The bad part about vacationing on Socotra, a four-island archipelago off the coast of the Horn of Africa: pirates. The good part about vacationing on Socotra: now that it has an airport, the island's freaky deaky biodiversity is accessible to tourists year-round.
And freaky deaky that biodiversity is. The last time the island was attached to any mainland we didn't even have real continents. It separated from the super-continent of Gondwana tens of millions of years ago and has been ecologically isolated ever since, though it's been continuously inhabited since ancient times.
Today there are over 700 endangered plants and animals on the island, a full 1/3 of them found nowhere else in the world. The island is a UNESCO recognized world heritage site. You can check out their Conservation Programme for more background.]]>