Kamaran
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Kamaran,
Yemen
Sunday, December 18, 2005
I recently got back from my final little bit of travelling. Accompanied this time by Ally (the German guy), Fatima (the French girl) and Zahara (the British girl, but really just an ex-pat from Dubai), we ventured by bus to Hodeida on the Red Sea coast en-route to our intended destination of Kamaran, an isolated island in the Red Sea.
You'll be glad to hear the 6-hour bus journey was less eventful than my previous encounter to Hadhramaut. That said, Fatima took the place of vomit-boy quite comfortably as she threw up all the way threw the twisty mountain roads out of Sana'a. Luckily, I wasn't sat next to her so it wasn't an ordeal this time (not for me at least). Once again we had the joyous accompaniment of a god-awful Arab pantomime movie - it was even the same annoying actor.
Anyway, once in Hodeida it was already late evening so we found a cheap hotel, dumped our bags and got some food and had a little walk around the town. The next morning we were up early to catch a taxi to Salif, an isolated Red Sea port about 100km from Hodeida. Once we arrived we negotiated with some locals to take us by boat to Kamaran. They kindly did so for a moderate price and the trip across the Red Sea was a wet and bumpy 15 minutes or so in a barely adequate dingy boat.
On Kamaran, we haggled a decent price for two rooms at a random and deserted youth centre as we did not fancy paying $40 each to stay in the one and only hotel on the island. After a brief rest we dumped our bags, donned our swimmies and headed for the beach filled with child-like excitement. The beach was quite beautiful, if not the desert-island paradise I'd naively been anticipating. Instead of soft white sands there was feet-crunching dead coral, and instead of leaning green palm trees there was.. well.. feet-crunching dead coral. But fear not, the beach was entirely our own with not another soul in sight, and sea was a gorgeous greeny-blue turquoise and was the perfect not-too-warm temperature for a swim. Apparently the Red Sea is swarming with sharks, but we weren't going to pass up this opportunity.
That's kind of all we did on our one day on Kamaran. The men at the youth centre made us food in the afternoon, evening and the following morning as there are no restaurants on this tourist-free island. If we'd have stayed longer I think there were parts of the island that would have been really cool to see - apparantly there are some pretty great coral reefs that you can go snorkling in. In our brief time there we unfortunately did not find this.
