Where the hosts demand ransom
I'VE JUST been holidaying in deepest
rural Switzerland
which is one of the least likely places I can think of for a tourist to be
caught up in a shoot-out between rebels and government.
A hooded man on getaway skis attempting
to seize a bottle of wine punch from the buffet table? After the fondue and
before the chocolates? I cannot see things getting much worse than that.
Of course there is always the
reasonably moderate risk of breaking an arm or a leg on the piste. There is an
almost infinitesimally small chance of being gnawed to death by the rare wolves
who may inhabit some of the remoter valleys.
But beyond that the Swiss are
remarkably skillful at assuaging the nerves of tourists. The rest of Europe
may once have laughed at the silly people who resorted to living on
mountain-sides but they should not be laughing now.
The Swiss, after all, live in a country
which makes a mockery out of us all. These are the people who pirouette across
crisp snowy fields on cross-country skis for the pleasure of tourists
breakfasting in large bay windows beneath chandeliers.
These are also the people who keep cows
in barns beneath their living rooms, who train armies to ride bicycles, whose
answer to the cruise missile is the penknife. And I have not even mentioned
cuckoo clocks.
Shop windows in Kandersteg, the village
where I was staying, look as though they have not been disturbed since before
the Second World War. Since, in fact, the days when lone travellers with straw
in their shoes would have come walking through these valleys on their way from
northern Europe to
Italy .
But why worry about commerce when your
bankers are world experts? Why dump the Alpine knick-knackery, the teddy-bears
and the watches, when you already have one of the highest GNPs in the world?
The locals may not be charming but they make exceptionally effective hosts.
The country sometimes touted as the
Switzerland of Arabia - the Yemen -
is a rather different case. It has one of the lowest GNPs in the world. It also
occupies an extremely unpromising location for tourism, across from Somalia ,
at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula .
In any world league table of the world's favourite countries, you might have
given the Yemen as
much chance of success as a snowflake in Saudi
Arabia - or a camel in
Kandersteg.
But in truth this unlikely little
country is one of the most fascinating I have ever visited. To see medieval
stone skyscrapers built on terraced green Arabian hill-tops, in fact, it is
almost obligatory to visit the Yemen .
Except that you might get shot. Well,
now you might. Which is one of the saddest things I have heard for a long time.
The Yemen is
certainly a country where your driver may ask you to mind the automatic gun
while he is in the toilet, but I also remember it as the country where an
Italian tourist, having spent several days as the guest of tribal chieftans,
later admitted that he was unaware that (technically) he had been kidnapped. He
had never received such gracious hospitality in his life, he said. In fact he
had never had such an enjoyable holiday.
Perhaps the Yemen is
really going to become a dangerous place for tourists. The few hotels that
there are may soon be empty and the desert cities of the Queen of Sheba may
moulder unvisited for a few more years. With the exception, possibly, of a few
happy Alpine hoteliers, the whole world will be the poorer for it.
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