I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I arrived in Hargeisa, but I definitely wasn’t expecting a full rainbow. My picture was rushed because I didn’t want to be questioned for taking photographs around the airport, and I still regret not getting a better shot. Almost immediately afterward, however, local people encouraged me to take more photos. As my trip continued, I realized that photography generally wasn’t treated with the suspicion I had encountered in some other countries, and I probably could have taken my camera out without worrying nearly as much.
First Impressions of Hargeisa
Hargeisa is the capital of Somaliland, a territory that declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and has operated with its own government and institutions ever since, although it is not widely recognized internationally as an independent country. By the time I visited, Hargeisa felt considerably more stable than the image of Somalia I had grown up seeing in the news. That stability made the city’s recent history even harder to imagine, because only a few decades earlier much of Hargeisa had been destroyed during the war against the government of Siad Barre.
The Destruction of Hargeisa
Somalia became independent in 1960. In 1969, Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in a military coup and eventually established an increasingly authoritarian government. During the 1980s, opposition movements grew throughout the country, including the Somali National Movement, or SNM, which drew much of its support from the Isaaq population of the north. The conflict escalated dramatically in 1988 when the SNM captured parts of Hargeisa and other northern towns. Barre’s forces responded with an extremely brutal counterinsurgency campaign, and Hargeisa was heavily bombarded and devastated.
Siad Barre was eventually overthrown in 1991. Somalia then fragmented as rival factions fought for control, while leaders in the northwest declared the independence of Somaliland. Toward the end of my trip, I had a taxi driver who spoke excellent English and told me that he had fought with the SNM. He described the destruction of Hargeisa with an amount of detail and emotion that was difficult to forget.
According to him, buildings throughout the city had been destroyed and bodies were left in the streets. One detail he repeated several times was that Hargeisa had become so deserted and devastated that hyenas were wandering through parts of the city. Hearing that from someone who said he had lived through the fighting gave the memorial a very different weight. The city I was walking through had been rebuilt so extensively that it was difficult to imagine it reduced to rubble only a few decades earlier.
People Around Hargeisa
One thing that surprised me was the amount of color in people’s clothing. Before arriving, I had pictured much more black and much more conservative-looking dress. Instead I saw bright colors and patterns everywhere. That was a useful reminder of how many assumptions I had formed before ever setting foot here.
Somaliland is overwhelmingly Muslim, and Islam is deeply woven into everyday life. I also noticed several older men whose gray hair or beards had been dyed orange with henna, a style I would see repeatedly in the region.
Hargeisa’s Market
Hargeisa’s main market was one of my favorite places to simply wander around. Along the outskirts I came across several donkeys attached to carts carrying goods. Closer to the center, trucks became more common and the market turned into a maze of clothing, household goods, jewelry, and small shops.
I actually bought a fake pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses here along with a belt. Each cost me about 6,000 Somaliland shillings at the exchange rate when I visited. One large part of the market seemed to sell almost nothing but shoes, and I remember wondering how all these guys possibly made money with so many competitors selling almost the exact same thing.
Then again, malls back home somehow managed to keep ten nearly identical shoe stores in business, so maybe it wasn’t that unusual after all.
Piles of Somaliland Shillings
Another unforgettable part of Hargeisa’s markets was the money changers sitting beside enormous piles of banknotes. At the time of my visit, I was getting roughly 6,000 Somaliland shillings to the dollar, and many of the notes in circulation were in small denominations. Changing even a modest amount of money could leave you carrying an absurd stack of bills.
What fascinated me most was how openly the money was displayed. There were piles of cash sitting along the street with surprisingly little visible security. Whatever combination of social norms, local enforcement, and the difficulty of running away with a mountain of low-denomination notes made the system work, the sellers themselves didn’t appear particularly worried.
I personally wasn’t especially nervous walking around the market, but one of my armed guards apparently felt differently. He kept peering around corners with his rifle, stopping in defensive-looking positions and behaving as though something might happen at any moment. At first it made me nervous too. Looking back, I still don’t know whether he genuinely saw risks I didn’t understand or whether he was enjoying looking extremely serious while escorting the foreigner.
Leaving Hargeisa
Outside the city I passed small communities where bags of charcoal were stacked beside the road for sale. Years later, while traveling in Yemen, I would see villages with surprisingly similar roadside displays. I also came across a large group of camels being herded along the road and was told they were being taken to be butchered and sold for meat.
