FEATURE-Yemen hopes to shed wild image, lure tourists
06 Jun 2007 18:04:49 GMT Source: Reuters
By Lin Noueihed SANAA, June 6 (Reuters) - Gun-wielding tribesmen. Al Qaeda attacks. Kidnappings of Westerners. Yemen has long conjured up images of wild badlands, fit only for the intrepid traveller. But as its oil dries up, this ancient land on the Arabian Peninsula hopes a makeover will put it on the tourist trail. "Yemen was harmed by the kidnappings and terrorist attacks and this gives us a bigger challenge, but we want to change people's view," said Tourism Minister Nabil Hassan al-Faqih. "Incidents happen repeatedly all over the world, more than they do in Yemen, but ... people focus on these issues and overlook the hospitality of the Yemeni people." Yemenis joke their country is so hospitable that hostages complain only of being forced to drink too much tea. One -- apocryphal -- tale runs that a German tourist kidnapped in Yemen made friends with the captors and later returned to visit them. Italian hotel manager Mirella Furlanello came to Yemen 15 years ago as a tourist and came back to run Burj al-Salam, a 45-room hotel in one of Sanaa's unique mud brick tower houses, which opened in October. "This is one of the last places in the world where everything is genuine," she said. "This is what is special. Nothing is made up for tourists. This is real life." Home to Biblical-era cities, mountains, deserts and Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, Yemen has no shortage of attractions. The fabled Queen of Sheba is thought to have ruled over what is now Yemen, a land grown rich on the trade in incense. Her throne is widely believed to have been at Ma'rib where the six-columned remains of a 3,000 year-old temple lie. In 1986, the United Nations culture organisation, UNESCO, declared the entire old city of Sanaa a World Heritage site, prompting the preservation of the capital's tower houses and labyrinthine souqs. Inhabited for more than 2,500 years, Old Sanaa is a living city, where women swathed in black carry mysterious bundles from the market, children play with spinning tops in the alleys and families live in tower houses six or seven floors high. To the east, the 16th century city of Shibam, dubbed the Manhattan of the Desert, boasts the world's oldest skyscrapers. "I came because I had read about Yemen and it is a very interesting country," said Cesar Franzi, an Italian lawyer. "I don't think it is dangerous. I think you just have to be a little intelligent." EXCLUSIVE ACCESS Snatched mainly by tribesmen to pressure the state into building rural schools or roads, the scores of foreigners kidnapped over the decades have almost all been freed unharmed. But it is the ordeal, not the release, that makes headlines and militant attacks on the USS Cole in 2000 and a French tanker in 2002 helped cement Yemen's reputation as a no-go area. Little wonder that tourism accounts for only 1.5-2 percent of Yemen's GDP, though tourist numbers rose 15 percent to 382,000 in 2006. The impoverished country envisages that figure exceeding 400,000 in 2007 and hitting a million by 2010. "We think tourism can play a big role in the economy in the future," said Faqih. "We hope to grow tourism to reach 6.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2010." Foreigners need to get special Interior Ministry permits to travel outside Sanaa, a measure authorities say is meant to protect them. "I was interested in seeing the famous Sanaa houses and it really is something," said Henri Boucharalat, a French tourist. "I feel safe in Sanaa. Maybe outside Sanaa it is different but people are very kind." While Sanaa and the port of Aden boast five-star hotels, much of Yemen is in dire need of infrastructure. Restaurants are lacking, bars virtually non-existent and the tarmac runs out as soon as you drive off the main motorways or out of big cities. Yemen hopes to increase its hotel rooms to 30,000 by 2020 from 21,500 now, and many projects on show at an investment fair in April were tourism-related. The Tourism Ministry, set up only in 2006, is trying to polish Yemen's image with posters, leaflets and TV commercials targeting Arabs, who comprised 73 percent of visitors over the last three years, and Europeans. It hopes to lure them with desirable adventures, focusing for the first time on scuba diving in the Red Sea, hiking in 3,500-metre mountains and trekking in the desert.
