After touching down in Hargeisa and making my way through the rudimentary, crumbling airport, the first thing I noticed was how chilly it was. I did it again...I came to some place in Africa without checking the weather, just believing everywhere there is hot. As it turns out, Somalia in December is quite pleasantly cool. But I'm not actually in Somalia if you ask the locals. According to them, I'm in Somaliland,
an independent country since 1991. Unfortunately, they're not recognized as such by anybody, so they are a country only unto themselves, but they do have their own government, currency and passports, for what it's worth.
Before I left home, I went online to book a hotel and was shocked to get zero results back when I searched for hotels in Hargeisa: the capital of Somaliland. It's been a loooong time since I've searched for a place and gotten no results, but that got my travel juices flowing. I heard a good place to make a base was the Oriental hotel, a place in business since 1958, and in this region, that's really saying something. So, I made my way there in a taxi and got myself a room; with great Wi-Fi to boot!
Driving through town is a slow and bumpy endeavor. Roads still aren't paved and there's so many potholes that there's hardly any level surface on some streets. Brightly colored storefronts line the streets with hand-painted signs showing the name and pictures of what goods are on offer. The streets are bursting with activity; hawkers selling knock-off jeans, gold bracelets, and everything in between. They spread their goods out on big orange tarps and sit on the ground waiting for somebody to hopefully need something they have. Then there's the animals. Donkeys, goats and sheep wander
the streets eating any scraps they come across. But the most unique sight in Hargeisa are the money men. The local currency is worth so little that guys sit on pallets of cash piled high in thick bricks. The largest denomination is 5,000 shilling and that only gets you 50¢. So if you change $100, you better bring a bag.
I didn't have much of a plan before coming, but I did want to try and visit some of the semi-nomadic people who live out in the scrub lands, so I hired a car and driver to take me to meet some. Hargeisa is very safe compared to Mogadishu, but foreigners are still required to have an armed bodyguard when venturing outside the city. So here, riding shotgun is more like "riding AK."
Hargeisa is not very developed, but it does have modern(ish) buildings and businesses. Once you get to the outskirts of the city, things get bleak really fast. Buildings turn from masonry to corrugated metal and then suddenly it starts feeling very post-apocalyptic. Scrapped cars litter the roadside. Shacks made of scrap-wood line the road. Rubbish piles up against thorny bushes. Glass windows is but a fantasy.
After about 90 minutes of driving we turned off the "highway" and headed for some light-colored structures far off in the distance. I couldn't tell what they were, but they weren't natural. As we got closer, their domed shape came into focus. There was just 5 or 6 of them in a group, and then we got close enough that I realized it was a tiny village,
each dome was a room made from garbage essentially. Before modernity, the huts would've been covered in animal skins but nowadays the people roof their homes with discarded fabrics and plastics of all sorts. They used everything from cardboard boxes to scraps of old jeans and bits of plastic tarps.
Each dome had a purpose. The largest was a communal meeting place, then there was the kitchen dome, and around that were scattered individual domes for nuclear families to sleep. In between the domes were corrals for livestock to sleep and surrounding the whole village was a walled ring of acacia thorns that provided protection from hyenas and other carnivores. My guide said foxes, but I suspect he must have meant some other larger canine. There was no electricity and no plumbing. To get water, the women would walk 2km to one source, or 5km to another. The source being a rough well dug into the ground by hand. It was a bleak existence that reminded me of the apocalyptic video game Borderlands. It was hard to believe I was not in a fantasy world on some fictional planet, but in fact on planet Earth and the year was 2019.
The 2nd day felt looooong, but at least I had someone to share it with. Met a cool American traveler from NYC named Ben and he was going the same way as I was, so we shared costs on a car and security. Our first destination was Laas Geel; arguably Somaliland's most important archaeological site. Laas Geel means "the camel's watering hole" because it's a rocky outcropping where two wadis meet.
But this is no ordinary rocky hill, this place was deemed haunted by local nomads and avoided for generations because on the rocks are ancient paintings, hundreds of depictions of bulls, people, sheep and even giraffe. It wasn't known to "Western science" until 1993 when French archaeologists "discovered" it with the help of some weary herdsmen.
The drive out there from Hargeisa was only 30km but the road is so bad that it was 3 bumpy hours passing endless scrub land in every direction. As far as the eye could see was Sandy dirt interspersed with thorny bushes like acacia, cactus, and eucalyptus. Every now and then the stillness would be broken by the movement of grazing camels, goats and sheep. The bright colors of a lone figure’s clothes were punctuated against the drab landscape. It was a bleak place to eke out a living for the unlucky few who called this place home.
Once we finally made it to the site, we walked up a hill of dark brown and ocher rocks where several overhangs jutted out near the top.
