I celebrated my 34th birthday in a country that doesn't exist. According to any official world map, I spent the last 48 hours in Somalia, arguably the most dangerous country in the world. In fact what I did was visit the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland in the northwest of what maps tell you is Somalia. And, unlike the pirate haven of Puntland to its east and the catastrophe that is Somalia proper to its south, Somaliland has been stable and peaceful since it unilaterally declared its independence back in 1991. Before you freak out, let me remind you that no one has ever misattributed impulsive daring to me. There's no reason to start now: I'd been thinking about this trip almost as long as I'd been thinking about Ethiopia, I researched the security situation thoroughly, and I only decided for sure to go after asking around in Harar and hearing from everyone I asked that Somaliland, and the roads to Somaliland, were totally safe. Still, I knew that the first six letters of "Somaliland" plus its location might cause unnecessary worry, so I didn't tell anyone I was going, with one exception, just in case anything went wrong. As it happens, by far the most dangerous thing I encountered in Somaliland was my driver on my birthday outing (more on which in a bit), who drove at ludicrous speeds, spent half the time texting away on his mobile phone, and had the courtesy to turn and look me in the eye when talking to me--except I was sitting in the back seat (I tried to keep conversation to a minimum). Actually, I've found that in general the roads east of Addis Ababa are prone to madness. Quite in contrast with the north of the country, where people drive with admirable caution.
The outing started on the afternoon of the 29th. I left my big backpack with my super-friendly hotel manager in Harar, and carried just a daypack with the things I'd need with me to Jijiga, two hours down the road and the last major town before the Somaliland border. Jijiga is the capital of Ethiopia's eastern Somali province. The urban planner who designed the place must feel the kind of disappointment a parent feels in a delinquent and annoying child. A lot of paved roads--including a main strip that even has a meridian--and all laid out neatly in a grid, but the town that's grown up around this aspirational design could be generously described as a shithole. I suppose that's what happens when you try to impose an administrative capital on a people to whom the concept of administration is alien. Nothing frightening or dangerous about the place, it's just drab and ugly, and the hotel I managed to find was awful. There was so much dust on the floor I could see my footprints. Good thing I stayed there barely more than 12 hours, and spent most of that time sleeping.
The next morning it was an hour or so by minibus from Jijiga to the border town of Wajaale. Scruffy and dusty, as one might expect, but here there was the thrill of adventure: across that border was a place that's unmarked on maps. How often does one have a chance to visit such a place in the modern world?
Everything at the border went smoothly. I was stamped out of Ethiopia and stamped into Somaliland (one of my errands in Addis had been to visit Somaliland's "liaison office"--unrecognized countries don't get embassies--and get a visa) by friendly border officials. Everyone on the Somaliland side was very excited to have me visit the country. A youth hanging around outside the Somaliland border office shook my hand warmly and welcomed me to Somaliland: "It is a beautiful country." If he'd said it with any more emotion, he would have burst into tears.
That welcome pretty much set the tone for my stay in Somaliland. Unused to tourism, Somalilanders seemed for the most part fascinated and pleased that a foreigner should be visiting their country. Like in Ethiopia, many people approached me in the street, but unlike in Ethiopia, none of these people approached me to try to squeeze money out of me in one way or another. They just wanted to shake my hand, welcome me, and ask me where I was from. The whole atmosphere of the place made it hard to remember that I was doing anything that anyone would think of as remotely unsafe.
The capital city of Hargeisa is dusty and a bit ragged, but what struck me most is that it seemed wealthier than any town I'd visited in Ethiopia. There was far less destitution and far more private vehicles on the roads (in Ethiopia it's almost entirely taxis and minibuses). As I understand it, Somaliland's economy is almost entirely dependent on expatriates sending money home from abroad (many of whom live in Canada, which made me popular, as if I had anything to do with their being able to make decent lives for themselves in Canada), and I suppose, with a population of 3.5 million as compared to Ethiopia's 82 million, you're far more likely to know someone who can send you money from abroad if you're a Somalilander, and the Somali clan structure ensures that this wealth gets distributed to people without immediate relations abroad. Also, I imagine Somaliland's history has pushed a far greater proportion of its population to seek its fortunes abroad.
