Why a Booktrail?
2000s – Also a film starring Ewan Mcgregor, this is a story about doing the impossible and not taking no for an answer. Yemen is explored via from the end of a fishing rod.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
What you need to know before your trail
For Dr. Alfred Jones, life is quiet and unremarkable, Working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and married to Mary, things are perhaps as normal and uneventful as they can be.
But one day, he gets the chance and the desire to help a sheikh who not only wants to introduce salmon fishing into Yemen but to change the entire ecosystem of the country.
Is salmon fishing in the Yemen even possible? Science might say no. But there are those who are at least willing to try the impossible…
Told in a series of snippets, emails and conversations between British and Yemeni authorities, this is an international trail of the journey of salmon and people with one vision from opposite ends of the world.
Travel Guide
A sheik in Yemen believes his passion for the peaceful pastime of salmon fishing can enrich the lives of his people, or make him look like a visionary which ever your opinion is. When he calls on the assistance of Britain’s leading fisheries expert, the two cultures and countries clash and also work together on what appears at first to be nothing more than a mad cap idea.
“We conclude that conditions in the Yemen and its geographical location relatively remote from the North Atlantic make the project your client has proposed unfeasible”
The desert in Yemen is not ‘ fish friendly’ and the amount of money it will take to even attempt to introduce fish here is astounding. Once the British government get hold of the idea, their attempts at turning it into a ‘good will story’ and the battle of wills begins. Could this even be a way of diverting the British people’s attention away from events on the world stage?
“The thing to realise about the Wadi Aleyn in August was that it was hot. It was hot beyond the imagination of anyone who has never been in the desert. The sun in the Wadi Aleyn was hotter than a dozen English suns.”
From the Glens of Scotland where the Sheikh goes to explore the possibility of salmon fishing to the driest desert on earth, bringing such a unique thing to the people of the Yemen is a bizarre notion where money and power seems to outweigh anything such as common sense.
Then the terrorists get involved and intercepted messages from Al Qaeda declaring that the project is ‘unIslamic’ start to flow.
A unique and often comical view of a country and one sheik’s vision.
The film version of the story was filmed in Ouarzazate province in Morocco and on the Ardverikie Estate in Newtonmore in the highlands of Scotland.
The booktrail features some places in Yemen mentioned in the book.
Where Next?
