MOTORING WITH MOHAMMED: Journeys to Yemen and...

MOTORING WITH MOHAMMED: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea by Eric Hansen (Vintage: $10.). In 1978, the author and four acquaintances found themselves shipwrecked on the remote desert island of Uqban in the Red Sea. Before they were rescued by a crew of Ethiopian goat smugglers, Hansen buried seven years of journals on the island, to protect them from thieves. A decade later, he became obsessed with recovering those journals and flew to Yemen to find them, which proved far more complicated than he had anticipated. Uqban now lay within a restricted military zone, and Yemeni officials were not eager to have a foreigner with an improbable story about lost diaries poking around there. As the bureaucratic delays multiplied, Hansen began exploring the hot, bleak mountains of Yemen. His often sardonic account of learning to respect and enjoy an alien way of life makes for highly entertaining reading--in an air-conditioned room.