There's no financial transaction in Somaliland that the US dollar can't perform, but for souvenir's sake if for nothing else I traded $20 into Somaliland shillings. The shilling comes only in bank notes, and in denominations ranging from 100 to 5000. The US dollar trades at about 6500 Somaliland shillings. When I traded my $20 at Wajaale, I was given two-and-a-half bricks of one hundred 500 shilling notes wrapped in rubber bands. Downtown Hargeisa is full of money changers sitting with stacks of rubber banded cash. I've seen photos of this sort of thing from places like Zimbabwe and 1920's Germany, but I'd never seen it in person.
Hargeisa itself is rather devoid of tourism sights--the only thing that could fit the bill is the war memorial, where a MiG jet is mounted atop a stone block set with alarmingly graphic friezes depicting the destruction of the war that preceded Somaliland's independence--but it was fun to wander about for a couple of hours. The market is colourful and sprawling, the central mosque is massive (it was prayer time when I went by it so I decided it would be better not to try entering), and the whole place buzzes with activity.
And, as it turns out, Somaliland also gets its share of tourists. I stayed at the Oriental Hotel, which was by far the nicest hotel I've stayed at on my trip, although, at $15 a night, it was also the most expensive, but by not quite as far. At the same hotel was Daniel, a German I'd met in Lalibela, Pascal from Montreal, another German called Nawid, and two Italians, a journalist and photographer. The added company was a good thing because joining forces and finances with Nawid made my birthday outing cheaper (although still the single most expensive day of my trip) and allowed me to do more than I'd originally planned.
The original plan was to visit the rock paintings at Las Geel. Visiting Somaliland for my birthday wasn't simply a stunt (although I admit it was partly that) and it wasn't simply because I was curious what it would be like to step outside the nation-state system (although I admit it was definitely also that)--it was also that I'd read that Las Geel was spectacular. And indeed it is: if it were located anywhere other than in a geopolitical black hole I'm sure its name would be as famous as... actually, when I consider most people haven't heard of Lalibela, which doesn't lie in a geopolitical black hole, I wonder how many wonders this world contains that I know nothing about. Anyway, the Las Geel site consists of a series of remarkably well-preserved prehistoric rock paintings. (Actually, I was disappointed to learn that they're less than 5000 years old, but I guess while the Egyptians were building pyramids the Somalis were still in the Stone Age. On the bright side, they're better preserved than they would be if they were tens of thousands of years old.) On a rocky bulge in the mostly flat landscape, ancient Somalians painted red and yellow ochres with bits of black all over the rock faces and small caves. Judging from the paintings, camels hadn't yet reached the Horn of Africa (present-day Somalis are more obsessed with camels than Russians are with booze), and the big thing was cattle: big-uddered cattle, cattle humping, little people standing on the backs of cattle, little people standing beneath cattle, and more cattle. And all of it, in its primitive way, strikingly beautiful. I could have stayed much longer than I did, and kind of regret that I allowed Nawid's faster pace and the impatience of my guard to hurry me along a bit.
Right, so my guard: the main foreign relations priority of Somaliland is to have foreign relations. They've been struggling for twenty-one years now to get the outside world to recognize them--a key step in having an economy based on something other than expatriate remittances--and they're well aware that the worst setback to that campaign would be if bad things happened to foreigners within their borders (in case you're wondering or still worried, the last terrorist attack in Hargeisa was 2008, which was the first one in five years: all of this from neighbours trying to destabilize the country). As a result, they're obsessive about security. Foreigners aren't allowed to leave Hargeisa without police permission or an armed escort (the latter being easier to organize when you're on a short visit), and every town has a military checkpoint. It was all very relaxed and friendly, but it meant that Nawid and I sat in the back seat behind a driver and a soldier riding shotgun--or more accurately, riding Kalashnikov.
