Yemen Observer

Transcription

Islands have always stirred up the fantasies of fiction, whether it is literature, cinema, TV series or even video games. Real worlds within the world, they fascinate with their isolation, their history, their mystery. The laws that regulate continents, whether they are moral or physical, seem to have any effects there. But as you will see, for islands as for the rest, truth is stranger than fiction. The first island I am going to talk about may not be the strangest in the world, but it is probably the most dangerous. Located off the coast of Sao Paulo, the island of Queimada Grande is uninhabited, and its access is strictly reserved to scientists. If I tell you it is called Snake Island, you may guess why. Indeed Queimada Grande has the most dense snake population of the planet. They are on the floor, in the trees, and even in the old lighthouse, abandoned for a long time. If they were grass snakes, it would be bearable, but the snakes of the island all belong to a deadly species : the island trigonocephalus. These reptiles only live on Queimada Grande, and their venom, which is one of the most powerful in the world, literally makes the flesh melting around the bite. For the herpetologists, the island is a unique curiosity. For the rest of humanity, this is a nightmare. At the end of the 19th century, the Mitsubishi group buys a small island to the south of Japan. Named Hashima, it is situated on a coal deposit that the group intends to exploit. To welcome the miners, a real city develops on the island, with apartments, schools and shops, all surrounded by a great stone wall which protects them from storms. During World War II, the Hashima's mine products 400 000 tons of coal a year. Among the workers, there are at least 800 slaves who come from Korea, under Japanese domination at this time. More than a hundred would work themselves to death. In the 1950s, the island population increased so much that it reached almost 5300 inhabitants for a surface area of 6 hectares and a half, that is to say a density of 216.000 inhabitants/sq.mile. At the time, it was the highest population density in the world. The history of Hashima turns when oil becomes the main Japanese energy source. The mine's activity quickly decreases, and the last inhabitants are evacuated in 1974. So the island ends up abandoned, given over to the onslaughts of the typhoons, and its buildings are gradually invaded by the vegetation. Nowadays, 40 years later, Hashima is in the same condition as Mitsubishi left it : a ghost town in the middle of the sea. In the 1950s, someone called Julian Santana Barrera decides to leave his wife and his children to live as an hermit on the island of Xochimilco, in Mexico. Once there, he would have found a young girl drowned in a canal. To honour the spirit of the little girl, Don Julian starts collecting the abandoned dolls which drift downstream, and he hangs them on the trees. Obsessed by this task, he accumulates hundreds of dolls he finds in the rubbish tips, or he gets back from the local residents. The island vegetation ends up being covered with small mutilated bodies. Even the shed of Don Julian is filled with dismembered dolls, ruined by the passing of time and the elements. During the 1990s, the media deal woth the story, and the island of the dolls becomes a kind of macabre attraction. Some excursions are organized so that the tourists can discover this surrealist landscape, where the glassy-eyed dolls seem to stare at them from all sides. ON 17 avril 2001, Don Juan was found drowned aged of 80 years old. He had spent the majority of his life alone on the island, in the heart of his ridiculous and spectacular piece of work. The dolls keep slowly going mouldy in the sun of Mexico, but according to the local superstitions, we might be able to see them moving during the night... Standing like a gigantic canine in the middle of the Tasman Sea, Ball's Pyramid might make The Black Island of Tintin as welcoming. This island is a vast structure of lave which solidified inside a volcano. This is what is called a neck. Once the volcanic cone is eroded only remains a rocky crag. Ball's Pyramid, 1.844 ft high, is the highest volcanic spine in the world. Seeing the hostile and deserted aspect of the pyramide, one may believe it is deprived of all life. But in 2001, a team of scientists made an incredible discovery : around 328 ft-high, under an isolated shrub, they found a population of 24 insects supposed to be extincted since 1930 : the dryococelus australis, or tree lobsters. These gigantic insects can be 5.9 inches-long, and at the time of the discovery they were the rarest insects in the world. Since then, some specimens have been taken off to renew the species. If you wonder how a group of extremely rare insects ended up on a lost rock between Australia and New-Zealand, the answer is simple : nobody knows. In the Venetian Lagoon, there is a small island with a tragic past where you won't see any tourists. Throughout History, Poveglia has been used several times as a lazaretto, also called quarantine area. Firstly during the 14th century, when the Black Death annihilated Europe. Every sick person from Venice was exiled on the island, where they would soon end up burnt on huge stakes, alongside with thousands of other victims. The plague struck again during the 17th and the 19th centuries. Overall, it is believed that more than 160.000 people died on this barely 9 hectares-big island. Later, using its reputation of cursed place, Napoleon will use it to store weapons and gunpowder. But the story does not end there. In 1922, a mental institution was opened on Poveglia. The local legends say that a doctor engaged in strange experiments on the patients, and that he threw himself from the hospital's bell tower. The asylum finally closed in 1968, and the island was abandoned shortly afterwards. Needless to say the horrific past of Poveglia provides a solid renown to this haunted place. Fishermen keep away from it, and some say they occasionally hear the bell tower ringing, while there haven't been any bells for ages. The thrill seekers venture into it to explore the ruins of the hospital, in which we can still see some medical facilities frozen in time. If you are around Venice and you want to make a little hair-raising getaway between two gondola rides, you still have to be discreet : visitors are now strictly forbidden on Poveglia. Socotra is legendary island which seems to come straight from a science-fiction novel. Situated off the coast of Yemen, the island broke up from the African continent 6 million years ago, and this geographical isolation gave birth to a phenomenal biodiversity : Socotra is home to more than 800 rare plant species, one third of them being endemic, which means they don't exist anywhere else on the planet. Among the strangest specimens, there is the cucumber tree, the fig tree of Socotra which looks like a flowered elephant foot, and also the Socotra dragon tree, whose red resin was used as dye and medicinal balm in Antiquity. Not to be outdone, the fauna counts several dozens of birds, reptiles and insects species unique in the world. If you have ever dreamed of visiting an extraterrestrial landscape, Socotra is probably the closest place. Thank you for watching this video. If you have enjoyed these couple touristic suggestions, don't hesitate over subscribing to the channel and following Axolot on social networks. See you soon !