Travel with Indigo

After clearing the western end of the absurdly misnamed secure corridor in the Gulf of Aden, we set a course for Djibouti, the name of a country and also the name of its capital town. Once a French colony, it is today an independent nation of the most meager sort whose minor port supplies Eritrea, its land locked neighbor, and the coalition’s warships.

Just a bit smaller than Massachusetts, it is a dreary, festering sore of a country, one of the hottest, most arid, most inhospitable places on earth. With an unemployment rate of 60 percent in urban areas and 83 percent in rural areas, virtually no industry, few natural resources, a life expectancy of 43 years, a population of half a million comprised of two African tribes who only recently concluded a civil war, a neighborhood that includes Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and an economy deeply in debt all of which is in arrears, the place has little to recommend it.

Indeed, when men prominent in the weighty matters of world affairs gather to discuss the site in Africa into which an enema should be inserted to the best effect Djibouti figures prominently.

Still, as I had never seen a country of such unrelenting dereliction, such grim poverty, such pervasive hopelessness, I directed us there. I just had to see what the place was all about.

It will not come as a surprise to learn that in Djibouti there is no yacht marina. As a consequence, we were assigned a berth in the commercial port alongside small freighters which with the aid of swarms of stevedores were loading and unloading their cargos. The first thing I noticed was that everybody, in addition to being black, was extraordinarily slight of build. They resembled a Kenyan marathon runner who has only recently recovered from a bout of intestinal flu. Two of them, prone and stacked on top of each other, wouldn’t have made a decent speed bump. I don’t think there was a single man in sight whose weight could possibly have exceeded 110 pounds or whose height exceeded five and a half feet, and these were the people with jobs. Obesity is not among the problems confronting this country.

According to John and Lloyd, our South African security guys, the people of Somalia and Djibouti are uniquely blessed with handsomely sculptured facial features. There is a certain delicate quality, a fineness of detail that makes them attractive. They said it is the result of genetic heritage found nowhere else on the continent.

Adjacent to Indigo’s berth were holding pens for animals being shipped out or arriving, including emaciated Brahmas and mangy camels. From these, as well as from the dock workers, it was easy to see that food, whether for animal or human, was a matter of the most compelling concern.

On our first night, speaking of food, I took the crew and John and Lloyd to dinner at a restaurant on the derelict town square. Called Le Puque, or something similarly French sounding, it had the air of a place which had been missed for the past twenty years by the local health inspectors, and it came complete with a snotty French waiter, who also as it happened was the owner.

Quite awhile ago an undernourished and overworked draft animal of some description, possibly an ox, expired after a long and arduous career pulling a dull plow through the rocky soils of a subsistence farm. It was a sinewy piece of this unfortunate beast which appeared on a plate in front of me forever putting to rest the dubious notion that all French cuisine is superior. With no ax at hand, I had no adequate means of cutting off bite-sized pieces and, even if I had been able to do so, I was sure that my jaws would not have been up to the task of masticating them. So I ate the freedom fries, drank the barely drinkable wine, and with the rest of the party headed out for the night life that Djibouti offers the festive minded but less discriminating visitor.

Blithely following Lloyd, the only one among us who had been here before, we walked down a tawdry, dim lit side street that seemed like it would be a fine place for a homicide and entered the doors of the ironically but aptly named Club Hermes. Its proprietor evidently was not aware when he chose the name that Hermes was the ancient Greek god whose province included thieves.

Inside was a motley collection of young sailors, all from the ships of some of the various countries whose navies are joined in the coalition, and in keeping with the Laws of Nature an assortment of vamps there to offer themselves in matrimony, or failing that to separate the lads from their paychecks.  For the avaricious women of Djibouti, Club Hermes could be thought of as a convenient gathering of ATM machines whose PIN numbers, so to speak, they knew all too well.

My gray hair and advanced years didn’t seem to dampen the ardor of the young ladies. Indeed, the notion that with more years might come more wealth seems to have taken a firm hold here and only added to their already impressive avidity. In this part of the world, it’s common for a man to purchase his bride using camels or goats in payment, so the guy with the most of these gets his pick. One particularly desperate lady, who tried her best to cling to me and so claim me as her own, was, I noted, about eight months pregnant.  It wasn’t long before we all decided we’d had enough of Djibouti night life.