On the ceiling of each overhang were the eerie depictions of people and animals from a time long forgotten. Huge bulls were painted with red ochre, their horns in white swooping towards each other like crescent moons. Amongst the bovine paintings were slender human figures. The sheer number and size of the cows lead one to infer their importance to the lives of the people who lived there 9,000 years ago. However, today there are no herds of cows kept by the Somalis. And it is conspicuous that camels were not drawn on the rocks, yet camels are a prominent livestock herded today, so it begs the question, what happened in the intervening millennia that the animal husbandry practices of these ancient people completely changed?
Soon we made our way back to the vehicle to continue our journey to the sea where we would explore the old maritime port city of Berbera, a sleepy town of 50,000, but one with a long history of trade between the horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. In modern times, it was ruled over by the Ottomans, then the British, until the 1960's when Somalia gained statehood, and then finally now it is a part of Somaliland who declared independence from Somalia in 1991.
Walking the dusty streets of Berbera, laid out in an orderly grid, it felt so peaceful compared to the chaos of Hargeisa. But the buildings really wore their age. The coral and mud-brick buildings one and two stories tall were crumbling everywhere. Several streets still maintain their historical Ottoman
and British architecture with arched palisades and 2nd story balconies, albeit in a severely dilapidated state. As I explored with my camera in hand, I found the people much more accepting of me taking photographs than in the capital, with many young people asking me to take their picture.
My traveling companion Ben is a bit of a graffiti artists and so many of the crumbling walls were blank canvasses that he decided to find some spray paint and do some artwork on one of the ruined buildings. I was hesitant towards the idea because I was not sure how the locals would react and the last thing I wanted was to make them angry, or worst-case scenario, get thrown in a Somali jail. I mean, we've all seen Black Hawk Down right?
As Ben started to paint, our presence attracted the attention of curious passersby. A few came and chatted to me, wondering where we were from and why we had come to Berbera, but most just looked on with curiosity. Thankfully, a fuss was not made.
The 3rd day was mostly travel. Sitting, peering out the window of a 10-passenger van, I watched the rugged landscape fly by. The vast coastal plain eventually morphed into hills and mesas of thick green scrub punctuated by rocky outcroppings. The desert whizzed by and my mind drifted off into thinking how these people living out along the desert road, living in the dirt and dust of the arid, harsh wilderness. They couldn't have showered every day or maybe even every few days. There was no plumbing in these half-ruined concrete boxes with no permanent electricity that they used as impromptu shops, many with add-ons made of anything discarded and of structural value. It's crazy the people in Somaliland are the direct descendants of some of the most ancient humans; this land essentially the cradle of mankind with Ethiopia neighboring to the north.
When we got back to Hargeisa, I went to see about buying a Somaliland passport. A moneychanger across the street said he'd get me one for $100. Only got him down to $90 but he produced it within an hour or two. I just went and got a picture printed quickly. Ben took the pic of me just standing against a random white wall out in the street. I made my name Harry J. Balls, born on April 1st, 1983 in Hargeisa, Somaliland. I also had to put my parent’s names, my height, and my profession. And then magically a moment later I'm suddenly "officially" a citizen of Somaliland. No, wait. Actually, I'm a citizen of the Democratic Republic of Somalia. I thought I was getting a passport for Somaliland, but in fact it is Somalia proper. I don't really mind but after thinking about it, I think the reason why it's still possible or at least this easy to get one is because someone from Somaliland has access to Somali passports as well as the 3 requisite stamps needed in said passport.
To end the trip, we went for a photo walk down to the dry river that dissects Hargeisa. To get there you descend into the 7 levels of Dante's market inferno. The first level starts with you walking from the sunlit dusty street into a dark portal made from bits of shipping crates and wooden pallets with colorful tarp patches draped over the entrance. Inside, the path ahead is narrow enough that only one person can walk straight without having to turn their shoulders to pass by.
Cheap Chinese clothes for men and boys hung from ground to ceiling, busting from the shopfronts out onto the covered paths. Just a continuous tunnel of shirts, pants, shorts, jackets. Then the next level down begins, the ladies' wear/curtains/tablecloth, depending on how you look at the huge swathes and spools of colorful and patterned fabrics. Many shops had young men sitting at whirring white sewing machines making the abbayas, as their called, right there. The whole scene inside the market is a cacophony of sound with people always yelling whole conversations across the way between two shops. Their tolerance for conversational distance is much further than ours. They are comfortable talking loudly to people who are 30(10m) feet away. In the deepest darkest center of the market lies the butchers, hacking at chunks of red meat with worn out choppers on old slab cutting boards while innumerable flies swarm around the bloody mess.
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