Day 354: Business As Usual

20.12.09:

You know when somebody says that something was a breath of fresh air, I can’t describe how apt that saying is when it comes to Rwanda. It is there that you find all that Africa could be if only its scumbag criminal leaders would allow it. But there’s no time to dilly-dally, I’ve got a mission and a damn good reason to get to Egypt in 11 days time… Mandy.

I hopped a motorbike taxi (and for the first time in Africa, crash helmets are mandatory) to the bus station nice and early and before long I was being whisked out of the country towards Uganda, past the green terraced hills and the cute little villages along the way. Since the darkness of 1994, Rwanda has turned itself around like you would not believe. THAT’S what you can achieve with 15 years of half-decent governance and well-structured aid programmes.

Rwanda shouldn’t really be in this position. Don’t forget, it wasn’t just the 1994 genocide which knocked the country sideways, Rwanda was heavily involved in the conflict in DR Congo which claimed the lives of the most number of people since WWII. It’s also totally landlocked with pretty lousy neighbours (the road from Dar es Salaam to Kigali is still not sealed all the way and you can forget about trucking stuff in from DR Congo – there are no roads!) but, against the odds, they have forged a successful state of which all Rwandans (there are no Tutsi or Hutu any more, only Rwandans) should be proud.

Unlike Uganda which sucked the big one. Yup, sorry to report but once over that border (an ordeal and an utter rip off $50 for a one day transit visa) Africa reverted back to its dusty, dirty, unfinished, grimy, sweaty, unpleasant, uncomfortable, stressful, poverty-stricken, pot-holed, manic, dangerous, diseased, dispossessed, corrupt, undemocratic, sticking, grotty, unsanitary, littered, open-drained cesspool that we all kinda expect it to be (and it is).

When you consider that Uganda has only had three leaders since independence back in the sixties (and one of them was Idi Amin) and that the current leader has been in charge since the mid-eighties, you can imagine that this is another place where, to quote the Manics when they were good, democracy is an empty lie. So Uganda finds itself in the same trap as nearly every other African nation – politicians go for the job for the money, not to make things better, the people are nothing more than an inconvenience in the way of the leaders true calling – to skim off a percentage for every bit of oil, gold, diamonds, timber, coltan whatever that is extracted at the behest of the western world with no net gain for the people.

My heart sank as I saw the same skanky shops that line the roads of every country I’ve been through since Morocco. The same shoeless orphans, the same put-upon women carrying the same mosquito-infested buckets of water on their heads, the same grind, the same unfinished concrete hovels, the same the same the same. God it’s depressing. I’ve had seven months of this and I’m sick of it. As I’ve said before, I see no romance in poverty. Life here is brutish, nasty and short. The average life expectancy is 50. The same that it was in Britain 200 years ago. The gap between us developed and them undeveloping is vast and perhaps unimaginable to bridge, but if Rwanda can turn itself around after those dark, dark days of 1994, then there’s a glimmer of hope for the future; if only Africa could rid herself of the gangsters, criminals and thugs that currently run the show. If only…

The mad thing is that these places run by horrible little thieves, bastards and con-men actually get to vote on important issues facing the planet, most pertinent this week being action against climate change. That scum like the miserable turd who is currently running nasty narco-state Guinea into the ground (although I’m kinda intrigued to see how it could possibly sink any lower) are allowed to have a say on any matter beggars belief, but on a matter of such complexity and import as the urgently needed cuts to worldwide carbon emissions it just leaves me dumbfounded. It’s like asking Ian Huntley his opinion on the matter, only he murdered considerably less children. Why are these dreadful men allowed to use international democratic institutions when their concept of domestic democracy involves taking out any opposition with a bullet to the head?

If Hitler were around today, would he get a vote? Looking around the credentials of the current crop of African tin-pot dictators one would have to conclude yes.