On the next day, there appeared at Indigo’s door by prior arrangement a modern SUV behind whose wheel was a smallish local driver whose name I never quite got. His was a physique that a pugilist would have been pleased to see on his opponent. He wore trousers so baggy on his diminutive frame that only when he squatted could they have made contact with his legs. We were told by the agent who had arranged for the car that the driver “speaks English” by which he evidently meant that the man had been taught to announce the word “English”. Only in this limited and unhelpful sense could he have been said to speak the language.

John and Lloyd, both wiser in the ways of Africa than I, were to be my companions for the day’s travels the goal of which was to drive across the Djibouti outback to the Somali border and, if possible, pass into that country and return from it unharmed. That it was known to be both war torn and ironically the home of the very same pirates who had plagued us only added to the allure.

I should point out, though, that Somalia is a sizeable country, that the regions in which the pirates are active and those in which the war zones are located are not close to where we proposed to travel, and that accordingly our destination was not as foolhardy as it may first appear.

We made our planned destination known to the driver, who by various grunts and gestures indicated that he understood and knew the way there, which was we figured about fifteen miles away. Shortly after setting out, we turned off the paved road onto a rough track passing by a collection of primitive market stalls that in the arena of retail design fell well short of your basic childhood lemonade stand. These ramshackle huts, all with dirt floors and unpainted, were arranged in helter-skelter fashion and housed more supine souls resting in their shade than goods.

From the moment we set off, there was in our driver the suggestion that he had only recently got behind the wheel of a motor driven vehicle. After he had stalled the car many times in a flawed attempt to coordinate clutch and accelerator and had convincingly demonstrated his fear of exceeding ten miles per hour, we summarily relieved the man of his duties and stuffed him in the luggage compartment. As he was a frail, gangly man, he fit into it nicely. Lloyd drove from then on.

Continuing down the wash boarded road, we passed for several miles through heaps of trash, garbage, and assorted detritus, veered around a newly deceased camel which appeared to have been struck by a vehicle and a somewhat less recently deceased and so more redolent goat, which seemed to have met with a similarly violent end.  For Muslims, an animal may not be consumed unless it has been killed in an approved manner which, judging from these unmolested carcasses, doesn’t include getting run over by a car.

After a distance of some five miles or so the trash heaps could no longer be seen. In their place was a vista of endless miles of trackless dreary desert dotted here and there with low, scabby hills. At various places along the roadside, there appeared quite inexplicably a man squatted on his haunches under a scraggly tree ill-suited to providing the shade he sought. When we waived, he waived back, though only after a pause long enough to suggest that he had given the matter rather more attention than it demanded, and that was that.

At another point along the way, a goat-sized, four-legged, creature with impressive horns bounded across the road in front of us. According to Lloyd, our designated African wild beast expert, this was a Thomson Gazelle. When I naively asked who was Thomson and how had he allowed his gazelle to escape, Lloyd just rolled his eyes and groaned. It is a species of small gazelle peculiar to Africa and first revealed to the world by one Joseph Thomson. How this particular animal had thus far escaped the hungry clutches of the natives I couldn’t say, but he seemed to be quick afoot, a useful talent for animals in these parts.

We saw lots of wandering camels and goats, which appeared to be feral but we knew were not. Any animal that can be caught and eaten is most certainly owned by somebody. Here and there were isolated stone huts, none larger than a two-man camping tent, which in their design appeared no different from what you’d expect in a bronze-age hovel.  Near these was usually a man, a woman and a kid or two going about some domestic task though not in a manner reminiscent of a scene from Leave It to Beaver.

Quite far along the road, we came to a miniature village of about ten of these huts arranged in no order at all. Women in colorful robes and kids with runny noses paused to stare at us. When we stopped, the kids ran up to us with hands out shrieking and laughing and rapping on the car windows for attention, thus adding a cheery tone to a decidedly bleak place.

