After being stood up once, we decided to take our destiny into our own hands and marched down to Avenue 26, the dusty chaotic road filled with Jeeps and trucks headed to Somaliland, most of them held together with no more than a few rubber bands and some used chewing gum. Contrary to any expectation we may have had, we paid up and were on our way within about an hour. The road was smooth, the car was reasonably comfortable (given that there were only 11 people squeezed into some kind of 4x4) and we made good speed. Within an hour, we had arrived in Loyaada, the border village. Leaving Djibouti was straightforward – names and occupations went into a book in a small hut inhabited by large numbers of flies, and we were sent through on foot while the car was searched.
Maybe it was the lure of the unknown but those hundred or so metres filled me with anticipation and excitement in a way no other border has. Somalia has been a mess ever since I can remember and Somaliland has emerged from it peaceful, and organised, with every organ of a state functioning, yet no-one recognises its independence, which it declared nearly 20 years ago. In the eyes of everyone apart from Somalilanders, this place is still a part of Somalia. I celebrated our arrival by losing my phone. We had been to another state-which-isn't-a-state about a year ago – Transnistria, a communist wannabe which broke away from Moldova around the same time that Somaliland tried to secede from the rest of Somalia, but I felt that this would be pretty different and I was impatient to see how Somaliland looked, felt, and worked. Before we could do that, though, was the small matter of getting from Loyaada to the capital, Hargeisa.
The track consisted of smooth sand (for a happy 20 minutes) or rocks and monster pot-holes (for the rest of the 17 hours or so). The guy sat opposite us spent the entire trip munching qat or snorting cheap perfume (a habit I don't think I'd ever encountered before) and the back of the seat we were on detached itself from the metal bar supposed to be holding it in place. For most of the trip, we were thrown around like rag-dolls in a washing machine, hitting our backs on the metal bar, our heads on the roof, and various body parts on the knees and shoulders of other passengers. This continued until about 4am when we stopped for a rest in a small village, where we looked up and saw a sky like neither of us had ever seen before – we could hardly see the night sky for stars, bands of stardust and various other twinkling celestial features. I'm not much of an astronomer but I could have watched it for hours. As it was, I was too tired for that and so I fell asleep on a table while M did battle with the cold. At 6am we set off again and a few hours later we arrived bruised, battered and tired in Hargeisa.
It was a beautiful and exciting journey. Not even a million dollars would have persuaded me to turn around and do it again.
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