Anyway, so what do you want to know? Uganda was same old same old, and that’s all I have to say about it. I’ve seen it forty times before and I’m bored of it now. I think I’ve got poverty fatigue. I just can’t seem to get as excited about it as Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. There is no stoic dignity about seeing half of your children die and having to shit in the streets.

So I passed through Kampala really not caring less, but I will report that – as usual – the people were an utter delight. Incredibly friendly and talkative, and it’s great to see the increasing cross-pollination of the five East African states (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda & Kenya) in microcosm on the bus. When I have a pop at the state of Africa in 2009, please don’t think for one second that I’m bitching about Africans. I am not. I am bitching about African politicians, who are a breed apart. A breed of psychopaths and sociopaths who don’t deserve the time of day much less a seat in the UN for their twisted cronies and henchmen.

I was a little worried at the Kenyan border that I’d miss the bus as I was last in the queue to get stamped out of Uganda and when I changed my money at the Western Union they took their sweet time about it, so I legged it over the border. Bad call. It was dark and was I really expecting a road in Africa to be, you know, flat? Of course it wasn’t. I went FLYING, scraping my left arm and right hand in the process.

Not an auspicious entry in my 128th Nation I’ve got to say. But an entrance nonetheless and the fact I’ve got to 4 nations in less than two days is a goddamn miracle. I get into the capital of Kenya, Nairobi, at 5am tomorrow. If I can get my Ethiopia AND Djibouti visas in the morning (unlikely) I should be able to get an overnight bus towards Ethiopia and then I really will be on schedule for the boat to Egypt and what lies beyond.

If not, I’m going to be pushing it, not least because Friday is Christmas Day and things (buses, border posts etc.) might shut down. But then again, if I’m in Ethiopia, no worries – they don’t celebrate Christmas until January!

Onward, my friends, onward…

Day 357: The Hard Slog

23.11.09:

Any time frame you are given in Africa, remember to add a few hours, or even days. Matt and I got up at 6am, just in time to jump back on yesterday’s truck and crack on towards Ethiopia. The Pixies blasting in my ears and the sun rising to our left it was possibly the best trip I’ve had in Africa so far. However, our man predicting that we’d be at the border at 9am was ludicrously over-optimistic and we arrived sometime after 11am.

So over the border and into Nation 129: Ethiopia. A nation that has had its fair share of publicity, but for all the wrong reasons. The only African nation not to suffer the horrors of colonisation, one could argue that Ethiopia proves that Africa would be just as stuffed up as it is now whether the damn whities had bothered invading or not.

Before I go on, it’s possibly important that you know the difference between the era of slavery and the era of colonisation. They are two very different stories with a gulf of some eighty years separating them.

Because history is so badly taught in schools (no linear progression – we just jumped from the Egyptians to World War I to the Romans to World War II to the Vikings to Henry VIII to the Normans with gay abandon) it’s easy to think that the dastardly Europeans rucked up in their ships some time in the past, enslaved the population of an African country and set about selling them off like cattle to toothless banjo-players in Alabama.

What really happened was a little more complicated than that.

Before the invention of Gin & Tonic, there was little reason for Europeans to stay in the tropics. With Malaria rife and Europeans having no naturally selected resistance to it, any trip to a mosquito coast would be a one-way ticket to go join the choir invisible. But after the discovery of quinine, the stage was set for the exploitation of the world – Asia, America and, eventually, Africa.

For the first couple of centuries of European interference in Africa, there was no colonisation. There was just trade. Ships would turn up loaded with iPhones and Nintendo Wiis and trade them with the local chiefs for slaves and novelty beer hats, then bugger off to the Americas (at this point it would be remiss of me not to point out that a greater number of slaves were taken to The Caribbean to work under British slave-masters, so you can put your toothless banjo-player away) to sell these poor guys for a handsome profit.