We had wondered where these isolated, desperately poor people got their water. There was no sign of it anywhere. But here in this village we saw a small standpipe from which flowed a steady stream of fresh water in which a woman was washing clothes and kids were playing. Also nearby was a large white plastic tank apparently set in place and kept filled perhaps as a secondary source in the event the well should run dry.  The well’s pump was powered by a small field of solar panels, a gesture of technology that was startling to behold in the Djiboutian desert.

After traveling some two hours through the blistering heat with no sign of the Somali border, we began to get the uneasy sense that our driver had no idea where the country might be. There was in the car a disconsolate feeling of the kind that you might get if you found yourself driving around in Oklahoma unable to locate Texas. Surely we had missed a turn somewhere.

But as always seems to happen in such cases we just pressed on rather than turn around, not willing to give up the ground we had gained, even if it had been gained in the wrong direction. We of course had no map and no GPS, and our driver stuffed in the back had shown himself to be a man in whom it would be foolish to bestow the confidence of asking corrective directions.

Stopping to ask directions of strangers, never an attractive option for the determined explorer, was out of the question as none of us spoke a word of French, to say nothing of the tribal tongues of Somali or Afar. Under these less than appealing conditions, it seemed to me that pressing on was just the right choice. After all, Somalia had to be out there somewhere.

In due course, we came upon a large village, containing maybe sixty or seventy of those ancient stone huts, a few newer cement structures, and a new school of a startlingly out-of-place modernist design sporting a bright blue metal roof. In the single-lane, unpaved and still rugged road that passed in front of the school were two of the most unnecessary speed bumps that I have ever encountered.  One of these we managed not to see in time with predictable results.

While passing through the village, we saw ladies wearing wonderfully colorful and richly patterned clothing carrying babies whose swaddling was much the same. The contrast with the uniformly black abayas and white robes of the UAE and Oman was striking. Two camels with brightly colored saddles fashioned from carpet were couched near the road and around these a few people had gathered.

As we watched this, a statuesque woman of about twenty years unexpectedly stepped out of a door and into view carrying an infant. Her robe was of a deep red cloth that hung to the ground, and her matching scarf was tied in such a way as to leave only her face exposed.

She had high cheek bones, a delicate jaw, lips of which a professional model would be proud, and a long and shapely neck. The smooth ebony skin of her face surrounded clear strikingly white eyes, which to my astonishment she focused on me with an intense lacerating glare of hatred. It gave her the appearance of one who regularly communes with the netherworld, a place to which it was clear she wished to consign me.  If she had known my name, I’m sure she would have read it with pleasure on a tombstone. She scared the hell out of me and everybody else in the car too.

John and Lloyd explained that to African tribal people a person attempting to photograph them is a person attempting to deprive them of part of their soul. Not aware of this opportunity for cultural blunder, I was attempting to take her photo which, as you can see, met with her apparent disapproval. I don’t know that she hexed me but I can say that since that moment I have been experiencing various unusual health problems which I can’t explain.

The road on which we had travelled to this village ended there. We had come literally to the end of the line in the Djiboutian desert and still had not found Somalia.

It is the rare occasion when a small group of experienced travelers, including one highly trained in such matters by the British army, another by the Royal Marines, not to mention still another– your humble servant–by the US Army, is unable to find an entire country. It is rarer still when this feat of non-discovery is accomplished while sober. But this was one of those uncommon events, so we turned around and drove the many bumpy miles back to Indigo and the well-earned restorative that awaited us there.

In the later stages of refreshing ourselves that night, and after a great deal of vigorous if not deeply thoughtful debate, we arrived at the only possible conclusion to which the right thinking man could be drawn in explaining how we had misplaced an entire, rather large country. A voodoo curse had been placed upon us by the witch woman from the village. No other explanation suffices.

I returned to Indigo very happy that I had stopped in Djibouti and, given the right opportunity, I would gladly return there again. Next time, though, I would travel with a proper map and a GPS unit that would direct me to the Somali border, and I would employ a driver who had not so recently stepped off the back of a camel. I would also refrain from snapping photos of the local babes and take with me an antidote for curses.