Socotra has drifted alone in the Indian Ocean so long that more than a third of its plants grow nowhere else on Earth, and its emblem — the dragon's blood tree — bleeds a deep red resin when its bark is cut. The island split from the Arabian landmass millions of years ago and now lies about 380 kilometres south of mainland Yemen, closer to the Horn of Africa than to Arabia. That long isolation let its plants evolve into shapes found on no other island: the dragon's blood tree holds its branches in a dense, upturned-umbrella crown, while the bottle-trunked desert rose swells grey and fat straight out of bare rock. Forests of these mushroom-shaped trees cover the Diksam plateau beneath the jagged granite Haghier mountains, which rise to roughly 1,500 metres. In 2008 UNESCO named the archipelago a World Heritage Site; nine in ten of its reptiles, too, live nowhere else.
The island is small enough that its landscapes change completely within a single day's drive. At dusk the dragon's blood trees stand as black umbrellas against an orange sky, and paths drop from the granite peaks past white sand dunes to empty coral beaches and jade-green tidal lagoons. There is almost no artificial light, so the night comes out thick with stars. Around 110,000 Socotri people live here, speaking a Semitic language that has never been written down and is passed on only by ear. Reaching them is easier than the war on Yemen's mainland suggests: the island stays calm and largely apart from the conflict, and small charter flights run in from Abu Dhabi through the October-to-April travel season. The trees themselves are under pressure, though — grazing goats strip out the seedlings before they can grow, and the fierce cyclones of recent years have toppled trees that had stood for centuries.