[slideshow]Photo by Kai Erik-Jensen/TheGazelle;Photo by April Xiong/The Gazelle;Photo by April Xiong/The Gazelle;Photo by April Xiong/The Gazelle;Photo by April Xiong/The Gazelle;Photo by April Xiong/The Gazelle;Photo by April Xiong/The Gazelle[/slideshow]

Xiong planned her trip through a tour company called Socotra Ecotours and, alongside three others, spent ten days on the island.

“Everything was taken care of by the tour company,” she said, “Highly recommended.”

“You really felt like it was an island that time forgot,” she said, describing the alien landscape she thought of as the highlight of her trip.

Over a third of its fauna is endemic to the island, a byproduct of Socotra’s long geographical isolation and unique climate. Dragon blood tree forests and the giant succulent Dorstenia gigas are frequent sights for travelers.

Xiong’s interactions with the locals were as interesting as the foreign landscapes and plant life on Socotra.

“The driver was so funny … He proposed to me a lot of times,” Xiong said. Since many of the women on the island get married at around 15, Xiong was constantly teased for being unwed at the age of twenty-one.

“Socotran people, I think, are the nicest people I’ve ever met in the world … they were so nice and welcoming,” she added.

For most of the trip, Xiong was without Internet, electricity or a proper place shower.

“I really felt re-energized by going there and getting away from the big city … It was really amazing to be in a place where the way of life is so simple,” she said.

The second NYUAD student to spend his spring break in Socotra was Jensen, who also hired a tour company to assist him with his stay. But after a four-day hike with a local guide, Jensen reached a protected dragon blood tree forest with a small nearby village of about a hundred people and said goodbye to his guide.

Near a Socatran wadi, Jensen befriended locals he met.

“We listened to Arabic music … they played some Socotran poetry … it’s not a written language; it’s purely an oral tradition … poetry is a really big deal actually. They have poetry festivals there,” Jensen said.

“As we were walking down [the wadi], one of the kids said, ‘Life here is normal, we don’t have anything modern.’ It was really striking to me that he called their life normal. Of course, English is his second language, but it seemed like a very deliberate word choice,” Jensen said.

On the far-northeast side of the island, an area called Qalansiyah, alongside a Portuguese-speaking tourist, Jensen met the sheikh of a Yemeni tribe, who is the husband of the daughter of the current Yemeni President, and the son of the Commander of the Socotran Army. With his new friends, Jensen saw dolphins, swam in an infinity pool-like lake nestled at the top of a mountain, snorkeled in a shipwreck that once carried gold en route from India to England and dined at the Commander’s house.

“Definitely the trip took a turn for the unexpected once I met the sheikh, and it became some kind of wild adventure among bros … it was a bunch of bros hanging out on spring break with a little bit of like, really odd … things mixed in,” Jensen said.

“One of the real highlights was, of course, the hike, just because it was an exercise in self-reliance, and it was a physical challenge too,” Jensen said.