I stumbled upon these pictures a while ago, and thought I should share them. There’s some great inspiration here for writing stories, running campaigns, designing games, etc.
The site describes it pretty well, but I’ll give a quick summary for the tl;dr crowd. The Isle of Socotra is in the Indian Ocean, between Yemen and Somalia (though controlled by the former). It’s home to some of the strangest, loveliest, and most alien flora on Earth. The plants here are unique to the island.
Enjoy!
I wasn’t expecting much, but it turns out the plants there are actually amazingly cool.
It looks like some of this stuff belongs underwater, and that city is amazing.
That’s seriously awesome.
Looks pretty otherworldly…very cool. :3
Wow, that’s some pretty impressive stuff there. Makes me wanna take a trip there and check it out. Makes me wonder if some of that stuff was underwater at some point in time.
I was amazed (and delighted) that such life exists on Earth. The city is actually not on the island (it’d be cool if it were); it’s on the mainland of Yemen. I actually have a friend who taught English in Yemen for about a year, and he described it as being nearly medieval in its mindset. While this does result in scenic villages (which I’m sure don’t smell very good), it causes some difficult social situations.
There’s at least some presence of Islamic radicalism in Yemen, as seen in the Cole bombing back in 2000. Nothing bad happened to my friend (hospitality is a VERY big part of Arab culture), but Yemen’s still not the safest place in the world.
Socotra’s probably remote enough that nobody causes trouble there, though it is close to the pirate-infested Somali coast. Fortunately, the pirates don’t seem to care too much about it. Maybe it’s out of their range.
ooo. Nifty.
Never heard of the place, but yeah, that IS some interesting flora! The world is full of wonders, all we have to do is look beyond our routine lives to find them. 
Thanks Destron.
Lots of cool things on that island. That’s some of the wonders of geographic isolation. Islands are good things.
I didn’t have to, somebody posted a link to it.