In the evening, our Soqotri hosts sacrifice a goat in our honour. Over curry and red wine, Cookson explains how he came to found his adventure-travel company in 2009 after what he downplays as “two kinda funky trips”. The first was the Scott Dunn Polar Challenge in 2005, a 360-mile race to the North Pole, which he won. Two years later, he kite-skied 1,100 miles to the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility – the very first time it had been reached on foot. Rumour has it that in the 1960s a Soviet expedition, using tracked vehicles and planes, had left behind a bust of Lenin; after 48 days, Cookson and his team found it, breaking one of the last records in polar exploration. After that, he says, he couldn’t go back to banking. “I knew I didn’t want to spend my life working under fluorescent tubes.”
Name TBA, Firhmin Forest, Socotra, YemenAlex Barlow
The next morning, we set off on a camel-assisted hike to the sharp, limestone peaks of the Hajhir mountains. Walking through a rocky, steep-sided wadi, I meet Salem Ghanem, one of our Soqotri guides, a soft-spoken linguist and teacher, who has spent seven years in Saudi Arabia studying languages. He points to trees: croton, frankincense, pomegranate and the tentacled, bottom-heavy cucumber tree that, even in stillness, looks like it’s wobbling. We talk about Soqotri – an ancient, unwritten language that predates Arabic – which he wants to formalise (the island’s five dialects complicate things). The conversation then turns to qat, the green shrub and legal high chewed throughout Yemen. He disapproves, and says it undermines young Yemenis’ potential and the country’s economy. “We used to grow the best coffee in the world,” he says. “Now that land is used to grow qat.”
Under wilting light, we ascend a steep, rocky trail and set up camp in the saddle of the mountains, a small clearing of grass among large granite boulders, directly opposite a sharp, napkin-sketch of a mountain peak: 45 degrees up, the same down. As we finish our meal, the sun disappears behind the toothy peaks, leaving us in a pale pink light, then darkness. With the effects of qat kicking in, our bedouin guides begin to sing and dance around the campfire. I ask Ghanem what the songs are about. Eyes deep in the fire, he replies with a faint smile: “Love.”