Volcanic viewpoint – Arthur’s Seat and the city below.

Edinburgh’s New Town – wonderfully elegant Georgian archictecture. Combined with the Old Town it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site (thanks Wikipedia!) Having lived in London for several years I’ve developed a remarkable distaste for  tourist trails and associated tat. Having moved up to Edinburgh I have to reconcile this natural aversion with the fact that whilst I now live here I am essentially one of those tourists… But that’s not always a bad thing and it’s never a bad idea to take the camera out and stop and look up and around, take pictures and read signs. I only noticed the memorials at Grassmarket (the old site of Edinburgh’s gallows) on about my fifth walk through and was quite moved by the history of the place. Similarly, it was only on an aimless wander that Isabelle and I noticed the memorial on Cowgate to James Connolly, Irish socialist, born there in 1868. Connolly was executed firing squad in 1916 for his role in Dulin’s Easter Rising against British rule.  It’s a small memorial plaque quite hidden under the grandeur of George IV Bridge – perhaps that’s interesting in itself – but it was a very poignant find.

Went rambling in the borders near Peebles with Isabelle, Joe and Emma. A beautiful part of the world at this time of the year. Hiked up some hills, watched the salmon jump and – this being Scotland – stumbled upon a castle…

me too…

View from Edinburgh’s Botanical Gardens over the city. I do enjoy taking pictures of plants…

In March this year I escaped Hargeisa with the intention of flying to Nairobi and working my way back  via Northern Kenya and South and then Eastern Ethiopia. I was accompanied by my University of Hargeisa compatriot Mr Sean Connelly, A.K.A. Mr Shan Boqol (Mr ’500 Shillin’): think Somaliland’s white Polish/American answer to 50 Cent , art collector, adventurer and all round gentleman-scholar.

The first leg of the trip involved flying from Hargeisa over the vastness of the Ogaden semi-desert region of far Eastern Ethiopia and Somalia. Though the flight was bound for Nairobi, immigration formalities were completed in dusty Wajir,  an international aviation buffer zone between  the Somali Horn and Kenya itself.

Arriving in Nairobi from a part of the world which (according to the foreign office of my government) is too dangerous to even be in was a strange experience in that we felt it was here we should start getting worried about our personal safety. Nairobi’s reputation (‘Nai-robbery’) preceded it and not completely without justification, as wandering around after dark as a foreigner is just not a good idea. The perceptions of risk are based on different things of course – in Nairobi the danger is being mugged, in Hargeisa, the (distant) spectre of terrorism or kidnapping – but I never to fail to see the irony in that whenever there’s a security alert in Somaliland the INGOs pull out their staff to the safety and stability (hmmm…) of Nairobi.

Of course, Nairobi is a highly segregated city. The poverty exists ‘out there’ beyond the city centre in slums like Kibera and only encroaches in after dark, when any sensible white person travels by taxi to avoid the robbers. Wandering around by foot and being aware of the setting sun and how long it’d take to get back to the safety of the hostel was unsettling. Nairobi is very unlike Addis Ababa in that in the Ethiopian capital all of the wealth is piled in with the poverty – you walk out of the Sheraton and cross the road and you’re in maze of alleys and rusting tin-roofed shacks, and the beggars sit outside the African Union as heads of state drive past. Not so in Nairobi, where slums are clearly demarcated from suburbs, gated communities and shopping malls. We visited the Mall, just out of morbid curiosity, being so accustomed to commercial life in Hargeisa characterised by hand-painted business signs, a place where it feels like the sum total of western multinational market penetration is flat Coca-Cola from Yemen. Malls are weird at the best of times and this was culture shock like no other. Global brand messaging is everywhere in Nairobi: all ‘identification’ and aspirations of western styled fashions, affluence and middle class values – Johnny Walker, dinner suits and Nivea for him and her. It’s a far cry from Hargeisa where the adverts for mobile phones have pictures of camels in them – brand aspirations and identifications of the 21^st century pastoralist.

