Where the hosts demand ransom

I'VE JUST been holidaying in deepest rural Switzerland which is one of the least likely places I can think of for a tourist to be caught up in a shoot-out between rebels and government.

A hooded man on getaway skis attempting to seize a bottle of wine punch from the buffet table? After the fondue and before the chocolates? I cannot see things getting much worse than that.

Of course there is always the reasonably moderate risk of breaking an arm or a leg on the piste. There is an almost infinitesimally small chance of being gnawed to death by the rare wolves who may inhabit some of the remoter valleys.

But beyond that the Swiss are remarkably skillful at assuaging the nerves of tourists. The rest of Europe may once have laughed at the silly people who resorted to living on mountain-sides but they should not be laughing now.

The Swiss, after all, live in a country which makes a mockery out of us all. These are the people who pirouette across crisp snowy fields on cross-country skis for the pleasure of tourists breakfasting in large bay windows beneath chandeliers.

These are also the people who keep cows in barns beneath their living rooms, who train armies to ride bicycles, whose answer to the cruise missile is the penknife. And I have not even mentioned cuckoo clocks.

Shop windows in Kandersteg, the village where I was staying, look as though they have not been disturbed since before the Second World War. Since, in fact, the days when lone travellers with straw in their shoes would have come walking through these valleys on their way from northern Europe to Italy.

But why worry about commerce when your bankers are world experts? Why dump the Alpine knick-knackery, the teddy-bears and the watches, when you already have one of the highest GNPs in the world? The locals may not be charming but they make exceptionally effective hosts.

The country sometimes touted as the Switzerland of Arabia - the Yemen - is a rather different case. It has one of the lowest GNPs in the world. It also occupies an extremely unpromising location for tourism, across from Somalia, at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula. In any world league table of the world's favourite countries, you might have given the Yemen as much chance of success as a snowflake in Saudi Arabia - or a camel in Kandersteg.

But in truth this unlikely little country is one of the most fascinating I have ever visited. To see medieval stone skyscrapers built on terraced green Arabian hill-tops, in fact, it is almost obligatory to visit the Yemen.

Except that you might get shot. Well, now you might. Which is one of the saddest things I have heard for a long time. The Yemen is certainly a country where your driver may ask you to mind the automatic gun while he is in the toilet, but I also remember it as the country where an Italian tourist, having spent several days as the guest of tribal chieftans, later admitted that he was unaware that (technically) he had been kidnapped. He had never received such gracious hospitality in his life, he said. In fact he had never had such an enjoyable holiday.

Perhaps the Yemen is really going to become a dangerous place for tourists. The few hotels that there are may soon be empty and the desert cities of the Queen of Sheba may moulder unvisited for a few more years. With the exception, possibly, of a few happy Alpine hoteliers, the whole world will be the poorer for it.