Okay, the first foray into the realms of colonisation in Africa was in 1652 with the crazy Boars rucking up in South Africa, but let’s ignore that for a moment and, yes, one could argue that Sierra Leone was colonised when William Wilberforce and his mates bought a bit of land in present-day Freetown to stick the freed slaves that fought for the British against the Americans in the US War of Independence. After The British finally came to their senses in 1807 and abolished slavery, (unlike the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Arabs, Yanks and Africans who continued to practise it with gay abandon (some African countries [cough- Mauritania] still do)) Sierra Leone was used to drop off slaves from ships that had been intercepted by the British Navy en route to the Americas.

The Cape of Good Hope may have been annexed by the Brits in 1806, but it would be another seventy-nine years before what has been called ‘The Scramble For Africa’. Precipitated by journalist Henry Morton Stanley (as in Dr. Livingstone, I Presume) and his travels around central Africa under the sponsorship of the evil King Leopold of Belgium, The Scramble For Africa was undoubtedly the crime caper of the century and one which would have put Ocean’s Nineteen and a Half to shame.

In 1885 the European powers met in a brothel in Berlin, baked a cake in the shape of Africa and sliced it into almost 50 bite-sized chunks for themselves before coffee and cocaine snorted off a naked prostitute’s bottom. Things were much more civilised then, you see.

Much of North and West Africa was gobbled up by the French, Central Africa largely went to the Belgians and East and Southern Africa was largely annexed by the Brits. Germany got a few bits and bobs including Togoland and Tanganyika, Portugal got Angola and Mozambique while the Spanish, having conquered almost all of The Americas were (seemingly) happy with just nicking Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara.

The greatest heist in the history of the World? I have no doubt about it.

But there is something else going on here – each country’s experience of colonisation was markably different. In the same way that it’s easy to count Africa as one country (as I hope you have seen over the last seven months, it’s not!), it’s easy to see the history of Africa as one big shared history in which all the colonial powers were proper rotten to the territories they invaded – however, that’s not entirely the case. Some were more rotten than others. It would be fair to say that the Belgians probably have the most to apologise for – their conduct in The Congo is up there with The Holocaust as the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world, but the Brits weren’t blameless, killing 26,000 white Afrikaner woman and children in the world’s first concentration camps in the 1899-1902 Boer War.

Even so, each country in Africa experienced a different form of colonialism to its neighbours, yet all (with the exception of Botwana) collapsed into chaos once the colonial powers pulled out. In countries like Angola, were the Portuguese pulled out overnight leaving just three university graduates in the entire nation, it’s not hard to figure out why the Angolans spent the proceeding thirty years was spent gleefully massacring each other. In countries like Rwanda, in which a successful ‘divide and rule’ policy had been adopted by the Belgians you could almost draw a straight line to the genocide that came close to destroying that nation back in 1994.

But then what’s the story with Sierra Leone? What’s the story with Liberia? Both were set up to be free states in which their citizens could live in harmony. There was no abrupt and inept pull-out, no divide-and-rule tactics to set one ethic group up against another (well, maybe a little in Liberia), there was no rhyme nor reason for the horrific events that took place in the late 90s, just the same old story of greed and corruption that plagues this continent like a reaper of utmost grim.

But my biggest question is what the hell is the story with Ethiopia? Spared from the full horror of slavery (unlike West Africa) by its position near the East coast and spared the tyranny of colonialism, it’s post-colonial history (not that it was colonised) is one of war, war, war a bit more war and a few famines thrown in for good measure. WTF Ethiopia? You should be the glittering jewel of East Africa, the proof that Africa’s modern-day problems are all the fault of colonial greed and reckless European abandon.

Sorry guys, but I’m going to put my cards on the table right now. It’s time to stop the blame-the-past game. In less than twenty years, countries like Poland, Romania and Bulgaria have shrugged off the repressive fifty-year colonialism of the Soviet Union and are now productive kick-ass members of the European Union. India, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore… all ex-colonies whose economies are booming while nearly all African economies are operating at the level of a barely audible whimper. Ever driven an African car? Used an African mobile phone? Played an African video game? Worn some clothing ‘Made In xxx, Africa’? Nah.

