We left Salalah on Thursday 10th February at 6pm and sailed to Aden in company with an Austrian yacht called Thetis. The wind was from the southwest hence on the nose for the first day then it moved round to NE but became very light.

We saw no evidence of pirates thank goodness. A military helicopter flew over us and a Yemeni naval vessel, which we think was after cigarettes, visited us. We saw lots of fishing boats but none of them approached us. Our only encounter was during the night before we arrived in Aden, when Thetis became ensnared in some fishing nets but they managed to get free after about an hour.

On the wildlife front we saw dolphins and sailed past a pod of about a dozen small whales resting on the surface.

We arrived in Aden port five days later on Tuesday afternoon and checked in. We do not need a visa as long as we remain in the port area; we have a shore pass and immigration keep our passports. There is no requirement for yachts to use an agent but we engaged the services of Omar who is acting as our agent and tour guide. He has taken us in his car to the town of Aden. Part of the town is built in the crater of an extinct volcano and is called quite logically Crater. There is a bustling fruit and vegetable market here and lots of small local restaurants offering traditional cuisine at reasonable prices.

The next day Omar took us to the very ramshackle nearby town of Sheik Othman also known as Arab town. This was very interesting and had another huge market with a mosque on top of it. Camels were used to pull carts and we watched them being fed, the owner took a handful of hay and shoved it plus his hand right into the camel's mouth. I thought they had a reputation for being bad tempered beasts but these were very well behaved, a lot better than many horses I've seen. Some had patterns drawn on them to decorate them. Camels were used in the past to turn the press that we watched makingdate oil but they have now been superseded by a motor. We were the only tourists which isn't surprising as the night before the town had been the scene of a riot outside the police station in which 3 people were shot and killed by the police and a dozen wounded. There was debris all over the road and a large military presence.

After this Omar took us to the 900-year-old Al Aidrous mosque. It is the Yemeni version of Lourdes. The original Imam used to cook food for the poor and his tomb and those of his family are inside the mosque. People believe that if they go there and like him cook food for the poor they will be cured of ailments and other troubles. The tombs are wooden with a little door at the front through which you can look inside. It was dark and I didn't like using flash photography to see if there was a skeleton but the inside smelled very nice of incense.

The Tawilla tanks are about a 15-minute drive from the port. They are a series of very old huge water tanks and drainage canals carved out of the rocky mountainside, which used to supply water to the town. They were nearly empty when we visited but fill up after heavy rain.

Unfortunately this is not the best time to be a tourist in Yemen. We had planned to visit the beautifully spectacular capital city of Sana'a but were advised by Omar and the tourist board not to go because of the political unrest that is brewing. The people don't like their government and want a change. They have seen the recent events in Egypt and it has stirred them up. There are gatherings here in Aden and the riots a couple of nights ago in Sheik Othman.