From Las Geel we drove on to the port town of Berbera (this is the part that I couldn't have afforded on my own). Jijiga lies at the foot of the eastern spur of the Ethiopian highlands, and the Somali homeland beyond (or at least what I saw of it) is a mostly flat and arid landscape of dirt and scrub. Driving through this expanse of nothing, I couldn't help but wonder what could possibly possess people to kill one another over it. Somaliland has its desert-like beauty, but it's also damn hot, and gets hotter the closer you get to the sea. We drove out to Berbera with the windows rolled down, and the wind in our faces felt like a furnace blast. Berbera itself was a balmy 38 degrees (that's a touch over 100 Fahrenheit for the Americans in the audience), but it was such a dry heat that I barely sweated: any moisture that rose to the surface of my skin evaporated immediately. This was a mild day by Berbera standards: the town often records temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and it receives less than 5cm of rain annually.
The town was a bit of a disappointment. The port had a certain lazy charm to it, but the main event of dipping my feet in the Gulf of Aden was marred by the fact that as soon as we reached the shore ("we" being me, Nawid, and Pascal, who'd come down to Berbera the evening before) a gang of tough-talking youths approached who were clearly looking for an excuse to start a fight, so we decided it would be better to retreat.
I drove back to Hargeisa without Nawid. In case there was any danger of my thinking I was doing anything remotely hardcore by visiting Somaliland, he one-upped me: tomorrow he's flying from Hargeisa to Mogadishu. This sounds insane, and in a way it is, but Nawid's prepared for the whole thing with impressive sanity. He's been fascinated with Somalia for a long time, has read all about Mogadishu, and has spent ages planning his two-day visit. $1000 per day buys him a fixer--referred to him by a German war correspondent as the best one money can buy--a driver, and seven armed guards, who will escort him to all the bullet-riddled sights of the world's most dangerous city. Nawid's visited 106 countries in his time, and has decided to end his world travels with a bang--hopefully not literally. I wish him well and look forward to seeing the photos when he gets back safely.
So all in all, it was a fun birthday outing. The only thing missing was a celebratory drink at the end of the day. Strictly no alcohol in Somaliland, though in Berbera we met a group of Russians who service the airplanes at Hargeisa airport and I'd be very surprised if they hadn't smuggled a stash into the country. On the bright side, whereas Ethiopia specializes in coffee, which I don't drink (though everyone raves about Ethiopian coffee), the hot drink of choice in Somaliland is tea with camel's milk, which is a big step up from the warm-cup-of-water-plus-cheap-teabag that I normally get in Ethiopia. I'll make up for the absence of alcohol by having a beer tonight now that I'm back in Harar. Tomorrow it's an early bus back to the capital, giving me a little over 24 hours to rest up before flying to England. All told it's been a really nice trip. This is probably the penultimate post.
All over Ethiopia, and Somaliland, I see knock-offs of designer labels. To judge from the last month, you'd think the world's two top designers are Galvin Klein and Adibos. Today on the minibus from Jijiga back to Harar I saw my favourite yet: a guy wearing an athletic jacket with Adidas stripes and font, but instead of "Adidas" is just said "Addis."
The outing started on the afternoon of the 29th. I left my big backpack with my super-friendly hotel manager in Harar, and carried just a daypack with the things I'd need with me to Jijiga, two hours down the road and the last major town before the Somaliland border. Jijiga is the capital of Ethiopia's eastern Somali province. The urban planner who designed the place must feel the kind of disappointment a parent feels in a delinquent and annoying child. A lot of paved roads--including a main strip that even has a meridian--and all laid out neatly in a grid, but the town that's grown up around this aspirational design could be generously described as a shithole. I suppose that's what happens when you try to impose an administrative capital on a people to whom the concept of administration is alien. Nothing frightening or dangerous about the place, it's just drab and ugly, and the hotel I managed to find was awful. There was so much dust on the floor I could see my footprints. Good thing I stayed there barely more than 12 hours, and spent most of that time sleeping.
The next morning it was an hour or so by minibus from Jijiga to the border town of Wajaale. Scruffy and dusty, as one might expect, but here there was the thrill of adventure: across that border was a place that's unmarked on maps. How often does one have a chance to visit such a place in the modern world?
Everything at the border went smoothly. I was stamped out of Ethiopia and stamped into Somaliland (one of my errands in Addis had been to visit Somaliland's "liaison office"--unrecognized countries don't get embassies--and get a visa) by friendly border officials. Everyone on the Somaliland side was very excited to have me visit the country. A youth hanging around outside the Somaliland border office shook my hand warmly and welcomed me to Somaliland: "It is a beautiful country." If he'd said it with any more emotion, he would have burst into tears.