There is just one group of people that are responsible for the frankly laughable state of modern Africa and that’s the African politicians who are happy to run this great continent into the ground while they feather their own nests of golden straw and Fabergé Eggs. Yes, shit things happened in the past, but that is no reason for shit things to happen today. History is there to stop us repeating our ancestor’s mistakes, not as an excuse for making more of them. Africa today is on the verge of a precipice, and when brave men and women stand up to fight the powers that be, it’s about time we in the West gave them the support they deserve.

Africa is indeed a stain on the conscience of the world, not for what was done in the past, but because of our failure to do what needs to be done today. Band-Aid was actually a very good name, for charity only puts a sticking plaster over the problems of modern Africa. It is only by decisive – and smart – action on behalf of the UN and other inter-governmental bodies that the cancer that is deep-routed in almost all African governments can be cut out and the people here can, for the first time in history, be free. The shame we feel in the West about our colonial past should not hold us back. If we continue to fail, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 will look like small fry compared to the horrors that our grandchildren will be intrigued and sickened to know why we didn’t anything to prevent.

Anyway, back to The Odyssey…

Matt and I crossed the border into Ethiopia around midday, and there we tried to get the first bus to Addis Ababa, the ship I need to be on is leaving on Saturday, so it was fairly important. Unfortunately, all the buses for Addis leave at 6am (bit silly as the border is not even open then, but hey-ho) and the only bus that was of any use at all was one that was heading as far as Yabello, a town just a hundred kilometres north.

Hoping against hope that there would be an overnighter to Addis from Yabello, we clambered aboard this local bus which was fairly yuck and we had the misfortune to be sitting on the back seats so we found ourselves more crammed in than is usual. It took a good five hours to get to Yabello, but at least the road was now sealed (well done Ethiopia, one less mark for Kenya, methinks). We seem to have found ourselves back in the realm of ubiquitous checkpoints, but we only had a few minor problems with the police, and we managed to get all the way to our destination without paying a bribe.

Arriving in Yabello around sunset, we found that there was no bus until tomorrow. I think Matt was just happy to see a fairly nice hotel (three days of The Odyssey will do that to a mortal man), but ha ha it was full and so we wound up hiring a tent (for more than the cost of a room, I might add) and camping for the night on the strangely verdant grounds of the hotel. (Verdant because it was watered pretty much continuously which was a bit odd considering THERE’S A DROUGHT ON, but hey-ho the grass seemed happy enough.)

That night we met a couple of fellow backpackers, Silvia from Swizerland and Asier from Spain. They had been touring around Africa for 16 months now (blimey!), and their favourite place was Madagascar (told you it was good!). They’d be joining us on the bus tomorrow up to Addis so we shared a couple of beers and arranged to meet for the bus at 6am.

Day 358: Birdstrike!

24.12.09:

Another 6am bus didn’t seem like a lot of fun, but the minibus up to Addis turned out to be quite an eventful one, as after just half an hour on the road we hit a massive vulture at 70mph. It totally SMASHED the windscreen to bits and gave us all a bit of a fright, to put it mildly.

Silvia turns out to be one of those wonderful sheilas who are more than happy to poke a dead animal with a stick, so she jumped out of the minibus and procured a few feathers for our respective hats. The vulture however, turned into state’s evidence and the minibus crew picked it up and threw it on the bus, much to my chagrin, as it was laid out a little too close to number one here for my liking. After managing to get it moved to the front of the bus, we discovered the reason for the roadkill getting a free ride north – it’s illegal to drive with a cracked windscreen in Ethiopia (unlike in Senegal where it is illegal not to) and so the minibus guys had to get the police to write them a letter explaining what had happened or else we’d be high-tailing it back it Yabello and all hope of reaching Egypt by New Year would be dashed.

