If Somaliland were a "real" country, Las Geel would be a UN World Heritage site in a heartbeat, with all the good that brings--guards and preservationists and explanations of what you're seeing--and all the bad it brings, too--tour buses and parking lots and crowds.
Instead, it has a guard, sleeping off his khat high under a tree at the police check point about a mile from the site. After several horn honks, he stumbled out from under the tree and weaved his way toward us. He took our permission form from the Ministry of Culture and $10 each (an Edna pre-negotiated rate) and attempted to raise the metal bar blocking the road. When his first attempts didn't work, he picked up a rock and gave the latch a good couple of whacks, loosening it up enough to allow him to lift it for us to pass. He stumbled back to his mat under the tree as our dust cloud swept over the check point.
A few more minutes on the winding, rocky "road" and across a dry river bed and we were at the guide's hut. As the only people there today, as soon as we were able to wake him up from his mat under the trees we had his full attention. Here's our guide:
We began the climb up the quite steep hill to the eleven caves the paintings are scattered across.
The paintings are phenomenal, mostly of cows and dogs and canines: it's easy to see from their subject matter what was important at the time they were painted. Ironically, given its name, there is not a single picture of a camel among all the paintings. The paintings date from about 5000BC to 3000BC. Not too much else is known about them. They were only discovered in 2002 by a team of French archeologists, not surprising given how remote they are. It's unknown what was used to paint them--everything people can conceive of has been tested and none of it has been what was used. It's also not known if one person, perhaps a herder who came through often over many years, or many different people painted them. Some suggest that changing images of animals could indicate it was a ritual site.
Regardless of how they got there and who put them, they're fascinating to look at:
The setting is remarkable as well.
I didn't take this video, but I really like it. Gives you a good sense of the emptiness and somewhat desolate beauty of the place.
Made it to the top:
Made some new friends en route. A bug:
Lots of lizards.
A juvenile dromedary itself. This was one of about a thousand I saw today.
Warthogs! Pumba plus babies.
Classic black-headed Somali sheep.
Not my friends. I will not even get into how unpleasant it is to remove these from your appendages.
Though almost 20 years after the war ended Hargeisa has relatively few remnants of war damage, the villages along the Hargeisa-Berbera road are littered with reminders of the war. Sobering to see.
We also saw these giant bags of charcoal, used for cooking, for sale all along the road. It's US$7 a bag.
Harrison and Lauren left to go back to Canada today, so last night we went to dinner with them at Al Maan-Soor Hotel, apparently the most elegant place to stay in the county, clocking in at a whopping $30/night for a room. The food was delicious--Berbera-caught fish curry with chapati and Rani apple soda, straight from Yemen. Harrison, Lauren, Joanne, Me.
Until next time,
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