Somalilanding – 28 days later

I first wrote a travel blog about around 8 year ago, when I ventured to India on my first time travelling without my parents! I went with three uni friends to a city in Punjab for a nursing elective and wrote about all of my observations and experiences nearly every day. Every trip since then I’ve journalled, but now I’m travelling about for the foreseeable (I hoping to be gallivanting til July), I figured its time to re-start a travel blog!

So 28 days is a pretty long time to write about in one post and I definitely should’ve started sooner, but to be honest, for the first week I was pretty culture shocked!! Time flew by and I feel like I couldn’t really catch my breath. If I had time to myself, I didn’t really want to relive and reflect on my experiences, I just wanted to watch Emily in Paris (sorry not sorry!!) But hey, 28 days later, I’m raring to go and tell you guys (anyone that is interested) about my time so far in Somaliland! I figure I’d start with my last few days and then go back to the start!!

2/2/22

In the morning, I was told that extending my visa was going to be possible but that I needed $87, two passport photos and my passport for Abdilahi (the logistics guy) to take to the government. I asked my mate Mubarak to run me to the ATM and then got everything ready.

I headed over the road (from the hospital) to Nomad cafe for coffee with an American guy, whos family is Somali, who I matched on tinder, to get a Western/local perspective of Hargeisa. (I was bored and mildly curious one night and decided to download tinder to see if it was a thing that people did here, given that society is much more conservative than home! It seems it is ‘done’ by a small number of people, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a fair percentage of them are expats and Westerners on holidays.) I met Kenny and we had a coffee and chatted before he got me hooked up with internet and Zaad, which plays the role of Google Pay. This was super useful as now I am free to roam as I please while still being connected up to the world, and being able to pay for things, without the great hunt by any business for change!!

We then got a Zaad across Hargeisa to the downtown area, which is the busiest part of the city. There’s lots of malls, with shops and cafes, some hotels and fancy restaurants too. We went to a beaut restaurant in a hotel for food – I had ‘fish sizzling’ which was super tasty and Kenny told me about his time in Hargeisa – he’s been here since mid November. Then we went to the rooftop for a Frappuccino!! Afterwards, I ordered my own taxi (Uber equivalent) and communicated enough to be able to get home to the hospital. I paid with my Zaad and felt like a free woman!! I could get about of my own accord!! YAAAAS!

I got back, checked in with Edna, who was apparently worried about me as she had not seen me at lunch and had missed me at breakfast, before meeting Amanda, an American girl who has come to volunteer here for 2 months. She hopes to train as a nurse and midwife in the states and has travelled around loads of places teaching English including Kenya and Venezuala! It was really nice to talk with her as another Western gal and share the odd travel story – surprising how much you can miss these small things!

I went straight back out after that, walking with Mubarak. We like to head out to Masalaha which is a big rural area with a beautiful tarmac road going right through the middle – if you saw how insaaaane the roads were here with all the potholes and dust, you’d appreciate it! Whereas normally we stride out along this said road, today I fancied going off piste. We walked into the bush, through empty plots, past termite hills and rural homes. Along the way, we were held up by a long procession of camels and sheep being shepherded past a rural house with their own livestock. It took a considerable amount of care to ensure the two groups of livestock did not mix and was pretty impressive to watch. I filmed the debacle, and predictably the woman shouted at me for taking a photo! It turns out she was joking with me, and luckily Mubarak translated for me. He told her that these jokes stressed me out and she said ‘hoiyo, hoiyo’, meaning ‘I’m like your mother’! While this was going on, a small boy was chasing a baby camel (around 1 month old). They wanted the camel within their camp area to keep it separate from the mother, so they could milk it. The baby camel was having none of it and returned to its mother. The lady waved us over to the camels and let us stroke the baby – it had fluffy fur and felt quite like wool!! When then thanked them, headed on our way, while the boy returned to rounding up the baby camel.

I then returned to dinner before heading out again with my Kenyan friends Richard and David as well as Amanda, the new American volunteer, for a ‘top secret’ live music outing (with the potential of dancing)! We went to Ali Jirde, a local fancy hotel, which had decked out the car park with lights, tables and chairs, a stage and a sound system for the occasion. As is always the way here, we were told to get there for 8pm at the latest, while noone else (aside from a few groups with white people in them) got there til 9/9.30pm! The live music started around then, with a traditional guitar called a cuud, a single drum and singers, swapping in and out every few songs. Very excitingly, there was a young female singer, who had a fab voice and also danced about a bit. Food and drinks arrived (I had a chicken wrap – my fourth meal of the day – and a bottle of Sprite) and we tucked in. It was 15 degrees, which is seen as cold here, so fleece blankets were handed out – I held out for a good few hours before finally caving. Almost as soon as I was wrapped in my blanket, a guy came over and asked where I was from and why I was wrapped up! He was a Somali from Slough and basically said I should be more hardy, which is fair!! There was also a traditional dance group, who always seem to be at these events who danced. Bizarrely, at one point about 10 police went on stage with them and danced – when we asked the people on the next table what was going on, they explained it was a national police day so they were celebrating. The police left shortly after the dance and a recognition speech and then a few headscarfs came off, the lights were dimmed and the dancing began!! Energy levels were high!!