by Peter Boehm
What could we do? It would certainly take hours for him to sober up. But above all, I was angry that he’d taken such a difficult stretch of road so lightly. Enough was enough.
I told him outright to stop chewing khat. And reminded him that we were paying him to take us to Hafun. He stopped, calmly extracted the green mush from his cheek using his index finger, and disappeared behind a couple of shrubs in order to relieve himself.
A couple of minutes later he reappeared, with a woman and a small child in tow. I was, and still am, mystified by where he had found them in this wilderness, where there had previously not been the slightest hint of human life.
He then explained, quietly and conspiratorially, that the woman had told him that the route we planned to take was blocked by a landslip. This meant that we’d have to backtrack for a bit, and then take another road.
That may or may not have been true. In fact, I couldn’t even be certain whether we’d been going in the right direction until then anyway. Since leaving the tarred road, we hadn’t come to any of the places marked on the map.
At least Abdullahi was now driving better, and he said that he greatly appreciated it when people pointed out his mistakes to him. Almost as though it were hard to realise that you shouldn’t chew khat during a long drive.
Admittedly, I subsequently had only one driver in the whole of Somalia who didn’t chew khat at the wheel. And Abdullahi seemed to genuinely mean it. Besides, he repeated the same thing later, even though he must have found it hard to do so.
Shortly before dusk we arrived in Gergore, a settlement with a couple of impoverished huts at the side of the road. These too, just like the dwellings in the camps for displaced persons, were built from branches and plastic sheeting.
Nonetheless, the settlement was very important to us, as my map showed it to be the last place before Hurdiye. And we had to go through Hurdiye if we wanted to reach the Hafun promontory. Abdullahi had taken his own route, not the one shown on the map. So he really had found his way without any map or signposts.
Nuredin and I were pleased because, since the argument about the khat, we’d begun to distrust Abdullahi. He now well and truly had the upper hand again, and boasted, “Brother, you’ll be in Hurdiye in ten minutes.”
That, admittedly, was a vast exaggeration, as it would have been barely manageable even on a motorway. And it got even better. About 20 or 25 miles after Gergore, we suddenly got stuck fast.
A number of tyres had already buried themselves in the sand on this road. Here, it was the width of a dirt track, and consequently there was a high ridge in the middle. Unlike any professional driver would have done, Abdullahi did not drive on the ridge and the edge, but in the tracks. And here the sand was calf-deep.
We managed once to get out backwards but then, on our second attempt, just got stuck even deeper and more firmly. And, as we discovered after a couple of attempts, we could only get drive in the back wheels, no matter what we did with the four-wheel gear stick. Mohamoud Askar had sent us into the desert in an SUV with a 4-wheel drive which didn’t work!
Abdullahi claimed to have known nothing of it. He didn’t have a shovel with him either. We fashioned some kind of dustpan from a canister, tried putting large stones and branches under the car foot mats to help the tyres grip better and, despite Abdullahi’s vehement resistance, offloaded the heavy diesel barrel. But all in vain.
Abdullahi became increasingly subdued and helpless. At one point I had to take the wheel to try to drive the car out of the sand.
After two hours, we gave up. The sun had long set. But we were in luck – there was a full moon. And Nuredin and I had been pushing for a while to walk the last stretch to Hurdiye.
We’d passed the exit to Handa, a small town north of Hurdiye, long ago and so, according to my map, it couldn’t be more than 6 or 7 miles.
Abdullahi didn’t want to leave the car. He was afraid it would be stolen. He only followed us once we’d spent a long time persuading him, and had walked a little way.
He walked beside the track the whole time, and kept wanting us to turn off right, into the desert. He was certain that Hurdiye was there. But we no longer trusted either him or his sense of direction.
When he simply kept on walking, and left us behind on the track, I was once again wracked with worry. I called him. And, just as during our argument over his khat chewing, he once again flinched and came back and, at least for a few minutes, walked behind us. But you could argue with him about any question – even those you could simply answer with “yes” or “no”.