That welcome pretty much set the tone for my stay in Somaliland. Unused to tourism, Somalilanders seemed for the most part fascinated and pleased that a foreigner should be visiting their country. Like in Ethiopia, many people approached me in the street, but unlike in Ethiopia, none of these people approached me to try to squeeze money out of me in one way or another. They just wanted to shake my hand, welcome me, and ask me where I was from. The whole atmosphere of the place made it hard to remember that I was doing anything that anyone would think of as remotely unsafe.
The capital city of Hargeisa is dusty and a bit ragged, but what struck me most is that it seemed wealthier than any town I'd visited in Ethiopia. There was far less destitution and far more private vehicles on the roads (in Ethiopia it's almost entirely taxis and minibuses). As I understand it, Somaliland's economy is almost entirely dependent on expatriates sending money home from abroad (many of whom live in Canada, which made me popular, as if I had anything to do with their being able to make decent lives for themselves in Canada), and I suppose, with a population of 3.5 million as compared to Ethiopia's 82 million, you're far more likely to know someone who can send you money from abroad if you're a Somalilander, and the Somali clan structure ensures that this wealth gets distributed to people without immediate relations abroad. Also, I imagine Somaliland's history has pushed a far greater proportion of its population to seek its fortunes abroad.
There's no financial transaction in Somaliland that the US dollar can't perform, but for souvenir's sake if for nothing else I traded $20 into Somaliland shillings. The shilling comes only in bank notes, and in denominations ranging from 100 to 5000. The US dollar trades at about 6500 Somaliland shillings. When I traded my $20 at Wajaale, I was given two-and-a-half bricks of one hundred 500 shilling notes wrapped in rubber bands. Downtown Hargeisa is full of money changers sitting with stacks of rubber banded cash. I've seen photos of this sort of thing from places like Zimbabwe and 1920's Germany, but I'd never seen it in person.
Hargeisa itself is rather devoid of tourism sights--the only thing that could fit the bill is the war memorial, where a MiG jet is mounted atop a stone block set with alarmingly graphic friezes depicting the destruction of the war that preceded Somaliland's independence--but it was fun to wander about for a couple of hours. The market is colourful and sprawling, the central mosque is massive (it was prayer time when I went by it so I decided it would be better not to try entering), and the whole place buzzes with activity.
And, as it turns out, Somaliland also gets its share of tourists. I stayed at the Oriental Hotel, which was by far the nicest hotel I've stayed at on my trip, although, at $15 a night, it was also the most expensive, but by not quite as far. At the same hotel was Daniel, a German I'd met in Lalibela, Pascal from Montreal, another German called Nawid, and two Italians, a journalist and photographer. The added company was a good thing because joining forces and finances with Nawid made my birthday outing cheaper (although still the single most expensive day of my trip) and allowed me to do more than I'd originally planned.
The original plan was to visit the rock paintings at Las Geel. Visiting Somaliland for my birthday wasn't simply a stunt (although I admit it was partly that) and it wasn't simply because I was curious what it would be like to step outside the nation-state system (although I admit it was definitely also that)--it was also that I'd read that Las Geel was spectacular. And indeed it is: if it were located anywhere other than in a geopolitical black hole I'm sure its name would be as famous as... actually, when I consider most people haven't heard of Lalibela, which doesn't lie in a geopolitical black hole, I wonder how many wonders this world contains that I know nothing about. Anyway, the Las Geel site consists of a series of remarkably well-preserved prehistoric rock paintings. (Actually, I was disappointed to learn that they're less than 5000 years old, but I guess while the Egyptians were building pyramids the Somalis were still in the Stone Age. On the bright side, they're better preserved than they would be if they were tens of thousands of years old.) On a rocky bulge in the mostly flat landscape, ancient Somalians painted red and yellow ochres with bits of black all over the rock faces and small caves. Judging from the paintings, camels hadn't yet reached the Horn of Africa (present-day Somalis are more obsessed with camels than Russians are with booze), and the big thing was cattle: big-uddered cattle, cattle humping, little people standing on the backs of cattle, little people standing beneath cattle, and more cattle. And all of it, in its primitive way, strikingly beautiful. I could have stayed much longer than I did, and kind of regret that I allowed Nawid's faster pace and the impatience of my guard to hurry me along a bit.
