Piracy in (my) Paradise

A little Secret
Ok, time for me to let you in on a little secret. There is a place that inspired this whole idea, somewhere that I found a year or so ago while looking on a map. It was in my mind from day one to put it into the top three of one of the regions that I talked about in my last post. Where is it? Well, I am going to tell you. It is an island lying about half way between the coast of Somalia and Yemen, at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden. The island is called Socotra. More on this later in the post, first I will present what I found out earlier today..............

After a morning of looking into where pirates may be found, I became fascinated. I certainly am not saying that I like pirates, but I have developed an interest in them. It seems there are two types of pirates in the modern world: those that I will call "petty pirates" and those that I will call "professional pirates". Petty pirates, seem to be into sneaking on board a vessel and stealing whatever they can and then leaving. My understanding is that they are probably very poor and will take whatever they can get, and are not usually dangerous unless they feel threatened. The professional pirates are different. They are highly organized, and heavily armed groups. Their targets are usually large vessels such as cargo ships. They are typically armed with, and use automatic weapons and RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) to get what they want. Not only do they want the cargo, and the ship - but they often capture the ships crew and demand large ransoms for their release. Professional pirate groups seem to be made up of various types of people with one thing in common - making money. And making money they do, they are often wealthy. Rather than go on, I will put some links to interesting websites that I found had a lot of information and also some related videos, at the bottom of this post.


Socotra and the Gulf of Aden
While Socotra has captured my imagination for over a year, the waters surrounding it as you can see here http://www.icc-ccs.org/index.php?option=com_fabrik&view=visualization&controller=visualization.googlemap&Itemid=219 are home to the majority fo the worlds growing number of acts of piracy. As you can see from the latest piracy reports, which shows details of global incidents from the last 10 days; http://www.icc-ccs.org/index.php?option=com_fabrik&view=table&tableid=70&calculations=0&Itemid=82 this area is dangerous. Thankfully it seems that most pirates are not interested in small boats, and as it is possible to fly to the island, I hope to still include it on my list. If so, I will check into the safety aspects in more detail. Who knows, I may find three more appealing places when I look more closely at this region. I doubt it though!


Here are the links mentioned above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy for general information about pirates, and the history of piracy
http://modernpirates.wordpress.com/ for information on modern day pirates - particularly interesting is the "the pirates" section
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7623329.stm all about the piracy "industry"
http://goafrica.about.com/od/africanews/a/pirates.htm all about somali piracy with some interesting links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj5f6ApIjUE Somalia pirate interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM0jKpwRAXg a report on piracy, which tells the difference between "piracy" and "armed robbery at sea" among other things. Interesting viewing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji3RiuFRZEA Pirates attack French warship by mistake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4vgzZf8rbM images of modern piracy, I don't like the glorification of piracy, but the images are interesting.

The above links are most directly related to piracy around Somalia and the Gulf of Aden. Another particularly dangerous area is the Malacca Strait. The narrow stretch of water separating Malaysia and the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. Here is an interesting article on the Malacca Strait pirates: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/malacca-strait-pirates/pirates-text
and some great photos: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/malacca-strait-pirates/stanmeyer-photography

Pirates can also be found in central and south America: http://travelojos.com/?p=951 but it seems much less common today than in the areas I have already mentioned