There are no salmon in the Yemen, tourist board advises
The Yemen Tourist Board has issued a press statement warning would-be Western travelers against planning salmon fishing holidays in the arid desert nation.
The reason: despite the whimsical notion offered in the movie “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, there are no salmon in the Western Arab nation’s warm rivers.
Much as Robert Redford’s 1992 fly fishing classic “A River Runs Through It” sparked tourist hordes to flock to Montana’s Big Blackfoot River in pursuit of trout, Yemen tourist officials say they have been “inundated” with requests from Western travelers to visit the country and cast for its migrating cold-water salmon.
“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” directed by Lasse Hallstrom, presents a fanciful scenario in which a wealthy Arab sheikh (Amr Waked) teams with an uptight British fisheries biologist (McGregor) on an unlikely project to bring cold-water Atlantic salmon to a manufactured habitat in the Arabian desert. But it’s all a fiction dreamed up by novelist Paul Torday and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”).
To further complicate matters, Yemen is a hotbed for terrorist activities, and Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office last month issued a red warning for Yemen advising visitors to “avoid all travel to the whole country.”
- Dennis King
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