We left Nairobi by night train to Mombasa and the Swahili coast.

Mombasa was fascinating – the old harbour, the colonial fort, the markets, the Arab influences, the Indian connection, a feeling of being in a vast emporium of goods and trade and commerce and culture, all looking out into the Indian Ocean. Despite all that, my favourite of the pictures I took there was of the woman above, cooking dinner on her balcony, in the early evening light, her child next to her.

We headed up the coast all the way to Lamu, the last major town before the Somali border. Lamu itself is an island and the salt breezes wash over the classical Swahili architecture and through the narrow alleys. There are no cars, donkeys being the preferred mode of urban transport. ‘Bee-Beep! Lamu car!’ is delivered in sublime deadpan as both a warning and explanation from the donkey riders in the alleys. The mangrove coastline around Lamu is negotiated by means of the supremely elegant, triangular sailed dhows which line the harbour.

Lamu is tourist-ed but not in a way that detracts or compromises its identity as a living, breathing functioning community, harbour and town. The proposed construction of the Juba-Lamu oil pipeline (designed so that newly independent South Sudan can export its oil without having to go through Khartoum controlled northern areas of that now-divided country) may have a profound impact on the area. It certainly adds another important strategic element for consideration by the government in Nairobi. The Somali refugee crisis and destabilisation from Somali militants in the Northern Frontier District all have a new salience when considering where this pipeline may go. Recent Kenyan military intervention in Somalia suggests that the region is becoming a priority to secure against a spill-over of the conflict that continues to rage in South-Central Somalia.

From Lamu we backtracked south down the coast to Malindi, a seaside resort full of Italians and good pizza (naturally). We mutatu-ed it down to the Gede ruins which date back somewhere between the 13^th to 17^th centuries – no one’s quite sure, but that’s ok – it all adds to the atmosphere, which is wonderfully mysterious and quite beautiful. Less attractive was the beach we found ourselves walking down later that afternoon. The sand and sea were pristine but the place was swarming with fat, white (well, bright red) Europeans wearing very little in the way of anything. We’d stumbled, sweaty, dishevelled, looking like we’d just hopped the border from Somalia (which, in a way, we had) into quite an exclusive private resort and it all felt rather strange. Hopping back in the Mutatu we negotiated passage inland to the Marafa depression, a canyon of razor sharp red and orange pillars and knife-edges formed by some peculiar process of soil erosion by the wind and water. Fantastic, and not a single other mwzungu in sight. Mzungu, a word used in East Africa, to describe foreigners, derives from the Swahili to ‘wander around aimlessly’ and described us rather well….

Whilst in Lamu we’d toyed with the idea of heading North West into the Kenya/Somalia frontier region and the town of Garissa. Having read various warnings about bandits on the roads we were leaning on the side of caution until we found a coach-surfer listed for Garissa and were able to get in touch. Reassured about the potential hazards of the road (‘Bandits? Well, I’ve never seen any…’) we decided to hop a bus in Malindi and head up to hang out with Daniel, our new found coach-surfing Peace Corps buddy. It didn’t take long before we felt like we were very far away from Malindi and by the time we reached Garissa it was all beginning to feel like Hargeisa: Somali being shouted, portable huts (aqal) off in the scrub, camels and other livestock all over the place, the smell of goat fat and incense. It was reminiscent of Hargeisa in other ways too. We were back in NGO land – secure compounds and fancy hotels for international staff, detached from the hustle and bustle of the town. No doubt this side of the town is even more busy these days, given the famine in south central Somalia and the influx of refugees (and aid workers) to the camps in the border regions. Garissa is a real frontier town and there’s much more ethnic heterogeneity than Hargeisa. There’s a cultural divide and interesting dynamic of interaction between traders and businessmen from the Kenyan interior and the Somalis who consider this territory to be, well, Somali. A fascinating place but not one we had much time to linger in as we needed to move on quickly back to Nairobi before starting the long haul north towards the Ethiopian border.