But we plundered on through dusty villages and dried-up towns. Two things I haven’t seen much of on my journey so far – exceptionally skinny people and flies, legions of flies, cropped up a little too often for comfort, yes there’s a drought here (again) although the government seems more interested in picking the wax out of its ear than doing anything about it.

Lunch in Awasa was pleasant enough, we found a decent restaurant and I used the western flushing lav to squeeze out a dead otter for the first time since Monday morning. I can hold it in for a week if necessary – quite frankly, I refuse to squat. It’s smelly, uncomfortable, demeaning and I hate it. I keep meeting westerners who have lived in Africa for some time and say they prefer it – I find them mad. If you can’t comfortably play Tetris on your Gameboy for an hour then it’s not a trip to the loo as far I’m concerned. The very idea of standing on slippery urine-soaked porcelain and hovering your nethers a few inches from horrors I am not fit to describe fills me with awesome dread. Some other travellers may see this as a weakness, but I don’t care. There’s bog seat on my backpack for a reason – everyone deserves a decent dunny.

Actually, it’s been remarkable how few squatters I’ve used this year. Yes, my friends, we are progressing as a species!

After lunch we pressed on towards Addis, the unlovable sprawling capital city of Ethiopia. About as attractive as John Merrick eating spaghetti. Asier and Silvia joined us in the Dil hotel, the only mid-range place in the guidebook. Notice how I’m suddenly staying in a lot of hotels? Well, unlike me, Matt the Editor gets his expenses back, so I’m happy to abuse that fact for a few days and cadge a free night’s kip courtesy of the powers that be. Of course, if we really wanted to splash out, we could stay at the Sheraton hotel here, where a suite will set you back a cool $8,081 for a night’s accommodation. But, realistically, that place is reserved for African politicians – you know the guys who preside over those people living off less than a dollar a day. Hey, maybe after working for 21 years solid (and living off air) they too could afford one night in the f***ing Addis Sheraton.

When we talk about gaps between rich and poor we really have no idea. These aren’t gaps – they’re parsecs.

Matt got himself an early night while I stayed up with Asier and Silvia drinking and hark-the-heralding in the Christmas cheer.

I’ve come a long way since Comoros, but I’ve got a lot further to go before I’m reunited with Mandy a week from today.

Dar es Salaam to the Pyramids in two weeks, without flying? That’s a world record right there.

Day 359: Do They Know It’s Christmas?

25.12.09:

After a good three hours sleep, I left the Dil Hotel to go and get a ticket for Dira Dawa on the ‘luxury’ coach. No chance. Sold out. Although the guy really didn’t need to be such a swine about it, especially at four in the morning. I pegged it back to the hotel to pick up Matt and get the hell to the main bus station before the scuzzy buses sold out as well. We got there at 5am – just in the nick of time, cadging the last two tickets on the bus.

So that’s how I spent Christmas Day 2009, on a bus heading across Ethiopia. Well I spent my 30th birthday on a bus heading down Central America, so I guess I better start getting used to it.

Not that it’s Christmas here. The Ethiopians don’t celebrate the birth of that Jesus chap until January 7th. Looks like a managed to find the only Christian Country for whom 25th December is just another day.

Ethiopia, despite being just as infuriating as everywhere else in Africa, is a class act. The only African country that wasn’t colonised by us dastardly Europeans (so they can’t blame us for all their ills Mugabe-stylee) and as such it’s like nowhere else on Earth. If I parachuted blind into Tanzania and somebody told me I was in Kenya or Uganda, I’d be none the wiser; but Ethiopia is Ethiopia through and through – it couldn’t be anywhere else. Not only has Ethiopia got its own alphabet, religion and traditions; it also has its own calendar and time. This is a bit messed up and difficult to explain, but the short of it is that when everyone else adopted the Gregorian Calendar, the Ethiopians stuck with the Julian so it’s not 2009 here, it’s 2002. I think.