Traveling With Armed Guards
For my trip outside Hargeisa, I was told that I needed to travel with armed guards. I had researched the trip before leaving the United States and expected some kind of escort requirement, but my hotel staff insisted that I now needed two guards because foreigners had recently been attacked. I was skeptical because I had not seen that requirement in my research, and part of me suspected the hotel was simply finding another way to charge me.
At the same time, I was the visitor. I wasn’t about to arrive in Somaliland and lecture the people living there about their own security situation. So after arguing about it for a while, I paid for the guards and decided I would figure out later whether I’d actually needed both of them.
One Last Stop for Supplies
Once the guards joined me, we made one last stop on the outskirts of Hargeisa for water and fuel. One detail I remember clearly was seeing people smoking cigarettes around places where fuel was being handled. I had also been on a flight during this trip where smoking was allowed, which felt bizarre after years of being used to strict smoking bans back home.
Rain in Somaliland
On a road trip north we came across a swollen watercourse because it had rained the night before. Hargeisa sits at a fairly high elevation, and the weather during my stay was cloudier and wetter than I had expected. The storms became frequent enough that I complained about them to some locals, who told me they couldn’t remember seeing that much rain. Interestingly, some of them blamed the unusual weather on global warming.
The Great Camel Battle
After all the warnings I’d been given about traveling outside Hargeisa, I was half expecting bandits or some kind of serious trouble. Within an hour, we did encounter a battle, but it involved two camels fighting beside the road. For reasons I still don’t completely understand, my guards immediately had the driver pull over. They jumped out of the vehicle, ran toward the animals yelling, and started trying to separate them with sticks.
To this day, I don’t know why breaking up a camel fight became part of our security detail.
The Landscape Outside Hargeisa
The farther we traveled from the city, the more scenic the landscape became. Rocky hills rose above dry plains, with cacti and other drought-tolerant vegetation growing throughout the area.
Someone offered me fruit from a large tree along the way. I never figured out what species the tree or berries were, but I tried a few and thought they were pretty good. Later, while traveling in Yemen, I was offered what looked like the same fruit again.
I also heard stories connecting this region with ancient Egypt. Trade between ancient societies around the Red Sea and Horn of Africa certainly has a long history, but locals went a step further and told me that mountains here had inspired the shape of the Egyptian pyramids. That part I took as a local story rather than established history.
Approaching Laas Geel
My main destination for the day was Laas Geel, a prehistoric rock-art site northeast of Hargeisa. Before reaching the paintings, I scrambled up some of the surrounding rocks for a view across the dry landscape.
I was told that some piles of stones nearby covered human remains in makeshift graves. I had no idea whether they were connected with the civil war, much older burials, or something else entirely, so I never learned the real story behind them.
Wildlife Around Laas Geel
The area also had plenty of large rodents that, to me, looked about halfway between a rat and a squirrel. They were shy enough that getting a decent photograph took some patience. I tried to identify the species after returning home and had no luck.
Plants Growing Out of Rock
The plants were just as interesting. Some were growing from tiny cracks in the rock where it barely seemed possible for roots to take hold. One plant was literally growing downward from the ceiling of an overhang, making the photograph look as though I had accidentally turned it upside down.
The Rock Art of Laas Geel
The real reason I had traveled out here was Laas Geel. Local people had known about the paintings for generations, but the site came to wider archaeological attention after a French research team documented it in 2002. The paintings are several thousand years old and are among the most impressive prehistoric rock-art sites in the Horn of Africa. Many show highly stylized cattle accompanied by human figures, along with other animals.
What struck me most was how vivid they still were. These weren’t faint scratches that required someone to point at the wall and explain what I was supposed to see. The colors and shapes were immediately obvious.
The people who created the paintings clearly placed enormous importance on cattle. Many of the animals are shown with elaborate markings and large horns, while human figures appear beside them. After everything else I had seen around Hargeisa—the war memorial, crowded markets, armed escorts, camel fights, and the rocky countryside—ending up in front of paintings created thousands of years ago was a pretty incredible way to finish the trip.
My Time in Hargeisa
Hargeisa surprised me more than almost anywhere else I visited in this part of Africa. I arrived carrying a lot of assumptions based on what I knew about Somalia, and the city repeatedly complicated them. I found a rebuilt and functioning city in a region that had been devastated within living memory. I wandered through markets surrounded by piles of cash, talked with people who had lived through the war, traveled into the countryside with armed guards, watched them break up a camel fight, and eventually reached one of the most remarkable prehistoric sites I had ever seen.
And somehow the whole thing started with one of the best rainbows I’ve ever seen.
