guide, Salem Ahmed, a Socotri linguist and natural-born storyteller, leads me on hikes to cathedralic caves and mountain trails punctuated by alienesque bottle trees and gnarled frankincense trunks oozing fragrant resin that, he says, was once worth more than gold. We swim in jade-colored wadi pools and snorkel over coral gardens teeming with puffers and parrotfish. From a rocky outcrop near my tent, I watch barefoot boys cast lines into the surf, reeling in silvery trevally to sell to the camp cooks for a handful of rials.
Around a roaring fire that night, Nelson explains how he modeled his camp’s operations after the ones he has pioneered in Oman since the early aughts: immersive, low-footprint luxury that works with—and not around—the island and its people. “We try to really weave ourselves into the fabric of the place,” he says, summing up the pickup drivers, camel herders, fishermen and musicians that help him shape his adventures. “On any given trip, we probably employ some forty people from the surrounding communities.” His fluent Arabic has also helped him build rare trust with village elders and tribal sheikhs, who, in turn, hand him the keys to corners of the island few others have access to.
One such relationship pays off a few days later, when we head inland to the Dixam Plateau, where thousands of ancient dragon’s blood trees stretch across the jagged highlands. The road up is a bone-rattling crawl through dust and rubble, choked with groaning 4x4s. Occasionally, tourists armed with mobile tripods and flouncy dresses spill out to pose for pictures under the trees’ UFO-shaped crowns. A fixer barks instructions in Chinese. The accompanying driver looks bored. We don’t stop.
Instead, we bounce along a dry wadi channel, well past the campsites used by most visitors, where loud music bellows from a speaker. We cover the last stretch on foot, and end up in a clearing I’d have never found without someone like Nelson. His friend Suleiman Almaroh, the area’s caretaker, meets us at the trailhead wearing flip-flops and a skinny walking stick. He was born in a cave nearby, he tells me, and still grazes his goats between the trees.
While Nelson’s crew reassembles the camp on a rocky escarpment, Almaroh guides me around the forest of dragon’s blood trees. At one gnarled specimen—“Probably older than my grandfather’s grandfather,” he says—he whips out a dull blade and demonstrates how to harvest its crimson resin, once prized across the ancient world for everything from medicine to makeup to warding off malicious djinns.
But over his 70-or-so years on the plateau, Almaroh has seen the landscape change: rainfall has dwindled, and increasingly frequent cyclones have uprooted whole swathes of trees. Tourist numbers have grown, but at a cost. “My animals eat the rubbish they leave behind,” he says. “And some [tourists] climb the trees, even though we ask them not to.” He now tends a nursery of dragon’s blood saplings in his backyard, carefully fencing them from the roaming goats that have already gnawed their way through much of the island’s flora. “I won’t live to see them grow tall,” he says. “But my grandfather told me: love these trees more than your children. They give us life.”
We find a different kind of wonder in the days that follow. Almaroh guides us into the Hajhir Mountains, pausing often to let us cool off in wadi pools and snack on mouth-puckering tamarind plucked straight from the trees. We overnight in a simpler fly camp higher still, where the dragon’s blood trees grow fewer but seem older, more Biblical. Along the way, Ahmed shares news of a project he’s working on with Nelson: an auditory archive of the Soqotri language, which, without a written alphabet and under growing Arabic influence on the island, is at the risk of vanishing within a generation.
A week later, I’m back at Hadibo’s tiny airport, watching the same oddball crowd form again. Some edit TikToks, others pose for their last shots on Socotran soil, ready to fire off their memories into the algorithm to undoubtedly summon more visitors—and with it, development—in their wake.
I just hope they’ll listen. To Nelson, building the blueprint for a more mindful kind of high-end tourism; to Ahmed, preserving his language before it vanishes. And to Almaroh, who doesn’t speak a lick of English, but will make sure you understand the fragile beauty that’s at stake.