The time thing is even more interesting (and infuriating): for Ethiopians, 6am is ’1am’ so if your bus leaves at ‘three in the morning’, that could mean three in the morning or it could mean nine in the morning. Who knows? Luckily I had got wise to this strange way of telling the time before I got here.

Something else that’s weird is the pernicious meme that’s got about that when you’re on a bus you need to keep all the windows closed lest germs get in and make everyone ill. So even if you’re going to vomit, you can’t open the window, you just have to do it on the floor. Which is what a lot of people do, that is if they can’t find a hapless backpacker to hack their guts out all over instead. This is a particular bugbear of many travellers I’ve met who’ve travelled through Ethiopia, but in a land where 85% of the population is illiterate, it’s a bit hard to persuade them otherwise.

The reason why it’s always Ethiopia that seems to be having famines and not, say, Burkina Faso, is because of the awesome number of farmers here.. Pretty much everybody lives off the land – and while you may think that this leads to some kind of rural idyll (and, yes, the terraced hills are really quite breathtaking) it also means that when there is a drought (every ten years without fail) the economy grinds to a halt (nobody has anything to sell) and people die. The incredible number of people living off the land (100,000,000 people) also means that nobody goes to school. In fact, if everybody in the country attended school up until the age of 16, half of the working population would disappear. Nowhere else on Earth have I seen four-year-olds herding cattle across the road.

The journey to Dira Dawa was okay – Matt bribed some guys for their seats so he could have some leg room and I watched Blackadder on my laptop. The only downer was that in the madness that was yesterday’s minibus to Addis, I lost my Vodafone mobile internet dongle, so updating my website and twitter feed is now impossible. I’ve kept that little gidgit safe and warm for eleven months – it’s such a kicker to lose it now at the end of the year. I’ve got nothing but respect for Vodafone for giving me the thing in the first place – it’s been more useful than a Swiss army knife that purifies water and detects single women.

THANK YOU VODAFONE!! YOU’RE THE BESTEST IN THE WORLDEST!

Dira Dawa was everything that Addis wasn’t; ordered, neat, safe. After arriving around 5pm, we jumped a tuk-tuk (or whatever the hell they call them here) to the ticket office for the bus to Djibouti. All my dreams came true when the chap said that the bus left at midnight. This meant that we should be getting in to Djibouti City the following morning – perfect. Dino had informed me that the ship for Egypt had been delayed, giving me plenty of time to get to Somalia and back before clambering on-board the MV Turquoise like a American leaving Saigon in 1975.

Matt needed some shut-eye (it’s been five days on the road now – it’s understandable) so he checked into the hilariously inept Ras hotel for a few hours kip while I headed over the road to the Triangle Hotel for a few hours booze and internetting. Had a good chat on Skype with my brother Mike and my nephew Joe before packing everything away and rousing Matt for his last bus journey.

Day 360: Boxing Day In Somalia

26.12.09:

This was it. The most critical day of The Odyssey so far – make or break, do or die, cake or death. Dino Deasha, that magnificent chap, had cadged me a lift on the MV Turquoise, a huge container ship affiliated with those good folk at CMA-CGM and bound for Suez in Egypt, due to arrive on the 31st December. But first, I had not just to get to Djibouti City, I also needed to get to Somalia and back.

Yeah, Somalia.

Don’t panic! Somalia is perfectly safe. Well, no, it’s not – it’s the most dangerous country on Earth. What I mean to say is that the part which I intend to visit is perfectly safe – I’m going to Somaliland.

History lesson! (Cos I know you love them soooo…)

In the same way that we had British, Dutch and French Guyana and Portuguese, French and Spanish Guinea, on the east coast of Africa we had Italian, British and French Somalia. French Somalia became the independent state of Djibouti in 1977 while the poor old British Somalia (now known as Somaliland) got dumped with the Italian Somalia which is what we know as Somalia today.

