Arrival in Dire Dawa at 4.30am would have been a rude awakening, if only we had managed to sleep on the minibus where we were packed in like sardines. Cole and Amanda headed off to Harar and we piled into a tuk-tuk for the ride to the Djibouti bus station, where a company by the catchy name of Shirkada Gaadidka Dadweynaha Yar-Yar Dhexe Ee Siiti apparently ran a bus to Djibouti. On discovering that the bus had already gone, the tuk-tuk guy took us to around 10 different hotels, none of which could be bothered to let us in, before finding us a cheap deal down a dirt road somewhere in the area of Dire Dawa's railway station. We dragged our sleep-deprived selves down to the bus company's ticket office before spending the day eating and sitting around. Dire Dawa is a dusty, planned town with lots of space and orderly streets but not much else. This combined with our tiredness didn't leave us with much motivation to go and explore Dire Dawa and so we ended up continuing with our sitting and eating and lazing. Eventually, the time came to go get our bags.
This turned out to be more of a difficult operation than it should have been as we could not remember where the hotel was, nor could we remember the name of it (or indeed if it had a name at all). After walking twice down the same dark and dusty back-street a guy approached us offering help and, when faced with our predicament, he went and banged on a door and ushered us in. It seemed that this was the house of an American missionary who seemed as confused as us about the reason of our being here in his driveway, but helped us out all the same. Eventually, a guy who worked for his organisation offered to take us around the local hotels, although ours did not seem to be one of them. This continued for about half an hour until M managed to delve into her memory - « didn't last night's tuk-tuk driver give us his number...? ». The number was eventually found, our new helper called last night's driver and the utterly helpless tourists sat and waited until the guy showed up and showed us to our hotel. Everyone had a laugh and then started walking us towards the bus station. We told him we'd find our way from here and didn't want to waste any more of his time and offered him a healthy tip, to avoid him having to ask for it as we were sure he would. Shockingly for Ethiopia, he turned the tip down and sent us on our way!
The bus station, when we arrived, was a typically Somali affair. People sitting around chewing khat, the stench of laziness in the air, nothing happening. Our scheduled departure time of midnight came and went, nothing happened. At 1am, utter chaos broke out for some reason, we managed to squirm our way onto the bus amid arguments and shouting and chugged down the gravel road to the border at Gelille, the journey brighted up by occasional fist fights between Somali women while the men stared wistfully out of the window as if nothing was happening. We travelled with Betty, a tough Kenyan woman who was on her way to see friends in Djibouti, and gave us her number to get in touch once we had arrived in her home city of Mombasa. « If this happened in my country, the driver would have stopped the bus by now... » she laughed. It seemed things worked differently in this part of the world. The shouting and arguments carried on for most of the 8 hours until we arrived at the border post, went through the usual checks, hopped onto a different bus and headed off towards Djibouti City.
Welcome to the "Planet of the Apes" (yup, it was filmed right here in Djibouti...)
The landscape was totally different – sand, dust, flatness and heat gave us a marked contrast from Ethiopia. The smell of khat was also everywhere, and I helped the woman sat next to me to smuggle it through the checkpoints in exchange for a bunch of it which I munched on happily until we arrived in Djibouti City – exhausted, hot and confused, yet happy to have arrived somewhere new once again.
"I put the T in Khat"
Corona bottle recycling centre
No comments:
Post a Comment