Abdullahi’s only luggage was the weapon over his shoulder. I had some drinking water in a plastic bottle, a backpack with my small computer, and the rubbish bag full of money. All the things I hadn’t wanted to leave behind in the car. But now they were useless and heavy.
As it was already past midnight, and we clearly wouldn’t reach Hurdiye that quickly after all, we had another heated discussion about what to do. Abdullahi even persuaded us to follow him a couple of hundred yards into the desert. He was absolutely certain that we were on the right path. Wasn’t that even a house or a tent? But as we got nearer it was just a sand dune, illuminated by the moon.
Abdullahi still insisted that we should keep going. But I wanted to stay on the track. Admittedly, not a single car had passed us all day, since we’d left the tarred road. But it was still much more likely that someone would find us on the track than in the desert. At this point, I had just one thought – what will happen when the sun rises again tomorrow morning?! Then there would be nowhere at all where we could find shade. All I could see were knee-high, woody pines. And even if we’d been able to cower beneath one, it wouldn’t have made us much cooler.
We carried on in silence for a long time. Long enough to imagine what would happen if no-one found us. Long enough for panic to gradually spread to every fibre of our bodies. I felt distinctly that we couldn’t afford to do anything rash now – one single mistake would be our last.
I forced myself to think calmly, but my thoughts kept coming back to just one thing – the blazing sun, which would scorch everything and everyone here, as soon as it got light again. And wherever was this damned Hurdiye?
One centimetre on my Michelin map corresponds to 25 miles in reality. Nonetheless, this is standard for Africa. There are few other maps showing several countries, or even an entire region.
It wasn’t until I had returned to Germany that I noticed a small warning on it. In the bottom right-hand corner, in small print, it said “N.B. We were unable to update the information for some countries on this map with the usual degree of accuracy.”
This must have referred to Somali. After all, the entire route shown on the map between Hargeisa and Djibuti wasn’t even remotely near the one we eventually took.
Perhaps we hadn’t even yet passed the turn-off to Handa, and Abdullahi had just wanted to reassure us. Or maybe there were several turnoffs to Handa. In any case, we’d walked at a good pace for over two hours – so, at least 7 miles – but the lights of Hurdiye were nowhere to be seen.
Once we’d returned to the track, Abdullahi discovered two canisters of water beneath a pine at the roadside. It tasted salty, and horribly putrid.
“See – there are people here. We’ve got to turn off here.“ Abdullahi tried again to persuade us to go into the desert.
But I decided that we should spend the night next to the canisters. Tomorrow, someone would be bound to come to collect them, I reasoned. And if not, then the water would at least enable us to survive a little longer.
We lay down in the sand, right by the track. Nuredin and I put a thin sheet over us, which he had brought out of his plastic bag. Abdullahi lay down thirty feet away, just covered in his jacket.
Before we reached Gergore, Nuredin had, apparently out of the blue, told us about the “Somali Films” – about young men who had seen two of their friends talking and were convinced that the pair were planning to kill them.
Nured
in imagined this film now. Beneath the sheet he admitted to me, in a whisper, that he was afraid of Abdullahi. We should be extremely careful. He was certainly planning to kill us. After all, why had he kept trying to entice us into the desert? There could surely be only one reason for this.
Of course, I’d also already wondered whether we could trust Abdullahi. Hadn’t he wanted to leave us behind, on our own? But I considered it highly unlikely that he wanted to kill us. And I said as much to Nuredin.
I’d seen Abdullahi at the police station in Bosaso. When the police had called him in, he had shrunk back visibly. What’s more, the police had taken down his name, and he had had to explicitly undertake to ensure our safety.
Admittedly, on our return, Nuredin and I had then encountered the chief constable of Bosaso in the street. I told him that Mohamoud Askar had sent us into the desert in a car with a 4-wheel drive which didn’t work. He just smiled and said, “Yes, it’s pretty dangerous driving through the desert.”