Now as far as basketcases go (and Africa, let’s face it, has a mighty fine collection), Somalia is the basketcase to beat all basketcases. Next time some ill-informed idiot comes up to you at a party and tells you that he’s an anarchist, nut him in the face and Fed-Ex him off to Somalia. With no effective government since 1991, the only law and order in Mogadishu revolves around gangs of armed thugs randomly killing and raping with impunity. Mmm… anarchy… don’t-cha just looove it?

Of course, the international community should really do something about this, if not for the sake of Somalia itself, then surely for the sake of the poor bastards who have to navigate the pirate-infested waters anywhere within a thousand miles of Somalia’s shoreline. I’m sure Djibouti, Yemen, Oman, Kenya, Tanzania and The Seychelles are less than thrilled with the situation. But there it remains, and there it has remained, a horror show for nineteen years now.

But there is one bit of good news – Somaliland. Yep, that old bit of British Somalia that really shouldn’t have been lumped with the madness that was Italian Somalia in the first place, has broken away and now has it’s own parliament, capital, flag, currency, university and (heaven forbid!) multi-party elections. It’s got a damn good historical reason for being an independent nation and it’s got possibly the best current reason in the world for lopping off its malformed and pustulating growth of teeth and hair that is Somalia proper.

So, who thinks, given the circumstances, that Somaliland should be recognised as an independent nation by the world? All of you?! Good, that’s what I thought. If you can give me one good reason why Somaliland should not be recognised as an independent state then I will give a gold star and a jellybaby, because let’s face it, there is no good reason… well, that is if your brains haven’t been recently sucked out through your nose or, of course, you work for the UN. Because the UN says no..

Why does the UN say no?

Er, well…

To be quite frank, I have no f–king idea. The same institution that wants the French to give the island of Mayotte back to Cloud Coup Coup Land and (let’s not forget) facilitates the process in which the most blood-thirsty criminals in the world make trillions of dollars every year by enforcing this idiotic prohibition on drugs, refuses to allow Somaliland the status of being a nation. Blimey, what a bunch of f–ks.

I kinda hated the UN at the start of this trip, but now I really hate the UN, it’s about as much use as a KFC on the moon.

Well, as things are, if you visit Somaliland, it counts as a visit to Somalia, which is useful for me as I have less than no intention of visiting anywhere that might result in my head being chopped off. So that was the plan.

Matt and I jumped the bus from Dira Dawa (Ethiopia) to Djibouti City at midnight, only to find that irritating habit of buses leaving a couple of hours after they say it’s going to leave was still in full force. The latest from Dino was that the boat was leaving today, and I fretted over having time to visit Somalia/Somaliland. After 2am, the bus finally began the long haul to the Djibouti border, arriving at about 9am.

Because the Ethiopian border guards took an age stamping us out, we missed our connecting bus to Djibouti City. At this point, I was beginning to spak out somewhat. The latest intell from Dino (who had been working overtime over Christmas to get me on this ship to Egypt) was that I had to get to the CMA-CGM shipping office as soon as possible, and now it was beginning to look like I would not make it over there until the afternoon (we were supposed to be arriving at 10am).

Matt and I filmed some stuff on the border while we waited for the next bus to fill, and eventually we made it through to the Djibouti side of things. This took another half-hour as the ‘visas’ we had procured from Nairobi was actually a piece of paper telling the border guards to give us visas upon arrival – this confused the hell out of the border guards and I was steeling myself to being told to return to Addis when they stamped us in. Happy days.

What was less than happy was my face a couple of hours later when we were stopped on the outskirts of Djibouti City by a bastard Vogon who found a inconsistency in my visa (the border guards hadn’t filled out the ‘duration’) and wanted me to return to the border to sort it out. By now it was 1pm and time was running short. Unfortunately I only had nothing smaller than a $20 bill to bribe the horrible little toad and, once back on the bus I felt as if my brain was going to E.X.P.L.O.D.E. like the poster for Akira.

