Paul Torday: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

‘Another three hours.’

‘I might have a kip before we get in. You know, Peter, I’ve been having some private tuition in fly-fishing for the last week or two. I want the photos to look right.’

‘I’m sure they will, boss,’ I said loyally. ‘You pick up that sort of thing really fast.’

‘Yes, I do, luckily. But I tell you what, I think fishing might be quite fun. I really do. I wouldn’t mind trying it again when I have more leisure. I mean, I suppose I’ll only have time…How long have we got at Wadi Aleyn?’

‘Thirty, forty minutes, then back to Sana’a and on to Muscat for your speech to the Gulf Coordinating Council.’

‘Yes, I’ll only have time to catch one salmon, perhaps two at the most. But I’d like to have another go, on another occasion, when we get back to the UK. Do you think you could arrange it?’

‘I know exactly the place where you could catch loads of fish, boss,’ I said, thinking of McSalmon Aqua Farms.

‘Good,’ he said, stifling a yawn. ‘Let’s make a plan. And now I think I’ll go next door and have a rest before we land.’

When we landed at Sana’a it was early evening and dark. But the heat radiating from the tarmac hit us in the face as soon as we stepped out of the door of the plane, and with the heat came strange scents which could not be drowned out by the normal airport smells of aviation spirit and diesel. They were unsettling scents, hinting of a strange and unfamiliar world somewhere beyond the city lights. Then we were tripping down the steps and shaking hands and climbing into the air-conditioned limo.

The evening in Sana’a was long, polite and tedious. I don’t think we expected to achieve anything, and I don’t think we did, except that by dining with our host we implicitly received his sanction for our ‘private’ visit to the Wadi Aleyn. He seemed bemused by the whole thing and at one point over dinner asked me, in a low voice that the boss could not have overheard, ‘Why is your prime minister interested in this salmon project? Everyone here thinks it is quite mad.’

‘It has captured his imagination, President,’ I replied.

‘Ah,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and looking baffled.

I could see he had decided not to ask me any more questions on the subject, as I was clearly not going to tell him anything of use. The conversation became general again, and we spent the rest of the evening discussing how to put the Kazakhstan peace process back on the rails.

The next day we got up at dawn and had an early breakfast at the embassy. I can still feel the sense of almost childish optimism with which the boss and I boarded the helicopter. It was such fun to be going off to fish for our country! That was how we both felt. The boss was all smiles, shaking hands with the journalists, who were following on in a second Chinook, shaking hands with the ambassador, who had come to see us off, shaking hands with the pilot and co-pilot. He only just remembered in time not to shake my hand as well. Then we were in the helicopter, and the ground was slipping away sideways below us.

As we took off, the smallest knot of tension began to form itself in the base of my stomach. I’m used to helicopters, so that wasn’t it. I remembered, in a brief flash of something I imagined was deja vu, a dream I had once had about the boss and me standing in a wadi. The dry heat was running like flames across our skin. He had pointed upstream and said something. I couldn’t remember what he had said to me or whether I had really ever had such a dream. It was probably jet lag. I shook my head and concentrated on the immediate situation.

We sat there talking, laughing and joking with the security people in the back, and pointing out the grey and white tower houses and mosques of Sana’a, as they receded into the distance. Then we were approaching the mountains, and everyone fell silent as we approached the enormous walls of rock. We flew over mountain ridges, above great canyons a thousand feet deep, through cloud and mist that caught upon the peaks. The sky was grey, and cloud was boiling up in the south. It was pretty boring scenery, but the weather looked right.

‘Look at all those clouds,’ I said to the boss. ‘The water in the wadis will be rising with all this rain coming in.’

The water in the wadis will be rising-hadn’t those words been in my dream?

I was right. When we looked below us, we could see the occasional thread of white where water was running through the wadis; and where the flat gravel plains met the foothills of the mountains, pools of lying water had formed here and there.

I was so excited. This was so different to a normal trip. There were no men in grey suits waiting at the end of it, no tough negotiations, no speeches to be made. Instead of men in suits, there would be the sheikh and those great-looking guys who had made a guard of honour for me when I visited Glen Tulloch. It would just be an hour or two of fun, pure and simple. Jay would press a button to open the sluice gates and let the salmon run down the channels that lead into the wadi. Then he would go and stand in the river with his fishing rod and cast away for the benefit of the photographers. Fred had promised me the boss would catch a fish, and that would be it. There would be a short speech, followed by pictures of Jay standing in the river in his waders, with his fishing rod in one hand and a salmon in the other. I could picture how it would look on the front pages the next day. Mission accomplished. A great trip, a day in the desert, and well on the way to swinging several million voters across to our side.

Then we started to lose height, and the helicopter dropped down between the rock walls of the wadi towards a flat patch of ground and what looked like a giant construction site.

As the blades stopped turning we ducked out of the helicopter and walked through the swirling dust to a wooden platform. I could make out the sheikh, Fred Jones and a group of men in hard hats, presumably the site engineers. Beyond them stood a couple of dozen or so of the sheikh’s people in white robes and emerald-green turbans, some armed with rifles, others empty-handed.

Behind the platform, curving out from the side of the mountain, were the walls of three huge concrete basins: the holding tanks. For a moment I was truly awestruck by the enormity of this construction project. Listening to Fred’s presentations back in Downing Street I had thought, it’s like building another primary school or another supermarket. I simply hadn’t grasped what an enormous undertaking it was. This was more like the Aswan Dam, or the Pyramids. I hoped the photographers would capture the drama of the site.

In the centre of each basin wall was a pair of iron doors connected by a concrete channel to the wadi bed. Looking across to the wadi, I saw a wide, shallow river running down it. The sun had emerged for a moment from behind white towers of cloud and the sunlight glistened on many streams winding around islands of gravel or cascading over boulders. The fronds of green palms waved in a rising wind on the far bank. Behind us mountains rose, familiar as something once seen in a dream, of a staggering savagery and beauty, into an overcast sky.

I said to the boss, ‘Look at that! The river looks perfect. This is going to work!’

The boss looked at me in surprise. Of course it was going to work, the look said; you wouldn’t have dragged me 6000 miles for something that didn’t work, would you, Peter? Not if you wanted to stay in the job you like so much for another day. Before I could explain, we were at the platform, shaking hands again, smiling, joking, talking. Behind us I heard the second Chinook, with the press on board, coming in to land.