Right, so my guard: the main foreign relations priority of Somaliland is to have foreign relations. They've been struggling for twenty-one years now to get the outside world to recognize them--a key step in having an economy based on something other than expatriate remittances--and they're well aware that the worst setback to that campaign would be if bad things happened to foreigners within their borders (in case you're wondering or still worried, the last terrorist attack in Hargeisa was 2008, which was the first one in five years: all of this from neighbours trying to destabilize the country). As a result, they're obsessive about security. Foreigners aren't allowed to leave Hargeisa without police permission or an armed escort (the latter being easier to organize when you're on a short visit), and every town has a military checkpoint. It was all very relaxed and friendly, but it meant that Nawid and I sat in the back seat behind a driver and a soldier riding shotgun--or more accurately, riding Kalashnikov.
From Las Geel we drove on to the port town of Berbera (this is the part that I couldn't have afforded on my own). Jijiga lies at the foot of the eastern spur of the Ethiopian highlands, and the Somali homeland beyond (or at least what I saw of it) is a mostly flat and arid landscape of dirt and scrub. Driving through this expanse of nothing, I couldn't help but wonder what could possibly possess people to kill one another over it. Somaliland has its desert-like beauty, but it's also damn hot, and gets hotter the closer you get to the sea. We drove out to Berbera with the windows rolled down, and the wind in our faces felt like a furnace blast. Berbera itself was a balmy 38 degrees (that's a touch over 100 Fahrenheit for the Americans in the audience), but it was such a dry heat that I barely sweated: any moisture that rose to the surface of my skin evaporated immediately. This was a mild day by Berbera standards: the town often records temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and it receives less than 5cm of rain annually.
The town was a bit of a disappointment. The port had a certain lazy charm to it, but the main event of dipping my feet in the Gulf of Aden was marred by the fact that as soon as we reached the shore ("we" being me, Nawid, and Pascal, who'd come down to Berbera the evening before) a gang of tough-talking youths approached who were clearly looking for an excuse to start a fight, so we decided it would be better to retreat.
I drove back to Hargeisa without Nawid. In case there was any danger of my thinking I was doing anything remotely hardcore by visiting Somaliland, he one-upped me: tomorrow he's flying from Hargeisa to Mogadishu. This sounds insane, and in a way it is, but Nawid's prepared for the whole thing with impressive sanity. He's been fascinated with Somalia for a long time, has read all about Mogadishu, and has spent ages planning his two-day visit. $1000 per day buys him a fixer--referred to him by a German war correspondent as the best one money can buy--a driver, and seven armed guards, who will escort him to all the bullet-riddled sights of the world's most dangerous city. Nawid's visited 106 countries in his time, and has decided to end his world travels with a bang--hopefully not literally. I wish him well and look forward to seeing the photos when he gets back safely.
So all in all, it was a fun birthday outing. The only thing missing was a celebratory drink at the end of the day. Strictly no alcohol in Somaliland, though in Berbera we met a group of Russians who service the airplanes at Hargeisa airport and I'd be very surprised if they hadn't smuggled a stash into the country. On the bright side, whereas Ethiopia specializes in coffee, which I don't drink (though everyone raves about Ethiopian coffee), the hot drink of choice in Somaliland is tea with camel's milk, which is a big step up from the warm-cup-of-water-plus-cheap-teabag that I normally get in Ethiopia. I'll make up for the absence of alcohol by having a beer tonight now that I'm back in Harar. Tomorrow it's an early bus back to the capital, giving me a little over 24 hours to rest up before flying to England. All told it's been a really nice trip. This is probably the penultimate post.
All over Ethiopia, and Somaliland, I see knock-offs of designer labels. To judge from the last month, you'd think the world's two top designers are Galvin Klein and Adibos. Today on the minibus from Jijiga back to Harar I saw my favourite yet: a guy wearing an athletic jacket with Adidas stripes and font, but instead of "Adidas" is just said "Addis."
No comments:
Post a Comment