"'Aden" a Aden Municipality Travel Page by maykal

Aden intrigued me. Not the most beautiful place on earth, Aden is dramatically situated around a volcano on a craggy peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea. For centuries it was a British port, the third biggest duty-free port in the world...then it became the capital of the PDRY. After the reunification, Aden was heavily damaged by the civil war, then became something of a backwater, unable to compete with highland Sana'a.

Aden has all the elements for an exotic holiday...great beaches, hot weather, colonial buildings, an eclectic mix of Indian, Yemeni and British cultures, volcanic scenery, historical attractions...but somehow, it doesn't quite pull it off. The result is something of a seedy run-down place where the soul of the city has got up and gone elsewhere.

Unloved places are for me an attraction...I stayed five days in Aden, exploring all over the three main areas of Crater, Steamer Point (At-Tawahi) and Ma'alla, always finding something to keep me occupied, whether it was climbing behind an ancient water tank, chatting to an eccentric orange-haired man selling colonial black-and-white postcards, cavorting in the rough sea next to a Russian shipwreck, arguing over the price of qat with Somali sailors in the souq, or just sipping tea down by the waterfront. However, one thing to be said for Aden is that it is hot, and that is not in a good sense.

Since the new VT format came along, I've had to reshuffle a lot of my pages around while at the same time building new ones...my yemeni pages have been neglected somewhat, and badly need updating...the travelogues below used to be on my Yemen page, and have now been juggled around, so don't blame me if they are now out of order...I'll get round to sorting it out someday ;@P