...to Berbera, on the Gulf of Aden. Berbera is about 2 hours north of Hargeisa and has a port that brings in significant revenue for Somaliland, partly because land-locked Ethiopia depends on it. Here's a truck that was headed for Ethiopia, prior to a minor detour:
The drive is beautiful, if bumpy, especially the last hour. It's across scrubby desert, with stark, rocky mountains along both sides of the road, and crisscrossed with dry riverbeds, some low, rocky canyons and others wide and sandy:
We arrived in Berbera and went straight to Edna's beach.
There was no one around except for lots of crabs.
I went for a swim in my Somaliland appropriate swimsuit:
There were some beautiful shells on the beach.
Unfortunately, they were already taken:
Cool to see camels kickin' it on the beach:
After a while at the beach, we went to see the town of Berbera. This is what Lonely Planet said about Berbera: "The name alone sounds impossibly exotic, conjuring images of tropical ports, spices and palm oil. If the reality is a little more prosaic, it's a great place to chill a while nonetheless...soak up the atmosphere...dolphins frolicking in the bay."
That's about as accurate, as well, let's put it this way: About two years ago I found myself in a small town in Romania on what had been clearly marked as a main road on the Lonely Planet map but was in fact an alarmingly steep, pitch black, intermittently cobblestoned slightly glorified pathway, staring a growling feral dog down as I attempted to find my way back to town from a hotel Lonely Planet (2008 edition) had raved about but had been closed for more than 5 years. I later told this story to someone who had lived in Romania, and she confirmed my suspicion that the author of this guidebook sat in his hostel for the entirety of his stay, collecting information only from others who had ventured past Bucharest. I believe Lonely Planet Romania and the Lonely Planet Somaliland chapter may have been written by the same person.
It's not that it doesn't have possibility. It has some lovely, if faded, Ottoman-era buildings down by the port.
There's the port--fishing is one of the bigger industries in town (and the fish I've had from Berbera have been excellent). It's been a port for centuries, and scored a mention in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which was written by a Greek merchant in the first century AD. He noted that "here the natives are more peaceable" and that Berbera exported "frankincense...myrrh...and slaves, but rarely." It got sacked by the Portuguese in 1518, then occupied by the Ottomans, then the British.
In 1855, British explorer Richard Burton wrote, "Berberah is the true key of the Red Sea, the centre of East African traffic, and the only safe place for shipping upon the western Erythraean shore...this harbour has been coveted by many a foreign conqueror. Circumstances have thrown it as it were into our arms, and, if we refuse the chance, another and a rival nation will not be so blind." I love that.
It has some shipwrecks.
But it also has a massive swath of uninhabited, barren, trash-strewn land between town and the ocean, which Edna tells me were pine forests until Siad Barre bombed them beyond all recognition.
There's a massive graveyard, also bombed to pieces.
There's the shell of the hospital.
And there's the other bombed out buildings, abandoned, scattered around town, with no evidence of having been touched:
And the former land-mine fields (the sign says, "The Government House Minefield was cleared by The Halo Trust with support of the Government of Ireland")
Throw in the fact that, for being a pretty big town there is almost no evidence of life in the streets...
...and it feels much more like a ghost town just days or weeks emerged from a long war, not one of the principal towns of Somaliland, 19 years out from war. When I told Edna this, she told me people sometimes likened Berbera to the gullet--everything passes through, nothing stays and it never gets fat.
I will say Berbera's got one thing going for it: one of the longest runways in the world, built by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and used by NASA since the 1980s as an emergency landing strip for space shuttles.
Who knows what Berbera's future holds? There have been talks with Ethiopia to expand Berbera's port's operations, but there's no guarantee that money will impact Berbera itself. Some people are pinning their hopes on beach tourism, but my casual assessment would be that they've got a ways to go.
For now, it's one of the strangest places I've ever been.
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