Furthermore, Abdullahi knew that I was a journalist. He must have realised that the Puntland government would kick up a fuss if anything happened to me. Reports of a missing journalist didn’t fit with the image of the now safer autonomous region in Somalia.
I didn’t think it was a good idea to take the Kalashnikov from Abdullahi now. If we’d even managed to, if we’d kept watch with it, then I’d have had to keep watch. After all, could I even completely trust Nuredin?
My main concern was that I was completely exhausted and wanted to sleep. And besides, would I then have had to spend the whole of the next day walking behind Abdullahi, with the weapon poised?
Nuredin wasn’t reassured by this. His dreams disturbed his sleep. He started a couple of times in his sleep, he cried out, spoke to someone, and flailed his arms around in defence.
In any event, he didn’t sleep for very long, as the icy wind sweeping across the desert woke us all before dawn. Abdullahi immediately disappeared, and said he wanted to find the people who owned the canisters.
He returned a couple of minutes later, with a grey-haired man. He’d already been on his way to the water. He explained that the canisters were for his family, and for his goats and sheep. A lorry had left them beside the track for him yesterday, as usual. He promised to take us to Hurdiye, as he wanted to go there anyway. It wasn’t far, he told us. Maybe two hours.
His two nomad tents were just ten minutes away, hidden behind a dune. It was immediately warmer here, as the pocket was out of the wind.
The man’s family was in the middle of breakfast, sitting on a goatskin rug. I was astonished by how little they managed to survive with in this hostile environment.
They had two small tents made of sheets stretched across sticks, a kettle for making tea, and a couple of wooden bottles for milk.
Nonetheless, the elder of the two daughters already wore a hijab. She was probably about seven. But why? Who was there to see her in this wilderness? Apart from a couple of foreigners like us, who perhaps passed by every couple of decades, there was no-one for miles around.
The family also had a small herd of sheep, and another of goats. They were kept in an enclosure, fenced with brambles. The animals could obviously live on the sparse grasses we could see on the dunes. The man had given his camels to his brother to look after.
But the family wasn’t quite so self-sufficient as we’d initially thought. The man had another wife in Hurdiye. He spent most of his time there. He just came out here every few days to bring water and to see that everything was ok. He just left his second family here, slightly excluded, camping with the animals.
Despite the early hour, we were still sweating on the walk to Hurdiye. We set off in the direction Abdullahi had suggested, initially past awe-inspiringly huge dunes, and then towards the sea, across a completely barren and desolate plain. Long before we reached the ocean, the ground was already glassy and smooth – an ice rink of baked-hard salt.
Our guide just wore flip-flops – the plastic ones, so ubiquitous in Africa. But after a little while he also carried Abdullahi’s weapon over his shoulder, and Nuredin’s plastic bag.
After a journey like this, Hurdiye could only be a disappointment. It was a small village, right by the sea. The rickety wooden houses and the rough rocks seemed to cower in the sand – the only way in which they could survive the still strong wind. Some were abandoned. But new ones were already being built on the main road, to replace them.
Even before we’d really arrived, an inquisitive crowd had already gathered around us – obviously because Abdullahi had already informed his relatives, by mobile phone, of our arrival. In Somali you can phone even backwaters like Hurdiye.
We were taken to one of the austere houses and given tea and some salty water. Three beds, made of tree-trunks, were pushed up against the walls. There was a storm lamp in the corner, and a red buoy and wooden shuttle on the floor, which the fishermen were using to repair their nets. Just as outside, you waded through fine sand in the hut as well.
Abdullahi’s cousin was already waiting impatiently. He too, like our guide from the desert, was wearing a kikoi – one of those black and red Somali wraparound skirts – and was in his mid-30s.
He asked when we wanted to hire a boat to get to Hafun.
A boat?
“Yes, of course a boat. You want to go to Hafun, don’t you?“
“Yes, of course we do.....”, I said, “But just a minute. Why do we need a boat? Hafun is...”