I don’t normally get angry enough to contemplate homicide, I’m a lover not a fighter, but since my trials and tribulations at the hands of corrupt African officials, I can’t help but imagine the satisfaction of seeing one of these scumbags heads on a spike and coyly waving at it like Vir in Babylon 5. To add to my chagrin, this was the first bribe I had to pay since I left DR Congo – Southern and East Africa seemed to have sorted out the shop-front (especially were tourists are concerned) and I couldn’t help but feel that the ever-present culture of bribery and corruption that so afflicts West Africa might be on the wane over on this side of the continent. But now I think I just got lucky.

Anyway, fuming and ratty I arrived in Djibouti City only to find that the shipping agency had closed. I was too late.

Damnit.

There was nothing to do but head to the hotel that Matt had booked for the night – the Djibouti Sheraton, no less. Yet more ordeals awaited us. I expected to be able to get on the free wi-fi and contact Dino in the UK and find out what was happening. I mean, I’ve stayed in places that cost less than $5 a night that have free wi-fi, but the UTTERLY RUBBISH Sheraton hotel, which was so rubbish it might as well have been constructed out of used baked bean cans and slop, charged for its wi-fi. And they charged A LOT.

Then Matt got into all kinds of difficulty with regards to his credit card booking. The manager, some latter day Basil Fawlty type, was having trouble getting his head around the fact that Matt had booked through Expedia. Actually, he was having trouble getting his head around a lot of things, how to dial an international number for one. This lead to a hilarious situation in which he demanded to see proof of payment, which would be available online, but refused to give us the wi-fi code so we could actually go online and prove the payment had been made.

I think it was three hours before it was all resolved. Don’t you just love true customer service? SHERATON HOTELS, YOU SUCK. I will never stay in one of your flea-ridden hell-holes again as long as I live and I will encourage everyone I know to avoid your embarrassing chain of joke hotels like the PLAGUE.

While Matt was busy battling Basil in order to get into the room he had paid a lot of money for, I returned to the Shipping Agency under the behest of Dino, who was now acting as my Ed Harris in Apollo 13. If I didn’t make this boat, I would be spending New Year on my own, but more worryingly so would Mandy.

Back at the shipping office, I was greeted by Deyan, Abdourahman and Adbi-Chakour, three of the best guys in the world. For all the trials and tribulations that Djibouti had put me through, I was ready to sling it down amongst Congo, Guinea and Cape Verde as a circle of hell to which I would vow never to return – that was until I met these guys. Now Djibouti is a shining beacon of loveliness and wonder (albeit one that nobody’s heard of). Plus they filmed the original Planet of the Apes here, YOU MANIACS!

Deyan, Abdourahman and Abdi-Chakour not only sorted me out with the ship, the MV Turquoise, they also drove me to the border with Somalia/Somaliland and because they knew the guys on the border, managed to get me across, no questions asked. Huzzah!

Stepping foot in Somalia was a strange experience. On one hand, it was like edging closer to Mordor than anyone but a foolhardy hobbit would ever go (the borderlands were a rubbish tip like you’ve never imagined), on the other hand it was very normal, like stepping over any other rubbish-choked hell-hole frontier. The knowledge that I was actually entering a peaceful, stable area of an otherwise horrifically failed state was reassuring, but there was something about the place… the look on people’s faces that spoke of unspeakable evil happening on their doorstep.

Or maybe I’m just being melodramatic AND IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD.

Ah well, who cares? I made it out alive and everybody got their cut. The guys dropped me off at the Sheraton where I found Matt who was just about ready to kill, kill and kill again. The fact that everything was sorted for the boat and, barring a major disaster, I would be seeing my girlie again in just five days had put a spring in my step. Matt, on the other hand, had been put through HELL by these utter fools in the Sheraton – the funniest thing was that they were so completely unrepentant, like it was Matt’s fault they had all the mental faculties of a recently shredded gerbil who was suffering from Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease.

Matt bought me a beer and we called it a night just before midnight.