“But do you want to go to Hafun, or not?” the cousin interrupted again. He probably didn’t quite understand what I was getting at, and feared that some business was about to slip through his fingers.
We managed to resolve the misunderstanding, by means of protracted sketching with pencil and paper. The cousin explained that, yes, you could get to Hafun by land, and the other fishermen confirmed this. But only once every four weeks, and even then only during a window of a few hours, when the tide is particularly low.
That changed everything. If that were true then, to all intents and purposes, Hafun was an island, not a peninsula. And if Hafun were an island, then it couldn’t be the easternmost point of the continent. And if it wasn’t the easternmost point of the continent, then I didn’t need to visit it. The easternmost point must, instead, be 90 miles or so further north, at Cape Casayr. That isn’t very far from Bosaso either. But I just needed to know this.
My Michelin map clearly showed a track from the mainland to the Hafun peninsula, and to the town of the same name. And the other maps, which I’ve looked at since, also show Hafun as part of the mainland.
A historical article about Somalia in the early 19th century also talks about the “Ras Hafun promontory”.
Perhaps the land connection had sunk since then, or had been flooded? Of course, it was also possible that the fishermen were lying, because it would mean lost business for them. Admittedly, though, I’d seen for myself that the land around Hurdiye did look like an island. And I’d ruled out the possibility of there being a land connection further south, as the map indicates. You’d certainly have been able to see it, because the island was clearly visible in the water. And the distance shown on the map between the mainland and the island is exactly the same as that from Hurdiye to the alleged land connection.
(NOTE FROM 2013: Using new technology, however, such as Google Earth, everything looks rather different. This shows that there very probably is a land connection between the mainland and Cape Hafun. At the narrowest point, it still seems to be over half a mile wide. There also seems to be a track on it.
Nonetheless, we would have had to make a detour of about 40 miles in order to get from Hurdiye to the land connection to Hafun. By water it’s just 6 miles or so.
The village of Hafun is located at the western tip of the peninsula. From there to the eastern tip, and thus the easternmost point of the African continent, it’s another 10 miles as the crow flies, through a wilderness without any tracks. It would have been less than 20 miles
by boat from Hurdiye to the eastern tip.
There, however, the cliffs are very steep, and it’s highly dubious whether you could land there by boat. Either way, it would have been an extremely difficult journey.)
I didn’t go to Hafun by boat. I didn’t trust the fishermen. There’s a tradition of piracy in this region. In July and August, according to the above-mentioned historical article, this area has a strong north-flowing ocean current. This creates a whirlpool at Cape Hafun, which pushes boats ashore. The coastal inhabitants would pounce on the ships, killing the castaways and dividing the cargo amongst themselves. In the early 19th century, they could anticipate two or three stranded ships each year.
There are also frequent kidnappings off the coast of Puntland. Today’s pirates have speedboats, with mounted machine guns. They often kidnap people holidaying on sailing boats, and demand hefty ransoms, but they’ve also made rich pickings from small cargo ships.
Abdullahi and his relatives set off in a lorry to haul our SUV out of the sand, and Nuredin and I had a short rest. We ate spaghetti at the market – the Somali national dish since its time as an Italian colony – and a fisherman showed us around the harbour.
There was some smelly, slippery red stuff all over the beach. I thought it might be blood from the fish which had been caught. But the fisherman said it was just a specific type of algae. A breakwater projected several hundred yards into the sea.
From the village, the harbour and its facilities had looked huge and impressive. As we got closer, however, its complete dilapidation became clear. A lot of the stones in the quay wall were covered in moss; others had become loose and fallen out.
The harbour must have been out of use for decades. Some small fishing boats were simply anchored in the open water, a few yards from the beach. Besides this, there were a couple of large heaps of scrap metal on the beach. They looked as brittle and fragile as rotten wood. You could no longer tell what they would once have been. The fisherman said they were German canons from the Second World War.